The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes and Community by William H. McNeill

Author:William H. McNeill [McNeill, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780691086484
Google: z4C8QgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 1680004
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1992-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

MICROPARASITISM, MACROPARASITISM, AND THE COMMERCIAL TRANSMUTATION

IN MY FIRST lecture I traced the development of humanity to its achievement of a potentially stable pattern of life under conditions of civilization. By about 1 A.D., commands issued from a sovereign center and applied locally by bureaucratic agents of a distant ruler acting in uneasy collaboration with local landlords, chieftains, and other men of power could regulate and (more or less) safeguard the sorts of mutual dependency that urban specialization had called into being among populations living hundreds of miles apart from one another. Such territorially extensive states as the Han, Roman, Parthian, Mauryan, and Kushan empires may therefore be considered as constituting an institutionally adequate response to the novelties inherent in the urban transmutation that began about 4000 B.C. in Mesopotamia.

It is noteworthy that similar state structures arose not just in the Old World but also in the New, beginning about 1000 years later. Amerindian social organization had indeed not passed beyond this level of organization at the time the Spaniards broke in upon the Aztec and Inca empires of Mexico and Peru, bringing them to an abrupt and catastrophic end. The apparent convergence of patterns of development in mutually isolated regions of the earth suggests that the evolution from priestly to military-bureaucratic management was not simply accidental. Instead it seems plausible to believe that the intensified human interdependence that had been induced by urban specialization needed a protective carapace. Bureaucratic command systems were the simplest way to meet that need, perpetuating into adulthood a childlike dependence on a superior’s direction.

My second major point was that, beginning about 1 A.D., a new kind of transformation began to assert its power over human behavior in the Old World—a change I propose to call the “commercial transmutation.” This refers to an enlarged commerce that began to link China with the Mediterranean and both with India soon after the Christian era. Long-distance trade of this kind responded mainly to market price differentials. Decisions and actions initiated by thousands of private persons affected the movement of caravans and ships—and determined what they would carry.

Of course, such decisions were also affected by bureaucratic commands. Governments were always good customers—for some goods they were the only customers. But insofar as trade moved across jurisdictional boundaries, the power of officials and rulers was checked by the unwillingness of merchants to buy or sell at prices that would not meet their costs and assure them a profit as well. Official acts that violated this principle—a compulsory purchase at less than market prices or outright confiscation—dried up trade very rapidly. The same applied to more local exchanges within a single state. Thus, insofar as rulers and their officials fixed prices at less than market levels—a policy especially prevalent in the grain trade—they inhibited the development of the private sector of the economy and perpetuated the command principle whereby men acted not of their own free will but in obedience to orders coming from someone above them in the political-social hierarchy.

Civilized societies

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