A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON

If these features of modern Europe are found in other societies that might have established overseas empires but did not, the argument that they were conducive to empire is spatially overstretched and hence weakened.

Arabs and Europeans alike followed missionary religions and had active pri­vate profit sectors with merchants traveling far afield. But the polities Arabs founded during their initial drive into the Fertile Crescent and across North Africa seem to have been weaker and less internally stable than states emerging in modern western Europe. On the one hand, suprastate constraints on sovereignty were set by incor­poration into overarching political-religious structures: the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, later the Ottoman sultanate. On the other hand, rulers of many Islamic polities found it difficult if not impossible to control nomadic peoples in their do­mains’ vast, dry hinterlands.⁵⁶ Effective governance was more elusive than in Europe, where the population consisted mainly of sedentary agriculturalists. The daunting challenge of subjecting urbanites and pastoralists to common bureaucratic struc­tures left few resources and limited energy for administering territories elsewhere.

Arab long-distance trade was less hierarchically structured and metropole centered than trade patterns Europeans devised. Many Arab merchants set out on their own or joined sea voyages or caravans. They were not employed by firms headquartered in the Arabian peninsula, Egypt, or Fertile Crescent. The Islamic world did not have its Dutch or English East India Company. Less able than Euro­peans to accumulate gains from physically dispersed activities in one place, the Arab private profit sector was less able to place profits at the disposal of governments.

The religious sector offers an additional contrast. Islam’s initial advance was simultaneously the expansion of Arab-speaking conquerors. But expansion was of a people on the move, not of a defined home state dispatching soldiers, bureaucrats, and settlers to implement an ambitious foreign agenda. The closest Arab equivalent to European metropoles was the administratively decentralized Umayyad and Ab- basid caliphates. But even this (somewhat forced) parallel disappeared with the decline of the Baghdad-based Abbasids in the tenth century and their decisive defeat by Mongol/Turkic forces in 1258. The rise of the Ottoman Empire, in many areas at the expense of Arab elites, hastened the decoupling of Islam from its Arab progeni­tors. Moreover, in the eastern edges of the Muslim world the original Muslim dynas­ties were not Arab. Facing Mecca in prayer had everything to do with a transcendent faith and nothing to do with acknowledging Arab ethnic superiority, much less Arab political hegemony.

The cosmopolitan trend in Islam reversed the tendency toward parochial asso­ciation of region with religion that I have called Euro-Christianity. Both religions spread, each in keeping with its proselytizing mission. But over time Christianity became linked to the political project of one region, whereas Islam became in­creasingly disconnected from any particular region or people.

The conversion imperative took different institutional forms in the two reli­gions. Heavy Christian reliance on missionary bodies permitted monitoring and control of operations from mission headquarters in Europe. With Islam, conversion was more the responsibility of specialists in nonreligious activities ranging from warriors to merchants. Islam did not generate orders like the Jesuits, White Fathers, or Church Missionary Society whose primary task was converting unbelievers. Its spread during and after phase 1 was a more diffuse, decentralized operation, with pressures for reform and mass conversion often coming from areas distant from the Arabian core zone.

The Chinese empire had impressive, centralized, respected public sector insti­tutions during the Ming (1368-1644) and Ch’ing (1644-1911) dynastic eras spanning the centuries of European advance. Yet the very strength and historical continuity of these institutions may have hampered emergence of a private profit sector with the autonomy, social status, and incentives to stimulate growth at home and sponsor extensive activities beyond China’s borders. The imperial bureaucracy was recruited largely from local landowning elements, and its revenues were derived primarily from agriculture. With its vast territory and agrarian fiscal base, China’s central government had less incentive than rulers of smaller, ocean-oriented polities like Portugal and England to seek additional revenues from abroad. Cities lacked the degree of insulation from imperial control they enjoyed in feudal Europe. For these reasons, groups that led the drive for development in western Europe—urban-based artisans, traders, financiers, and manufacturers—played a more peripheral role po­litically and economically in China.

China’s religious sector was integrated with the public sector through the practice of staffing the bureaucracy with scholars trained in the Confucian classics. None of the religions practiced in China had a hierarchical structure or degree of autonomy from state control equivalent to that of the Roman Catholic Church. Neither was there a strong will to go abroad. Confucian doctrines did not call for conversion of unbelievers elsewhere. If anything, Confucianism was a civil religion, supporting a domestic social and political order that was considered unique—and clearly superior to other societies.

Joseph Levenson draws the contrast in these words:

From the point of normative Confucianism, wedded to culture and history and antimessianic to the core, the barbarians are always with us. From the point of view of normative Christianity, transcending culture and history... the pagans are not always with us; let missionaries go overseas, seek them out, convert them. The “Kingdom of God” was nowhere in the world. But the “Middle Kingdom,” the point of balanced perfection in the world, under Heaven, was at home. Whatever it was that sent Chinese into Southeast Asia before the Portuguese ever got there, it had nothing to do with any pretensions to bearing out a Word.⁵⁷

Subordination of the private profit and religious sectors to an inwardly di­rected public sector meant that people who in Europe had opportunities and incen­tives to go overseas, on their own or in cooperation with government, in China stayed home.

The contrast may be traced to patterns of overland migration and conquest preceding phase i. The Roman Empire was the closest European parallel to the Chinese in territorial scope and the belief that it was a center of civilization. But the Roman imperium was broken into fragments by invaders, giving urban capitalists and the Roman Catholic Church the political space to develop largely on their own in the millennium after the fall. China also experienced invasion. But the Mongols, instead of fragmenting China as the Huns, Vandals, Goths, and others did to the Roman domains, ruled it as a component of their vast Eurasian empire. China emerged from invasion and conquest an intact polity, with a government strong enough to limit the autonomous development of urban mercantile and religious institutions.

Ironically, the invasions which destroyed western Eurasia’s greatest empire laid the foundations for new rounds of empire building centuries later. The Mongol invasion, by failing to dismantle eastern Eurasia’s greatest empire, reinforced Chinese tendencies to avoid overseas involvement.

In brief, Arabs and Europeans possessed an outward-looking private profit sector and a missionary religion. But compared to western Europe, Arab states were weak and Arab economic and religious activities less institutionalized and more cosmopolitan. China and western Europe were similar in that their people lived under relatively centralized bureaucratic structures. But compared to western Eu­rope, China’s private profit and religious sectors were less autonomous and less institutionalized. To the extent that China had an official religion, its message was that adherents should stay home. Taken together, these factors point to substan­tial differences between Europeans and the other two societies in the capacity and will of sectoral institutions to exert influence overseas. Evidence from crucial non­European cases thus supports the argument being advanced.

The separation of public, private profit, and religious sector institutions in western Europe was instrumental in placing limits on the arbitrary exercise of power by state rulers. One consequence of a distinctive regional pattern of sectoral relations was enhanced prospects for constitutional regimes respecting individual and group liberties. This same sectoral pattern had quite different, indeed opposite, conse­quences abroad. There, the triple sectoral assault facilitated formation of empires whose agents had substantial latitude arbitrarily to restrict the liberties of non­European peoples. Institutions conducive to a politically liberal order in one part of the world were the instruments of authoritarian control elsewhere.