Chapter 6 of 14

Empires of the East: China, India and the Islamic World

About 28 minutes to read

Twenty thousand cells

In the old centre of Nanjing, near the Confucius Temple on the Qinhuai River, there is a museum built on the site of what was once the largest examination hall in China. Under the last dynasty, the Qing, the Jiangnan examination compound held more than twenty thousand cells. Each was a narrow brick booth, open at the front, roughly a metre wide and not quite deep enough to lie down in. Two wooden planks slotted into grooves in the walls served as a desk by day and a bench or bed by night. The cells stood in long, straight lanes, each lane marked with a character from the classic Thousand Character Text, so that every candidate could be found by his number.

Every three years, men from the provinces of the lower Yangzi came here to sit the provincial examination. They were searched at the gate for notes — museums in China still display "cheating shirts" with the Confucian classics copied onto them in characters the size of ants. Once inside, they were locked in. Each session of the examination lasted several days and nights, during which a candidate ate, slept, wrote and relieved himself in his cell, while guards patrolled the lanes and examiners waited in the halls at the centre of the compound. Candidates fell ill; some died. The essays they wrote, on themes drawn from the Confucian classics and in rigidly prescribed forms, were copied by clerks so that the examiners could not recognise the handwriting, and then graded.

Only a small fraction passed. For those who did, the reward was transformation. A man who earned the provincial degree of juren joined a privileged elite. He was exempt from corporal punishment and from labour service, he could deal with local magistrates as a social equal, and he became eligible for the metropolitan examinations in Beijing, which led, for a few hundred men every three years, to the highest degree, jinshi, and to a career in the imperial bureaucracy. Families and whole lineages invested for generations in the education of a promising son in the hope of such a result. For most candidates, it never came. They sat the examinations again and again, into old age.

The examination system was, in its way, one of the most remarkable inventions in the history of government. It recruited the managers of a vast empire through a competitive test rather than by birth alone. It is often admired, rightly, as an ancestor of the modern civil service exam. But it was also something else, which this chapter will explore: one of the most effective machines ever built for selecting, training and binding the shepherds of a human farm.

The trouble with "oriental despotism"

Before we go further, a word of caution.

For centuries, European writers described the great empires of Asia as fundamentally different from Europe. Montesquieu wrote of "oriental despotism", in which a single ruler held all property and everyone else was his slave. Karl Marx sketched an "Asiatic mode of production", in which village communities paid tribute to an all-powerful state and history stood still. In the twentieth century, the historian Karl Wittfogel, in his book Oriental Despotism (1957), argued that the need to manage large irrigation systems had produced uniquely total forms of state power in Asia — what he called "hydraulic societies".

These ideas have been heavily criticised, and rightly. They rested on thin and often inaccurate evidence, and as the literary scholar Edward Said and many others have shown, they served to present Asia as Europe's backward, servile opposite, at a time when European powers were conquering it. Historians of China, India and the Islamic world have since demonstrated that these societies had property rights, markets, law, regional autonomy, intellectual dissent and constant change.

This chapter makes a different argument. The empires of the East were not more servile than Europe. They were, in their essential mechanics, remarkably similar. They had different stories — the Mandate of Heaven, the cosmic order of varna and karma, the Islamic ideal of just rule — and different institutions to go with them. But underneath, they had the same five parts as every other farm in this book: a fence, a feed, shepherds, a story and breakouts. What is striking is not how different the farms of Asia were from those of Europe, but how different stories could produce such similar results.

China: the Mandate of Heaven

The Chinese farm was, for most of the last two thousand years, the largest on earth. From the unification of China by the First Emperor of Qin in 221 BCE until the fall of the last dynasty in 1912, a single imperial state — though repeatedly broken and reassembled — ruled tens and then hundreds of millions of people. By the time of the Ming dynasty's registers of 1381, with which the last chapter ended, the official count of the population was close to sixty million, and modern historians think the real figure was higher.

The story that justified this state was older than the empire itself. When the Zhou dynasty overthrew the Shang, around 1046 BCE, its rulers explained their victory with a new idea: Heaven (tian) granted the right to rule — the Mandate of Heaven — to a ruler of virtue, and withdrew it from one who became cruel or corrupt. The signs of withdrawal were natural disasters, famine and rebellion. It was a story with a sting in its tail. It made the emperor the "Son of Heaven", answerable to no earthly authority. But it also implied that a successful rebellion was proof that Heaven had changed its mind.

Confucian philosophy, which became the official ideology of the imperial state under the Han dynasty, filled in the rest. Society was ordered by a hierarchy of relationships — ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brother — in which each owed loyalty and obedience upward and care downward. The ideal ruler governed by moral example rather than by force. And the philosopher Mencius, in the fourth century BCE, put the division of society into words that sound like a Chinese version of Adalbero's three orders. Some, he said, labour with their minds, and some labour with their strength. Those who labour with their minds govern others; those who labour with their strength are governed by others. Those who are governed feed those who govern; those who govern are fed by those they govern. This, Mencius declared, was a principle accepted everywhere under Heaven.

Notice again the structure of the story. Like Menenius Agrippa's fable of the belly and Adalbero's three orders, it does not deny that the governed feed the governors. It states it openly, and presents it as a fair exchange — the farmers' grain for the scholars' wisdom.

Mencius was not merely an apologist for power. He also declared that the people were the most important element in a state, the altars of the land and grain came next, and the ruler counted for least. He argued that a ruler who abused his people forfeited his title, and that killing such a tyrant was not regicide but the execution of a mere criminal. The Mandate of Heaven was a story that could justify rebellion as well as obedience — a fact that Chinese peasants understood very well.

The fence and the feed

The mechanics of the Chinese farm rested on registering households and taxing land and labour.

The Qin state, which unified China, organised its population into groups of households that were collectively responsible for one another's crimes and obligations, and imposed heavy demands for military service and labour on public works. The building of the walls along the northern frontier, the roads, the canals and the First Emperor's own vast tomb required enormous numbers of conscripted labourers. A folk story that has been told in China for two thousand years, the legend of Meng Jiangnü, tells of a woman whose husband was conscripted to build the Great Wall and died at the work. When she came to find him and learned of his death, her weeping was so terrible that a section of the wall collapsed, revealing his bones. It is perhaps the most famous expression in Chinese culture of what the corvée meant to the families who supplied it.

Later dynasties refined the system. Under the "equal-field" system introduced by the Northern Wei dynasty in the late fifth century and continued under the Sui and Tang, the state in principle allocated land to peasant households according to the number of adult workers, and in return each household owed a fixed tax in grain, a tax in cloth, and a certain number of days of labour service each year. The Sui dynasty used such labour to build the Grand Canal, linking the Yangzi valley to the north, in the early seventh century; the human cost of that project, and of the Sui's disastrous wars in Korea, contributed to the dynasty's rapid fall.

Over time the equal-field system broke down, as powerful families accumulated land and peasants fled their obligations. In 780 a Tang minister, Yang Yan, replaced it with the "two-tax" system, which taxed households twice a year according to their land and property. Eight centuries later, under the Ming, the reforms associated with the Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng consolidated a confusing mass of land taxes and labour services into a single payment, increasingly made in silver — the so-called "Single Whip" reform. A great deal of that silver, as we will see in a later chapter, came from the mines of the Americas, dug by forced labourers on the other side of the world.

Behind the formal taxes stood the reality of landlordism. Through much of Chinese history, a large share of farmland was owned not by the peasants who worked it but by landlords, many of whom were members of the scholar-gentry, and tenants commonly paid around half of their main crop as rent. Each dynasty began with land relatively widely distributed, often after a period of war and depopulation, and ended with it concentrated in fewer hands. Chinese historians themselves long recognised this rhythm as part of the "dynastic cycle".

The scholar-officials

At the centre of the Chinese farm stood its shepherds: the scholar-officials and the wider class that historians call the gentry.

The imperial examination system took shape under the Sui and Tang, was greatly expanded under the Song, and lasted until it was abolished in 1905. In theory, it was open to almost any man who could master the classics, though certain hereditary "mean" groups — such as actors, boat people, some servile households and prostitutes and their descendants — were excluded, as were all women. In practice, mastering the classics required years of full-time study from childhood, tutors, books and the freedom from labour that only a reasonably prosperous family could provide.

How open the system really was has been one of the great debates of Chinese social history. In 1962 the historian Ho Ping-ti, in The Ladder of Success in Imperial China, analysed the family backgrounds of thousands of Ming and Qing jinshi graduates and found that a substantial proportion — by his count, often a third or more — came from families that had produced no degree holders in the previous three generations. Later historians, including Robert Hymes and Benjamin Elman, pointed out that such figures could understate the advantages of birth: a man without a degree-holding father might still belong to a wealthy lineage with schools, libraries and powerful relatives. Elman's conclusion was that the examinations produced mobility mainly within the elite — circulating positions among the families who could afford to compete — while effectively excluding the great majority of the population, the peasants and labourers, who were mostly illiterate.

The numbers give a sense of the shape. By the nineteenth century, perhaps two million men might sit the lowest-level examinations in a given cycle. The historian Chang Chung-li, in his pioneering study The Chinese Gentry (1955), estimated that before the Taiping Rebellion there were about 1.1 million degree-holders of all kinds in a population of some four hundred million; with their families, the gentry made up around 1.3 per cent of the population. It is hard to imagine a more literal "1%". In a sequel, Chang estimated that this group received something like a quarter of China's national income — from official salaries and fees, from land rents, from commerce, and from the many informal payments that flowed to men of standing. His figures are approximate, and later historians have treated them with caution. But the proportions are revealing.

The gentry played exactly the role this book attributes to the shepherds. The emperor's appointed officials were few: a county magistrate might be responsible for several hundred thousand people, with a small staff. He could not govern alone. The local gentry mediated between the state and the villages: they organised the collection of taxes, ran famine relief, managed irrigation works, founded schools, led local militias and resolved disputes. They were the indispensable managers of the farm. They also enjoyed privileges that protected them from its demands — exemption from labour service and corporal punishment, informal influence over tax assessments — and many were landlords in their own right. They were, at once, the emperor's servants and the people's landlords.

And they were trained in the story. The examination curriculum was the Confucian classics, read through the official commentaries of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi. To pass, a man had to absorb and reproduce, in elegant form, the moral vision of a hierarchical order in which each person had his place. The examinations did not merely select the shepherds. They shaped how they thought. In Chapter 12 we will see how modern meritocratic systems of education perform a remarkably similar function.

"Are kings and nobles a breed apart?"

China also had the longest and most dramatic tradition of peasant rebellion in the world.

In 209 BCE, barely a decade after the First Emperor had unified China, a group of conscripted peasants on their way to frontier service was held up by heavy rain. Under the harsh Qin laws, arriving late was punishable by death. Two of them, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, reasoned that they would die whether they went on or rebelled, and chose rebellion. According to the great Han historian Sima Qian, Chen Sheng rallied his companions with a question: were kings, nobles, generals and ministers a breed apart? It is the Chinese counterpart of John Ball's question at Blackheath fifteen centuries later. Their revolt was crushed within months, but it set off the wider uprisings that brought down the Qin dynasty.

The pattern recurred again and again. The Yellow Turban rebellion of 184 CE, led by a Daoist faith-healing movement that promised a new era of "Great Peace", fatally weakened the Han dynasty. The rebellion of Huang Chao in the 870s and 880s — himself a man who had failed the examinations — sacked both of the Tang capitals and hastened the end of that dynasty. The Red Turban rebellions of the fourteenth century, driven by famine, floods, and millenarian Buddhist hopes, overthrew the Mongol Yuan dynasty.

The last of those rebellions produced one of the most extraordinary careers in history. Zhu Yuanzhang was born in 1328 to a poor tenant family in Anhui. When he was sixteen, his parents and several siblings died in a famine and epidemic, and he survived as a novice in a Buddhist monastery and as a wandering mendicant, begging for food. He joined the rebels, rose through their ranks, defeated his rivals and in 1368 proclaimed himself emperor of the new Ming dynasty — the Hongwu Emperor. He remained deeply suspicious of officials and the rich throughout his reign. He executed tens of thousands of officials in purges, redistributed land, resettled populations and, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, ordered the registration of every household in the empire.

And yet the farm he built was recognisably the old one. A peasant had become the Son of Heaven, but the Mandate of Heaven, the land tax, the labour service, the examination system and the gentry all returned. Within a few generations, land was concentrating again. Chinese rebellion was often enormously effective at changing who sat on the throne. It was much less effective at changing what the throne was for. In the language of this book, the farm's breakouts often produced a change of farmer, not the end of the farm — which is precisely the lesson George Orwell drew from the Russian Revolution in Animal Farm.

The most devastating breakout came in the nineteenth century, and it was led by a failed shepherd. Hong Xiuquan, from a farming family in Guangdong, failed the provincial examination four times. After one failure he fell gravely ill and experienced visions that, after reading a Christian missionary tract, he came to interpret as revelations that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent to cleanse China of demons. The movement he founded, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, rose in 1850, captured Nanjing — the city of the great examination hall — in 1853 and held it for eleven years. Its programme included the abolition of private property in land, its distribution according to family size, the prohibition of opium, foot-binding and prostitution, and a new examination system based on Taiping scriptures. Most of this was never carried out. The war that crushed the Taiping, which ended in 1864, was one of the deadliest conflicts in human history; estimates of the number of people who died, mostly from famine and disease, range from about twenty million to more than thirty million.

The Taiping were defeated not by the imperial court's own armies, which proved ineffective, but by new regional armies raised and led by Confucian gentry, such as Zeng Guofan — men who saw the rebellion as an attack on the entire moral order they had been trained to uphold. When the farm was in mortal danger, its shepherds saved it.

India: the body of the cosmic man

If the Chinese farm's story was the Mandate of Heaven, South Asia produced the most elaborate story of hierarchy in human history.

In one of the later hymns of the Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, composed perhaps around 1000 BCE, the creation of the world is described as the sacrifice of a cosmic man, Purusha. From his body the parts of the universe were made. And from his body came the four orders of society, the varnas: from his mouth came the Brahmins, the priests; from his arms the Rajanya or Kshatriyas, the warriors and rulers; from his thighs the Vaishyas, the farmers, herders and traders; and from his feet were born the Shudras, the servants.

It is a striking image, and by now a familiar one: the body of society, in which the head speaks, the arms fight and the feet carry, recurring in Rome, in medieval Europe and here. The later legal treatises known as dharmashastras developed it into a detailed code. The most famous, the Laws of Manu, compiled probably between the second century BCE and the third century CE, prescribes the duties of each varna. To the Shudra, it says, the lord assigned only one occupation: to serve the other three varnas without resentment.

Beneath and outside the four varnas, the texts and social practice placed groups considered "untouchable", whose very presence was held to be polluting to higher castes, and who were confined to the most degrading work — handling dead animals, tanning leather, cleaning latrines, cremating the dead.

The varna scheme was a theory, written by Brahmins, about how society ought to be. Actual social life was organised around thousands of smaller, endogamous groups called jatis, usually associated with hereditary occupations and regions, whose ranking varied from place to place and changed over time. How rigid the system was in practice, and how far its modern form was shaped by British colonial rule, are matters of serious scholarly debate. The historian Nicholas Dirks, in Castes of Mind (2001), argued that the British, by classifying and enumerating castes in censuses and treating Brahminical texts as the authoritative description of Indian society, made caste more rigid and more central than it had been before. Other historians, such as Susan Bayly, have stressed the deep pre-colonial roots of caste hierarchy. Both positions agree that caste was real and powerful long before the British arrived.

What made the caste story so effective was its link to the doctrine of karma and rebirth, developed in the Upanishads and shared, in different forms, by Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. In its Brahminical form, it taught that a person's birth into a particular caste was the result of his or her deeds in previous lives. To accept the duties of one's station — one's dharma — faithfully was the way to a better birth next time. To rebel against them was to risk a worse one. The Bhagavad Gita puts the principle memorably: it is better to perform one's own duty imperfectly than to perform another's well.

Of all the stories in this book, this may be the most complete. Divine kingship tells the herd that the farmer was chosen by the gods. The three orders tell it that its place is part of God's design. The doctrine of karma tells each person that their place is the result of their own past actions — and that their best hope lies in accepting it. It is, in a sense, a meritocracy stretched across lifetimes, and it shares with modern meritocracy the power to make people at the bottom see their condition as deserved.

The Indian feed: the king's share and the jagir

The economic base of the farm in India, as elsewhere, was the land. Early texts such as the Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft attributed to the minister Kautilya, and the dharmashastras speak of the king's share of the harvest, traditionally set at a sixth, in return for protection. In practice, shares were often much higher.

The most thoroughly studied Indian farm is that of the Mughal Empire, which at its height in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ruled most of the subcontinent and a population estimated at more than a hundred million. Under the emperor Akbar, the finance minister Raja Todar Mal developed a system for assessing land revenue based on measuring fields and calculating average yields and prices over a period of years. The state's claim was set at around a third of the expected produce, and in many regions under his successors the demand appears to have risen. The historian Irfan Habib, in his classic study The Agrarian System of Mughal India, concluded that the Mughal state's revenue demand often approached half the total produce, leaving the peasant little beyond subsistence.

That revenue did not mainly go to a central treasury. Most of it was assigned, as a salary, to the empire's military and administrative elite, the mansabdars, each of whom held a rank (mansab) that determined his pay and the number of cavalry he was required to maintain. Instead of cash, a mansabdar typically received a jagir: the right to collect the land revenue of a specified territory. By the end of the seventeenth century there were several thousand mansabdars, and a few hundred of the most senior among them held the great bulk of the empire's assigned revenue. Few societies in history have concentrated wealth so steeply at the top.

The jagir system contained a flaw that Mancur Olson, whose "roving bandit" we met in Chapter 1, would have recognised immediately. To prevent nobles from building independent local power bases, the Mughals frequently transferred jagirs from one holder to another, often every few years. A jagirdar who knew he would lose his assignment soon had little reason to invest in its long-term prosperity, and every reason to extract as much as possible while he held it. Habib argued that this created an inbuilt pressure to over-exploit the peasantry. Within the stationary farm of the empire, the shepherds were behaving like roving bandits.

The breakouts followed. In the later seventeenth century, peasant flight, refusal to pay and armed uprisings spread across the empire — among the Jats near Agra, the Satnamis, the Sikhs of the Punjab and, above all, the Marathas of the Deccan, whose leader Shivaji built a rival state. Habib saw these agrarian revolts as a major cause of the empire's decline after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, a view that later historians have debated and qualified. By the mid-eighteenth century, Mughal authority had fragmented into regional states — one of which, Bengal, would fall in 1757 into the hands of a European trading company, as we will see in Chapter 8.

The breakout from caste

The most radical breakouts in South Asia were directed not at a particular dynasty but at the caste story itself.

The Buddha, in the fifth century BCE, rejected the idea that birth determined a person's worth. In a dialogue preserved in the Pali canon, he tells a young Brahmin that a person becomes a Brahmin not by birth but by deeds. Buddhist monasteries admitted men and women of any caste. The devotional bhakti movements of medieval India, from the poet-saints of the Tamil country to Kabir and Ravidas in the north, taught that love of God was open to all, and some of their greatest poets came from low-caste and "untouchable" communities. The Sikh tradition founded by Guru Nanak in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rejected caste distinctions in worship, symbolised by the communal kitchen, the langar, where all sit and eat together.

None of these movements abolished caste. Often, over time, caste distinctions crept back into the communities they founded. But the challenge was never silenced. In the twentieth century it found its most formidable voice in B. R. Ambedkar, born in 1891 into the "untouchable" Mahar caste, who became a lawyer, an economist with doctorates from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and the chief architect of the constitution of independent India, which abolished untouchability. In his undelivered speech Annihilation of Caste (1936), Ambedkar dismantled the argument that caste was simply a division of labour. The caste system, he wrote, is not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers — into watertight compartments, graded one above the other, which made it impossible for those at the bottom to unite. In October 1956, shortly before his death, Ambedkar converted to Buddhism in a mass ceremony at Nagpur, together with hundreds of thousands of his followers.

Ambedkar's insight applies far beyond India. Every farm in this book has depended, to some extent, on dividing the herd — by citizenship, by religion, by race, by caste — so that those at the bottom compete among themselves rather than combining against those at the top. Caste is the most elaborate example. It is not the only one.

The Islamic world: the flock and the circle of justice

Between China and India to the east and Europe to the west lay the great empires of the Islamic world. Here too, the old mechanics of the farm reappeared in a new form.

After the Arab conquests of the seventh century, the new Islamic state inherited the tax systems of the Byzantine and Sasanian Persian empires it had overthrown. Agricultural land was subject to a land tax, the kharaj, while non-Muslim subjects paid a poll tax, the jizya, in return for protection and freedom of worship. Under the Abbasid caliphs, from the eighth century, Baghdad became one of the greatest cities in the world, supported by the agricultural wealth of Iraq.

The Islamic world gave the farm metaphor its most literal vocabulary. The Arabic word for the subjects of a ruler, ra'iyya, comes from a root meaning to pasture or to tend a flock. In the Ottoman Empire it became reaya, the official term for the tax-paying subject population — peasants, townspeople and, in later usage, especially non-Muslims — as opposed to the askeri, the "military" class of soldiers, officials and religious scholars who were exempt from taxation. The empire's subjects were, in its own administrative language, its flock.

The story that accompanied this vocabulary was not the divine kingship of Egypt or Babylon. Islamic teaching held that sovereignty belonged to God, and that the ruler was bound by God's law, the sharia, as interpreted by religious scholars. But it developed an influential theory of how a ruler ought to treat his flock, known as the "circle of justice". Versions of it appear in Persian, Arabic and Turkish writings across many centuries, from mirrors-for-princes such as the eleventh-century Siyasatnama attributed to the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk to Ottoman treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One common formulation runs: there can be no royal authority without soldiers; no soldiers without wealth; no wealth without a prosperous peasantry; and no prosperous peasantry without justice — and justice depends on the ruler.

The historian Linda Darling, who traced the history of this idea, showed that it was taken seriously: rulers held public audiences where peasants could petition against oppressive officials, and complaints were investigated. The circle of justice was a genuine constraint on the abuse of power. But look at its logic. Justice for the peasants is valued because it produces wealth, which pays soldiers, who sustain the ruler. It is Mancur Olson's stationary bandit, written out as a theory of good government. The farmer looks after the herd because the herd is his living.

Slave shepherds

The Islamic empires also produced one of the most striking solutions in history to the problem of finding loyal shepherds: they made them slaves.

From the ninth century onwards, Muslim rulers increasingly recruited their elite soldiers from enslaved boys, often Turks from Central Asia, purchased young, converted to Islam, trained in arms and personally bound to their master. The reasoning was that men with no family, no local roots and no independent property would depend entirely on the ruler and be loyal only to him. In Egypt this system produced a ruling class of its own: from 1250 to 1517, Egypt and Syria were governed by the Mamluks, a self-perpetuating military elite of former slave soldiers who chose sultans from among their own number. The shepherds had become the owners.

The Ottoman Empire took the idea furthest. Through the devşirme, or "collection", Ottoman officials periodically took a levy of boys from Christian families in the Balkans, converted them to Islam and educated them. The strongest became Janissaries, the sultan's elite infantry; the most talented were trained in the palace for careers in the highest offices of state. Many of the most powerful men of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, including grand viziers such as Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, began their lives as Christian village boys taken from their families. Legally, they remained the kul — the slaves or servants — of the sultan, who could execute them and confiscate their property at will.

There are few clearer illustrations of the relationship between the 0.01% and the 1%. The Ottoman shepherds were rich, educated and powerful, often far more so than the free Muslim subjects they governed. They were also, by law, their master's property. The system ensured that their wealth and power depended entirely on their service — at least until, in the seventeenth century, the Janissaries became a hereditary corps that deposed and occasionally killed sultans.

The empire's land was managed, in its classical period, through the timar system, which resembled both the Mughal jagir and the European fief. A cavalryman, a sipahi, was granted the right to collect specified revenues from a group of villages in return for military service. The peasants were registered in detailed tax surveys, the tahrir defterleri, and were in principle forbidden to abandon their land; a peasant who left could be required to return or to pay a fee. The land itself remained, in principle, the property of the state.

Ibn Khaldun and the cycle

The great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, writing in North Africa in 1377, offered a theory of how such farms rose and fell that has been admired ever since. In the Muqaddimah, the introduction to his universal history, he argued that dynasties were founded by groups bound together by strong solidarity, which he called asabiyya, typically tribal peoples from the desert or the mountains. Once in power, they settled in cities, grew accustomed to luxury, lost their solidarity and came to depend on paid soldiers and officials. Over three or four generations, the dynasty decayed until it was overthrown by a new group with fresh solidarity.

Ibn Khaldun also made an observation about taxation that would not be out of place in a modern economics textbook. At the beginning of a dynasty, he wrote, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of a dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments. As rulers grew more extravagant, they raised taxes; heavier taxes discouraged cultivation and enterprise; revenue fell; and so rulers raised taxes further, until the farm was exhausted.

It is a sophisticated version of the dynastic cycle that Chinese historians also recognised, and it reveals something important about all the farms in this chapter. Their owners and shepherds were not unaware of the dangers of over-exploitation. They wrote treatises about it — the circle of justice, the Mandate of Heaven, Ibn Khaldun's cycle. They knew that a herd squeezed too hard would flee, rebel or die. And yet, again and again, they squeezed it too hard anyway, because the individual incentives of the people running the farm — the jagirdar with a short tenure, the official with a family to enrich, the ruler with a court to maintain — pulled against the collective interest in its survival.

The Zanj

One of the greatest slave rebellions in history took place in the Islamic world, and it deserves a place beside Spartacus.

In the salt marshes of southern Iraq, near Basra, large numbers of enslaved East Africans, known in Arabic sources as the Zanj, were put to work in the ninth century removing the salty topsoil from the land to make it fit for cultivation. The work was brutal, and the workers were fed on meagre rations. In 869, a man named Ali ibn Muhammad, who claimed descent from the Prophet's family, rallied them to revolt, promising them freedom, wealth and — according to the hostile sources that describe him — slaves of their own. The rebellion lasted fourteen years. The Zanj built their own fortified capital in the marshes, defeated several Abbasid armies and sacked Basra in 871. It took a massive effort by the caliphate to crush them in 883.

The sources for the Zanj rebellion, chiefly the historian al-Tabari, were written by their enemies, and their numbers, and the extent to which the rebellion was driven by slaves rather than by other discontented groups who joined it, are debated. But the episode shows that the Islamic farm, like the Roman, could produce rebellions on a scale that shook an empire.

What the eastern farms teach

The fence of the eastern empires was household registration and collective responsibility in China, caste and the doctrine of rebirth in India, and the tax surveys and land laws of the Ottomans. In all three, the peasant was in principle tied to the land he farmed and the obligations attached to it.

The feed was the land tax, the labour service and the rent: the Chinese peasant's grain, cloth and corvée, the Mughal peasant's third or half of the harvest, the Ottoman villager's tithes to his sipahi.

The shepherds were the scholar-gentry selected by the examinations, the Brahmins who wrote the codes and the mansabdars who collected the jagirs, and the slave-soldiers and slave-administrators of the Islamic empires — perhaps the purest example in this book of a 1% created, owned and directed by the 0.01%.

The stories differed: the Mandate of Heaven and the Confucian order of minds and muscles; the body of the cosmic man and the doctrine of karma; the shepherding of the flock and the circle of justice. But they had the same function — to make the farm's hierarchy appear natural, just and permanent — and remarkably, two of them used the same image of society as a body as Rome and medieval Europe did.

The breakouts were enormous: the Chinese rebellions that toppled dynasties, the agrarian revolts that broke the Mughal empire, the Zanj in the marshes of Iraq, and the long challenge to caste from the Buddha to Ambedkar. And they showed, more clearly than anywhere else, the farm's capacity to survive a change of management. A peasant could become the Son of Heaven, a slave could become a sultan, a failed examination candidate could proclaim himself the brother of Christ — and the farm would be rebuilt, often within a generation, on the same foundations.

Bridge: the sheep that eat men

When the Ming state converted its taxes to silver in the late sixteenth century, it pulled into China a large share of the silver being mined in the Americas and Japan. The Atlantic economy that produced that silver was being built, at the same time, on the far western edge of Eurasia — by states and merchants whose own farms were being transformed.

In 1516, an English lawyer named Thomas More published a short book in Latin called Utopia. In its first part, a traveller describes the miseries of England. Its sheep, he says, which used to be so meek and to eat so little, have become so greedy and wild that they devour men themselves. He meant that landlords were turning fields that had once fed villages into enclosed pastures for sheep, whose wool was more profitable than the rents of tenants, and driving the people off the land.

In the next chapter, we go back to England to follow that process — the enclosure of the commons, the clearing of the Highlands and the making of a landless people — which turned the land itself into private property and prepared the ground for a new kind of farm.