Genealogy

The evolutionary trajectory or genealogy of an imperial system is important in the process of building up imperial capital. Conquest is always followed by the extraction of tribute in one form or another, and this inflects the ways in which such tribute evolves over the medium and longer term into forms of regularized taxation.

But it also impacts upon the way in which we approach an “empire” and, more especially, the point in its history at which we approach it, since there are considerable differences inherent in dealing with young as opposed to older or “mature” imperial systems. For example, while the origins of the Roman Empire as an empire of conquest are clear (extracting wealth in the form of manpower as well as in tribute in various forms, human, animal, mineral, and agricultural), it had evolved by the second century ce an empire-wide system of taxation which, while varying in institutional form according to preexisting arrangements within the conquered provinces, nevertheless provided a more or less predictable annual revenue, subject to seasonal fluctuations in the market value of agricultural output and, to a degree, in commercial activity. But the conquest origins of these revenue flows were gradually forgotten, and as Roman citizenship was universalized from the beginning of the third century, so the imperial conquest aspect of Rome also faded—everyone was a Roman, the empire looked like a single extended territorial entity, and only on its fringes was there an echo of a conquest state. And just as the political crisis of the first half of the fifth century forced western provincial elites—especially in Gaul and Britain—to reassert a local (yet still “Roman”) identity as the imperial government at Rome became less and less able to defend provincial interests, so the political crisis of the seventh century forced the east Roman state to dramatically restructure its fiscal and administrative apparatus, a process that in fact promoted a much higher degree of court control, a centripetal development that enabled the state to survive against remarkable odds: paradoxically, the sudden—and massive— collapse in resource availability directly impacted on administrative and institutional arrangements to the state's advantage.^[401] These two very different results of similar fiscal and political crises reflect both the original pre-conquest structures of society and economy in the two halves of the empire as well as the long-term impact of Romanization and the ways in which indigenous cultures responded to it.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press,2020. — 584 p.. 2020

Genealogy

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