Societies become breakthrough powerful under fairly specific historical conditions.
Competition in a concentrated area.
This covers most breakthrough shifts. Let’s give some examples.
Europe
A large number of kingdoms and republics, in constant competition. If you didn’t advance militarily, culturally (administration and culture matter) and technologically, you were in trouble. As administration improved and military technology changed to favor “despotic kings” like Louis XIV and Henry the VIIth (a very underrated King), decentralized and smaller power, internal (nobles) and external were brought under control. Constant warfare and other forms of competition lead to rapid advancement.
Fail, and you could fall. If the English hadn’t defeated the Spanish armada, well, that would have been the end of an independent England. Many other principalities did fall.
In addition, there was external pressure, from the more advanced, at least initially, Ottomans, whom the Europeans were terrified of. The Ottoman threat was real, and a few key battles and wars could have swung the other way, and Eastern Europe fallen under Ottoman control.
With no central control of the entirety of Europe, people could move easily, and find a place where whatever new thing they wanted to try was allowed.
The end result was a huge increase in technology, administrative control allowing more and more resources to be brought under central control, and swift advancement in the military. Even before the industrial revolution Europeans wound up conquering a vast chunk of the world, one they had industrialized, the world was at their feet, and they wound up in control of about three-quarters of it, with the rest terrified and compliant. (This is the case with China: never actually conquered, but under the thumb, though they did fight as best they could, they were defeated.)
Ancient Greece, then Rome
Greek city states were in ferocious competition with each other. Militarily, culturally and even technologically. The Greeks were far more advanced than the Romans. If you lost, terrible things could happen, like the destruction of your entire city and the enslavement of every survivor.
The Greeks were also under threat by a great neighbouring power: Persia, and the wars against Persia, were, again, close run. They could have gone the other way. By the time of of the Ten Thousand, when Greek mercenaries who had fought for the losing side in a Persian civil were were able to march across much of a hostile Persian empire, crushing all in their way, it was clear to the Greeks that Persia was ripe—their armies were vastly larger, but the Greek way of war was vastly superior.
Greece itself was conquered by Macedonia, which was essentially Greek, but still somewhat Barbarian, then Macedonia, under Alexander, conquered Persia and Egypt. The Persians, even if their leadership hadn’t been cowardly, never stood a chance. Then the Greeks ruled the Eastern Med and the Near East until the Romans. After Alexander, however, they didn’t expand much. The successor states were not dynamic.
Rome was also in savage competition. Against the Greeks, the other Italian tribes, the Celtic tribes and Carthage. They were almost always at war, and they learned well. Eventually they were able to conquer Greece, Span, most of what is now France, and Egypt, though they never had much luck against most of what had been the Persian Empire. Once the Republic fell, Rome didn’t spread much. The occasional Emperor would conquer some land, but they could rarely hold it. The dynamism of the Republic, and the pressure required for advancement no longer existed. Indeed, as time went by the Romans lost a fair bit of their technology, as well. The big single Empire was not dynamic.
The Mongols
Before Temujin the Mongols and the other steppe nomads near China were in constant competition against each other, and were also constantly subject to manipulation and war from China, which sought to keep them down, fearing (quite rightly) that they would invade. Most of Temujin’s life was spent conquering and unifying the steppe nomads, then changing their culture to be more disciplined and usefully warlike. The steppe nomads had always been fearsome, but Temujin changed how they fought: ordering them in groups of 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 and enforcing amazing levels of discipline. The Mongols were not just disciplined in battle, strategically they moved faster than any other military of the time and were able to pull off amazing coordination. Columns of troops would meet hundreds of miles away, on the exact day planned.
Though horse archers are always dangerous, it was Genghis Khan’s unification PLUS his changes to society and military organization which turned them into a terror so great that they were not defeated for over a hundred years. In their time, they were just as dominant as the Europeans in the late 19th century.
There are other examples: the Zulus, who had the bad luck to run into the British at the height of their power are one. Warring States China is another. Ancient India around the time of the Buddha is a third. The Sengoku period of Japan is a fourth, and once Tokugawa took power, Japan, in many ways stagnated. (During the Sengoku period, the Japanese had more firearms than anywhere else.)
Concluding
Large empires are stagnant. There may be some advancement, though often there is none or even retrogression, but they don’t make breakthroughs into revolutionary power. At best they inherit it.
Small groups in competition have the chance, though not the certainty, of fast progress, stuck as they are in a cauldron. It doesn’t always happen: the tribes of New Guinea were caught in zero, indeed, often negative sum competition and remained backwards.
But the general rule of breakout power is small states in serious competition, usually with an outside threat.
Willy
I don’t know much about the Ottomans, but maybe should know more. I see a ragtag group of central Asian Turks who squatted inside a small abandoned Eastern Roman Empire province, to then somehow grow themselves into that formidable empire. I know it had to be more than harems, eunuchs, and that Janissaries thing which seems weird to me.
The early sultans were clearly working within a rapid cultural integrity expansion phase, so full of patriotic excitement, while their once rich and mighty neighbor was dying. Funny how that empire grew all around Constantinople, leaving that final remnant alone until taking it wouldn’t be as much of a pain with that gigantic cannon allowing them to bust through walls built during glorious ages a thousand years gone. Then they rapidly restored and expanded the place after centuries of Roman (they weren’t called Byzantine back then) neglect. They absorbed all that Roman knowledge, especially engineering, to build somewhat improved similar versions of bridges, aqueducts, and Hagia Sophias, all over the place.
I’d think there’d be a lesson in all that for American capitalists. Why does a company like say, Boeing, rise to be the mightiest of aerospace empires, to then after an interited stagnant phase, seem to be falling back to earth? Is that cycle inevitable, or can it be prevented? Maybe nations should take heed.
bruce wilder
There is an underlying dynamic of solidarity and surplus that seldom gets the attention it deserves.
Ancient Greece at the end of the of the Bronze Age participated in the famous but mysterious collapse and entered a Dark Age of significantly diminished population, political organization and culture. They emerged beginning around 800 BCE, apparently with a new set of technologies, politics and agriculture and trade that generated surplus. People were healthy and well-fed (comparatively). Greece experienced a population boom, increasing in numbers roughly ten times over 400 years and a critical part of the competition among city-states was to found colonies. It wasn’t just Greece, Phoenicia and the Etruscans and others were involved.
Technological innovation is not a merely moral phenomenon; it is a matters of surplus and numbers. There must be a surplus to feed an artisan class and trade and a differentiation of labor.
The surplus that fed the urban civilization that Rome engineered diminished with soil erosion. The extraction of the tradeable surplus from a slave class on the great latifundia was inefficient and self-defeating on many levels, undermining the economic foundation of an urban civilization. People at the bottom of the system were unhealthy. Famines and plagues ensued. Trade declined with falling division of labor in a dimishing artisanal class, compounding the effects of declining agricultural surplus.
The rise of China followed on the creation of enormous agricultural surplus to feed vast armies and an urban civilization with a huge artisanal population, with trade driving deep division of labor and technological inventiveness. The surplus originated in vast hydraulic projects and the elaboration three-crop rice production.
There would be no social barrier in China to ever more labor intensive agriculture: more and more hands in the fields until the extraction of surplus was choked off by congestion losses. By 1500, Chinese peasants could barely feed themselves. Ordinary people were physically weak. The cities were huge, but represented only single-digit percentages of total population.
Europe recovering from the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of Rome saw a revival of surplus, especially after iron plows turned the heavy but fertile soils of Northern Europe and dug deeper in the south. But, the congestion losses of too many hands in the fields showed quickly too and the flowering of the High Middle Ages ended in overpopulation and the Black Death, which was driven as much by imminent famine as rats and fleas.
The contrasting aftermaths of the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death — two, long series of bubonic plagues sweeping thru Europe is worth contemplating. One destroyed a civilization and the other seemed to spark a new civilization.
Agricultural surplus feeding a growth of artisanal production and merchant trade, but being choked off by congestion and extractive oppression is a recurrent dynamic. It underlies the peculiar history of rivalry between England and France. France, with the greatest agricultural potential in western Europe, occupying an extensive well-watered plain, had a vastly greater population than England thruout the Middle Ages and well into the 19th century. But, France became overpopulated. Famine and hunger drove the French Revolution when bad weather triggered bad harvests that threatened the surplus that fed Paris.
England’s ability to feed its industrializing cities was a near-run thing in the 18th and 19th centuries. The additional surplus generated by the British Agricultural Revolution was a paltry thing and Ireland was kept on the edge of famine by overpopulation until pushed over the edge.
The productive often desperate competition that Ian draws attention to has a multi-path causal relation to the generation and/or extraction of surplus. That surplus may originate in accidents, be managed or neglected by elites and be extinguished without intention.
Mark Pontin
These are all accurate conclusions. On the other hand, not to take away from any of this, everything here is something I learned, IRRC, reading Asimov’s FOUNDATION at age eight.
However, a major factor you allude to by, forex, mentioning Temujin and Alexander but you don’t discuss — for brevity’s sake in a blog post — is the enormous role sometimes played by contingency.
Contingency, specifically, in the form of some unlikely driven, talented individual turning up who bends the direction of their society’s development in such a way that it’s hard to imagine subsequent history going that way without them.
Sure: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” And this applies to leaders, too.
Yet it’s hard to imagine Zulu culture going the way it did without, forex, Shaka and it’s arguable, say, that the scope of the 19th century British empire at its height would have been impossible without Pitt the Younger as prime minister at that century’s turn determining that the Royal Navy would double in size and Britain would spend something like 50 percent of its GDP on shipbuilding (I exaggerate but not by much) alongside his driving substantial social reforms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pitt_the_Younger
And I bring all this up because you often insist China’s future dominance is deterministically preordained, given its population size, manufacturing capability, emphasis on STEM, etcetera. And I agree, mostly.
Still, I thought of you as I read this long FT article–
‘How China has ‘throttled’ its private sector: Venture capital finance has dried up amid political and economic pressures, prompting a dramatic fall in new company formation’
No paywall link: https://archive.ph/vbdO5
Original: https://www.ft.com/content/1e9e7544-974c-4662-a901-d30c4ab56eb7
The FT’s focus is the shrunken role of venture capitalists under Xi and their assumption is that this is necessarily a Bad Thing. They would say that, of course. “Governments can’t choose winners, blah, blah, blah.” This despite the fact that the CCP looks pretty damned good right now with China’s dominance in EVs and green technologies.
Still, it’s a long article that does some serious reporting and talks to people on the ground in China. I thought you’d be interested in it; it’s usually good to hear opposing opinions and one notes that India, despite having had many of the same determining factors in its favor, hasn’t yet succeeded in taking off as China has.
In India’s case, the circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past, have been its endemic corruption. In China’s case, it’s arguable that the society’s Confucian, centralizing tendencies could act to retard China’s progress in the longer term, as it has done historically. It’s not the way I, like you, would bet. But it’s an argument and a possibility.
Mary Bennet
A small quibble, when England, aided by the weather, defeated the Armada, the monarch was Elizabeth, not her grandfather, Henry VII. The reference to weather is not meant to denigrate the English achievement, but to point out the Spanish seem to have had a rather poor understanding of the seas around the British Isles.
Purple Library Guy
Japan was unusual in that it didn’t so much stagnate as actually regress, and that regression was due to a strategic decision . . . a very canny one, in a weird way. Technological changes have often ushered in shifts in a society’s class structure.
After the wars, Tokugawa REALIZED that. He saw that allowing firearms to continue gaining importance would create a shift in Japan’s class structure. And he didn’t WANT a shift in Japan’s class structure. So he banned ’em. It worked.
Daniel Lynch
Sometimes I think the endless competition & fighting is crazy. What if we cooperated, instead of competed?
The rational explanation is competition for finite resources. But sometimes — take the U.S. as a case in point — the U.S. has ample resources, yet is never satisfied, and still competes and fights, anyway. Make it make sense.
elkern
Interesting pattern.
USA seems like an exception, but maybe it fits another pattern, along with Macedonia (and maybe modern China?): Successor States, which mop up after a previously dynamic framework stagnates? They have to be isolated enough – and seemingly poor enough? – that the preceding Empire(s) avoid(s) the effort & cost of conquering them, but close enough to learn from the military, technological, and administrative advances of the dominant State(s).
History courses I’ve taken have always kinda glossed over Macedonia’s rise, so I admit I’m guessing a bit there.
The USA started with the technical advantages of contemporary Europe, and its focus on Commerce kept that up-to-date. European aristocrats looked down on Americans as “commoners” (much as Greeks had viewed Macedonians as “barbarians”?). The Atlantic Ocean provided protection from European Powers, and the country grew into an economically powerful State which was always more useful to European rulers as a trading partner than a potential colony.
The US Civil War might qualify as an episode of “intense competition”, leading to technical and military advances, but the Spanish-American War really announced the rise of US international power.
(Hmm, Japan had learned modern warfare and administration from Europe, too, and it claimed its place in the new World by drubbing Russia in 1905; maybe another example of a geographically isolated Successor State?)
Cultural and intellectual inertia blinded European aristocrats to the sclerosis of their Empires, and the Great War was the [beginning of] the end of the global rule of their Kings. WWII was the End of the End for Europe, leaving the USA and the USSR (another Successor State?!) in charge.
And China’s recovery from centuries of colonial interference seems to follow a pattern similar to the rise of the USA: focus on commerce, build a reasonably stable & efficient internal system, get rich, then get powerful.
In all these cases, the Successor State was able to grow – relatively peacefully – because there was a larger framework enforced by [an]other Power[s] for some time. The Predecessor Power(s) bore the ever-increasing costs of enforcing “global” stability, including the ultimately fatal cost of collective cultural stagnation.
Jan Wiklund
The Ottomans had a vast disadvantage – they were neoliberal, of sorts.
All Muslim powers had that disadvantage, which didn’t seem to have any great consequenses until well after AD1000.
At least, Timur Kuran argues in The invention of enterprise, ed Landes, Mokyr & Baumol, 2010, that if the state would try to govern economy, that would be against Islamic law.
And Prasannan Parthasarati says, in Why Europe grew rich and Asia didn’t, 2011, that the Ottomans challenged with superior Indian textile production happily said, Fine, that will be cheaper for the customers, and let their own not-that-effective textile industry go under.
We can’t deride them, they had no experience of where this habit would lead. But we have, and do exactly the same.
Ian Welsh
Willy, the Turks were the mercenary/military class of the middle East and had been for centuries. I recently read a history of Saladin which commented on this. When they took Constantinople they had the most advanced artillery in the world.
Bruce, excellent comment and worthy of an elevation, if you’re OK with it.
Mary, I didn’t say Henry VIII was in charge during the Armada, but I suppose writing about it so soon after mentioning Henry was bad writing. The weather was only one factor, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada
Mark Pontin, yes, agreed on contingency. I wrote a couple long articles on the Mongols, and Temujin was an extraordinary man.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-genius-of-genghis-khan/
With regards to venture capital, the numbers I’ve seen show that it’s becoming less and less productive, especially in the US.
PLG, absolutely and his ability to control and regress tech is fascinating. It stands in counterpoint to the argument that we can’t do so if we choose. Pretty sure I wrote an article on that once (or maybe I just planned to) but can’t find it. Written too many articles.
Elkern, as you say the US isn’t part of the pattern. It’s a successor state, and its power is just an extension of European hegemony. It is similar to Macedonia: after WWII it took over (made into satrapys) most of Western Europe, then reigned for about 80 years (I think that reign is in its very last days.)
Jan. Fascinating, I didn’t know that.
Feral Finster
Not sure that the Greeks were more advanced than the Romans. You don’t see ancient Greek bridges that are still in use today or large-scale projects like aqueducts.
“The Ancient Engineers” by L Sprague DeCamp discusses this in detail.
Willy
I was trying to paint a contrast between a rising culture and dying one. There was obviously a lot more going on. That Constantinople was able to hang on for more than two centuries after 1204 implies a strength coming from somewhere. But still, you know there are going to be observably distinct variables between rising cultures and dying ones.