A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals (Neil Faulkner)

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A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals
Author	Neil Faulkner
Publisher	Pluto Press
First published	2013
Type	Book
ISBN	9781849648653
Source	Anna's Archive

This magisterial analysis of human history—from "Lucy," the first hominid, to the current Great Recession—combines the insights of earlier generations of Marxist historians with radical new ideas about the historical process. Reading history against the grain, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past was not predetermined. Choices were frequent and numerous. Different outcomes—liberation or barbarism—were often possible. Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives great events. At the beginning of the 21st century—with economic disaster, war, climate catastrophe and deep class divisions—humans face perhaps the greatest crisis in the long history of our species. The lesson of A Marxist History of the World is that, if we created our past, we can also create a better future.

Introduction: Why History Matters

History is a weapon. How we understand the past affects how we act in the present. Because of this, history is political and contested.

All knowledge of the present – of its crises, wars, and revolutions – is necessarily historical. We can no more make sense of our own world without reference to the past than we can manufacture a computer without reference to the accumulated knowledge of many decades. Our rulers know this, and because they have a vested interest in defending their own property and power, they use their control of education and the mass media to present a sanitised view of history. They stress continuity and tradition, obedience and conformity, nationalism and empire. They purposefully underplay exploitation, the violence of the ruling class, and the struggles of the oppressed.

Their version of history has become more dominant over the last 30 years. Past empires, such as the Roman and the British, have been held up as models of civilisation by ‘neo-conservative’ supporters of imperialist wars today. Medieval Europe has been reinterpreted as an exemplar of the ‘new classical’ economics favoured by millionaire bankers. Attempts to construct grand narratives of history – that is, to explain the past, so that we can understand the present, and act to change the future – have been disparaged by fashionable postmodernist theorists who argue that history has no structure, pattern, or meaning. The effect of these ideas is to disable us intellectually and render us politically inert. Do nothing, is the message, because war promotes democracy, there is no alternative to the market, and history cannot be shaped by conscious human action.

This book stands in a different tradition. It is encapsulated in something the revolutionary thinker and activist Karl Marx wrote in a political pamphlet published in 1852: ‘Men [and women] make their own history, but not of their own free will, and not under circumstances of their own choosing.’ The course of history, in other words, is not predetermined; things can move in a different direction according to what people do. Nor is history shaped only by politicians and generals; the implication is that if ordinary people organise themselves and act collectively, they too can shape history.

This book has its origin in a series first published in weekly instalments on the Counterfire website (www.counterfire.org). It has been extensively revised for book-format publication. This introduction has been added, as has a rather longer conclusion. The short weekly web chapters have been grouped together as the sections of longer book chapters, and each chapter has been given a short introduction. A bibliography has been added so that readers can check my sources and search for further reading, and so has a timeline to help readers keep their bearings through the narrative.

The reorganisation and editing of the original web series should make this a book that can be read cover to cover, but it does not have to be read that way. It should work equally well as a volume of short analytical essays on key historical topics which can be accessed when needed. Either way, it is first and foremost a book for activists – for people who want to understand the past as a guide to action in the present.

Many changes are due to the following people, all of whom took time and trouble to read the text, in whole or in part, and offer invaluable critical comment: William Alderson, Dominic Alexander, David Castle, Lindsey German, Elaine Graham-Leigh, Jackie Mulhallen, John Rees, Alex Snowdon, Alastair Stephens, Fran Trafford, and Vernon Trafford. Needless to say, I have sometimes proved stubborn and rejected their advice, so the final result is entirely my own.

A common criticism was that I have neglected certain places and periods; that the book suffers from Eurocentrism, even Anglocentrism. This criticism is justified. I have done my best to correct it, but I have succeeded only in part. The reason is simple and obvious: I am a British-based archaeologist and historian with uneven expertise. Like all generalists, I can never wholly escape the constraints of my training, experience, and reading, and must therefore seek the indulgence and forbearance of readers who are neither British nor European.

Even on the ground I have covered, I suspect I leave a trail of errors and misunderstandings – inviting denunciation by diverse cohorts of specialists. That, too, is the inevitable fate of the generalist. There is only one defence. Would correcting the errors and misunderstandings invalidate the main arguments? If so, the project fails. If not – if the Marxist approach provides a convincing explanation of the main events and developments of human history irrespective of misconstrued details – then the project succeeds.

Hopefully, though, it will achieve something more: it will persuade some that, since humans make their own history, such that the future is determined by what each of us does, they need to get active. For, as Marx himself put it: ‘The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’

Neil Faulkner

December 2012

1. Hunters and Farmers (2.5 million—3000 BC)

Our story begins with a rapid survey of a vast span of time from about 2.5 million years ago to about 3000 BC. During this period, as a product of biological, cultural, and social evolution, four radical transformations took place. First, in East Africa, 2.5 million years ago, some apes evolved into the earliest hominids – animals that walked upright and whose hands were henceforward free to fashion tools. Second, about 200,000 years ago, again in Africa, certain hominids evolved into modern humans, creatures with larger brains and a greater capacity for tool-making, collective labour, social organisation, and cultural adaptation to different environments. Third, about 10,000 years ago, under the impact of climate change and food shortages, some communities made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. Fourth, about 6,000 years ago, new techniques of land reclamation and intensive farming allowed some communities in favoured locations to increase their output substantially by moving from hoe-based cultivation to plough-based agriculture.

I call these transitions revolutions to signal the fact that they were relatively abrupt: moments in history when the steady drip-drip of evolutionary development suddenly tipped over into qualitative change – from walking on all fours to walking on two legs; from a hominid of limited intellect to one of exceptional ability; from a way of life based on foraging or hunting for food to one based on producing it; and from hoe-based to plough-based farming. By the end of this period, around 3000 BC, farming was supplying human societies with agricultural surpluses sufficient to support religion, war, and groups of specialists. From among the latter, who usurped control of the surplus, the first classes of exploiters would emerge.

The Hominid Revolution

A new form of ape roamed the Afar Depression of Ethiopia 3.2 million years ago: Australopithecus afarensis (‘southern ape of Afar’). Anthropologists recovered 47 fossil bones of one of these ‘australopithecines’ in 1974, some 40 per cent of a complete skeleton. From the slight, gracile form, they assumed she was female and dubbed her ‘Lucy’, but she may in fact have been male.

Lucy stood just 1.1 m tall, weighed around 29 kg, and was probably about 20 years old when she died. With short legs, long arms, and a small brain case, Lucy would have looked rather like a modern chimpanzee. But there was a crucial difference: she walked upright. The shape of her pelvis and legs, and the knee joint of another member of the species found a short distance away, proved this beyond reasonable doubt.

Lucy was probably one of a small foraging group that moved around gathering fruit, nuts, seeds, eggs, and other foodstuffs. As climate change reduced the forests and created savannah, natural selection had favoured a species able to range over greater distances in search of food. But Lucy’s bipedalism (walking on two legs) had revolutionary implications. It freed the hands and arms for tool-making and other forms of labour. This in turn encouraged natural selection in favour of larger brain capacity. A powerful dynamic of evolutionary change was set in motion: hand and brain, labour and intellect, skill and thought began an explosive interaction – one which culminated in modern humans.

We do not know whether Lucy made tools. None was found in association with her remains or with those of her companions. But 2.5 million years ago Lucy’s descendants certainly did. Choppers made from crudely chipped pebbles represent the archaeological imprint of a new family of species defined by tool-making behaviour: the hominids. Tools embody conceptual thought, forward planning, and manual dexterity. They reveal the use of intellect and skill to modify nature in order to exploit its resources more efficiently. Other animals simply take it as it comes.

The hominids, like the australopithecines before them, evolved in Africa, and for about 1.5 million years that is where they largely remained. Although 1.8-million-year-old fossil remains have been found in Georgia, near the Black Sea, these appear to represent only a brief foray into Western Asia. Not until about a million years ago did a species of early human, Homo erectus, migrate from Africa to colonise much of South and East Asia. Later again, a more developed hominid, Homo heidelbergensis, settled in much of Western Asia and Europe. But these populations were tiny and unstable.

Hominids are creatures of the Ice Age epoch which began 2.5 million years ago. Ice Age climate is dynamic, shifting between cold glacials and relatively warm interglacials. We are currently in an interglacial, but 20,000 years ago much of Northern Europe and North America was in the middle of a glacial and covered by ice-sheets up to 4 km thick, with winters lasting nine months, and temperatures below –20°C for weeks on end. The early hominids were not adapted to the cold, so they migrated north in warm periods and moved south again when the glaciers advanced. They first arrived in Britain, for example, at least 700,000 years ago, but then retreated and returned at least eight times. Britain was probably occupied for only about 20 per cent of its Old Stone Age (c. 700,000–10,000 years ago).

Homo heidelbergensis seems to have inhabited coastal or estuarine regions, where animal resources were rich and varied. The standard tool was either an ‘Acheulian’ handaxe – essentially a chopper – or a ‘Clactonian’ flake – a cutter. These general-purpose tools were mass-produced as needed. Excavations at Boxgrove in England recovered 300 handaxes and much associated flint-knapping debris dating to around 500,000 years ago. They had been used to butcher horse, deer, and rhinoceros on what was then a savannah-like coastal plain.

During the last glaciation, however, there was no wholesale retreat. Homo neanderthalensis was a cold-adapted hominid that evolved out of Homo heidelbergensis in Europe and Western Asia about 200,000 years ago. Neanderthal adaptation was a matter of both biological evolution and new technology. With large heads, big noses, prominent brows, low foreheads, little chin development, and short, squat, powerfully built bodies, the Neanderthal was designed to survive winters with average temperatures as low as –10°C. But culture was more important, and this was linked to brain power.

Hominid brains had been getting bigger. Selection for this characteristic was a serious matter. Brain tissue is more expensive than other kinds: the brain accounts for only about 2 per cent of our body weight but no less than 20 per cent of food-energy consumption. It is also high-risk. Humans are adapted for walking upright, which requires a narrow pelvis, yet have a large brain-case, which imposes a strain on the woman’s pelvis in childbirth; the result is slow, painful, and sometimes dangerous birth trauma. But the advantages are considerable. Large brains enable modern humans to create and sustain complex social relationships with, typically, about 150 others. Humans are not just social animals, but social animals to an extreme degree, with brains especially enlarged and sophisticated for this purpose.

Sociability confers enormous evolutionary benefits. Hominid hunter-gatherer bands were probably very small – perhaps 30 or 40 people. But they would have had links with other groups, perhaps half a dozen of similar size, with whom they shared mates, resources, labour, information, and ideas. Sociability, cooperation, and culture are closely related, and achieving them requires high levels of intelligence: in biological terms, brain tissue.

The Neanderthals were certainly clever. The ‘Mousterian’ tool-kit of the classic Neanderthals contained a range of specialised points, knives, and scrapers – as many as 63 different types according to one famous study of archaeological finds from south-western France. Intelligent, networked, and well equipped, the Neanderthals were superbly adapted to Ice Age extremes, building shelters, making clothes, and organising themselves for large-scale hunting on the frozen plains. Lynford in England is a hunting site dating from 60,000 years ago. Here, archaeologists found Neanderthal tools associated with the bones, tusks, and teeth of mammoths.

But natural organisms are conservative in relation to their evolutionary perfection. The Neanderthals, in adapting so well to the cold, had entered a biological cul-de-sac. Meanwhile, in Africa, the crucible of species, a new type of super-hominid had evolved out of the ancient erectus line. Such was its creativity, collective organisation, and cultural adaptability that, migrating from Africa 85,000 years ago, it spread rapidly across the world and eventually colonised its remotest corners. This new species was Homo sapiens – modern humans – and it was destined to out-compete all other hominids and drive them to extinction.

The Hominid Revolution, which began around 2.5 million years ago, had culminated in a species whose further progress would be determined not by biological evolution, but by intelligence, culture, social organisation, and planned collective labour.

The Hunting Revolution

Somewhere in Africa, 200,000 years ago, lived a woman who is the common ancestor of every human being on earth today. She is the primeval progenitor of the entire species Homo sapiens – modern humans. We know her as ‘African Eve’. It is DNA analysis that has revealed this, confirming and refining the conclusions reached by other scientists based on the evidence of fossilised bone.

DNA is the chemical coding within cells which provides the blueprint for organic life. Similarities and differences can be studied to see how closely various life forms are related. Mutations occur and accumulate at fairly steady rates. This allows geneticists not only to measure biological diversity within and between species, but also to estimate how much time has passed since two groups separated and ceased interbreeding. Mutations in our DNA therefore constitute ‘fossil’ evidence of our past inside living tissue.

The DNA date for African Eve matches the date of the earliest known fossils of Homo sapiens. Two skulls and a partial skeleton found at Omo in Ethiopia in 1967 have been dated to c. 195,000 BP (before the present; the usual term when discussing hominid evolution).

The new species looked different. Early humans had long, low skulls, sloping foreheads, projecting brow ridges, and heavy jaws. Modern humans have large, dome-shaped skulls, much flatter faces, and smaller jaws. The change was mainly due to increased brain size: Homo sapiens was highly intelligent. Big brains make it possible to store information, think imaginatively, and communicate in complex ways. Language is the key to all this. The world is classified, analysed, and discussed through speech. African Eve was a non-stop talker. Because of this, in evolutionary terms, she was adaptable and dynamic.

Homo sapiens had this unique characteristic: unlike all other animals, including other hominids, she was not restricted by biology to a limited range of environments. Thinking it through, talking it over, working together, Homo sapiens could adapt to life almost anywhere. Biological evolution was therefore superseded by cultural evolution. And the pace of change accelerated. Handaxe-wielding Homo erectus had remained in Africa for 1.5 million years. In a fraction of that time, the descendants of African Eve were on the move. Or some of them were. The genetic evidence appears to show that the whole of Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas were populated by the descendants of a single group of hunter-gatherers who left Africa about 3,000 generations ago – around 85,000 BP. South Asia and Australia were colonised by 50,000 BP, Northern Asia and Europe by 40,000 BP, and the Americas by 15,000 BP.

Why did people move? Almost certainly, as hunter-gatherers, they went in search of food, responding to resource depletion, population pressure, and climate change. They were adapted for this – adapted to adapt. Designed for endurance walking and running, they were capable of long-distance movement. Their manual dexterity made them excellent tool-makers. Their large brains rendered them capable of abstract thought, detailed planning, linguistic communication, and social organisation.

They formed small, tight-knit, cooperative groups. These groups were linked in loose but extensive networks based on kinship, exchange, and mutual support. They were, in the sense in which archaeologists use the term, ‘cultured’: their ways of getting food, living together, sharing tasks, making tools, ornamenting themselves, burying the dead, and much else were agreed within the groups and followed set rules.

This implies something more: they were making conscious, collective choices. You talk things through and then you decide. The challenges of the endless search for food often posed alternatives. Some groups will have made a more conservative choice: stay where you are, carry on as before, hope for the best. Others will have been more enterprising, perhaps moving into unknown territory, trying new hunting techniques, or linking up with other groups to pool knowledge, resources, and labour.

A dominant characteristic of Homo sapiens, therefore, was an unrivalled ability to meet the demands of diverse and changeable environments. Initially, they would have migrated along resource-rich coastlines and river systems. But they seem soon to have spread into the hinterland; and wherever they went, they adapted and fitted in. In the Arctic, they hunted reindeer; on the frozen plains, mammoth; on the grasslands, wild deer and horses; in the tropics, pigs, monkeys, and lizards.

Toolkits varied with the challenges. Instead of simple handaxes and flakes, they manufactured a range of ‘blades’ – sharp-edged stone tools longer than they were wide which were struck from specially prepared prismatic cores. They also made clothes and shelters as conditions demanded. They used fire for heating, cooking, and protection. And they produced art – paintings and sculptures of the animals they hunted. Above all, they experimented and innovated. Successes were shared and copied. Culture was not static, but changeable and cumulative. Homo sapiens met environmental challenges with new ways of doing things, and the lessons learned became part of a growing store of knowledge and know-how.

Instead of modern humans either evolving biologically or dying out when environmental conditions changed, they found solutions in better shelters, warmer clothes, and sharper tools. Nature and culture interacted, and through this interaction, humans became progressively better at making a living.

In some places, for a while, Homo sapiens coexisted with early humans. Between c. 40,000 and 30,000 BP, Europe was inhabited by both moderns and Neanderthals. There is DNA evidence for some interbreeding – and, by implication, social interaction – but the main story seems to be the slow replacement of one species by the other. The Neanderthals eventually died out because they could neither adapt nor compete as the climate changed, as Homo sapiens populations grew, and as the big game on which all hominids depended were over-hunted.

Stone-tool technology seems to shadow this species displacement. Neanderthal fossils are associated with Mousterian flakes. Cro-Magnon fossils (as Homo sapiens remains are known in European archaeology) are associated with a range of sophisticated Aurignacian blades. The terms reflect two tool-making traditions recognised in the archaeological record. But that is not all. The new culture was diverse and dynamic, producing, in the course of time, spear-throwers, the harpoon, and the bow, and domesticating the dog for use in the hunt. The Neanderthals had been at the top of the food chain, but the new arrivals engaged them in a ‘cultural arms race’ they could not win.

Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge in England is a classic Homo sapiens site. It has yielded human remains, animal bones, thousands of stone tools, and artefacts made of bone and antler. These date to around 14,000 BP and belonged to a community of horse hunters. The cave offered shelter and a vantage point overlooking a gorge through which herds of wild horses and deer regularly passed. Here was a community of Homo sapiens adapted to a very specific ecological niche: a natural funnel on the migration routes of wild animals during the latter part of the last great glaciation.

The period from 2.5 million years ago, when tool-making began, to 10,000 BP is known as the Old Stone Age or Palaeolithic. Its last phase, the Upper Palaeolithic, is the period of Homo sapiens. It represents a revolutionary break with earlier phases. The Upper Palaeolithic Revolution was both biological and cultural. A new species of super-hominid emerged from Africa and spread across the world. In this first globalisation, the species adapted to diverse environments and opportunities by creating numerous distinctive ‘cultures’ – repertoires of tools, work methods, social customs, and ritual practices.

But by 10,000 BP there was a problem. The big game were dying out because hominids had been too successful: mammoths, giant deer, and wild horses had been hunted to extinction. At the same time, the earth was warming and the open plains were disappearing, overtaken by regenerated forest. The Upper Palaeolithic world had reached an impasse. The existing way of making a living could no longer ensure survival. Homo sapiens faced a supreme test of evolutionary fitness.

The Agricultural Revolution

Around 20,000 years ago the ice of the last glaciation began to melt. By c. 8000 BC global temperatures had stabilised at levels similar to today’s. By c. 5000 BC the world had assumed its current form. Europe, for example, took shape as rising sea levels broke through land bridges and flooded the Baltic, North Sea, and Black Sea. The result was a slowly evolving ecological crisis for the peoples of the world. In the North the open tundra gave way to dense forest, reducing the biomass of animals available to hunters by about 75 per cent. In Central and Western Asia the crisis was more serious: there climate change turned large areas into desert, and life retreated towards damp uplands, river valleys, and oases.

It was not the first time. During the 2.5 million years of the Ice Age, the glaciers had advanced and retreated many times. The difference now was the identity of the hominids faced with the challenge of a warming world. Homo sapiens was far better equipped than her predecessors, both intellectually and culturally, to cope with ecological crisis.

In the forested lands of the North, most humans settled by rivers, lakes, deltas, estuaries, and seashores, where food was both abundant and varied. Around 7500 BC, Star Carr in Yorkshire was the site of a seasonal camp used in late spring and summer each year. The Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) people who used it hunted wild cattle, elk, red deer, roe deer, and wild pig, and also smaller animals like pine marten, red fox, and beaver. Stalking and close-range ambush was their chosen method. As well as scrapers, borers, and other stone implements, their toolkit included barbed spearheads made from antler.

The people of Star Carr had a fairly easy life. Refined techniques of hunting and gathering enabled them to exploit the new food resources of a wet and wooded landscape. But in the arid regions of Asia something more radical was necessary: not new variants of food gathering, but food production.

Hunters had long existed in a symbiotic relationship with their prey. They created clearings, channelled movement, provided food, warded off predators, and spared the young. For maintaining plentiful game close by was in their interests. The transition from hunting to pastoralism (the rearing of domesticated animals on pasture) could be gradual and seamless.

That plants grow from seeds is a matter of observation. That people should sow seeds in order to harvest plants was therefore not a giant leap. But it involved a choice – and not necessarily a welcome one. Farming is hard work: it involves long, repetitive, back-breaking toil – clearing land, breaking up the soil, hoeing the ground, scattering seed, weeding, warding off vermin, irrigating or draining the fields, harvesting the crop; and doing so with the ever-present danger of drought, flood, or blight. Then the same again, year after year after year. Farming is rarely an ideal option. Hunting and fishing, gathering and scavenging are much easier.

The Agricultural Revolution is therefore an example of human beings making their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. They were driven to the hard labour of cultivation and animal husbandry by necessity in an increasingly desiccated landscape depleted of natural food supplies. El-Beidha near Petra in modern Jordan, for example, was home to a community of Early Neolithic (New Stone Age) farmers in c. 6500 BC. They lived in communal ‘corridor’ houses made of stone, timber, and mud, ground grain to make flour on saddle querns (grinding stones in the shape of a horse’s saddle), and manufactured many and varied flint-flake tools, including arrowheads, knives, and scrapers.

Geography and climate interacted with human ingenuity to produce different economies in different places. Farming developed in Western and Central Asia partly because it was drier and the pressure on food resources greater, and partly because wild varieties of key species were available for domestication – barley and emmer wheat, and cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. But climate change was global and farming was invented independently at different times in widely separate places. In Highland Papua New Guinea, for instance, a Neolithic economy developed in c. 7000 BC based on sugar cane, bananas, nuts, taro, grasses, roots, and green vegetables. It remained essentially unchanged into the twentieth century.

The first European farmers were Asian pioneers who crossed the Aegean into eastern Greece in 7500–6500 BC. They brought the ‘Neolithic package’ with them – cultivated crops and domesticated animals; permanent settlements and square houses; spinning and weaving; hoes, sickles, and polished axes; pottery and quern-stones; and ceramic ‘Venus’ or ‘fat lady’ figurines representing fertility deities. It all appears suddenly in the archaeological record alongside the burials of people with a distinctive ‘Asian’ DNA.

The spread of farming took thousands of years, and even now is still not universal. Since c. 7500 BC, hunting-gathering, pastoralism, and cultivation have coexisted. Many Early Neolithic communities operated a mixed economy with elements of all three. Others resisted farming altogether. Not before c. 5500 BC did it spread from the Balkans, across the Hungarian Plain, to Northern and Western Europe. There it halted again. For a thousand years the Mesolithic hunters of the Baltic, the North Sea coasts, the Atlantic fringes, and the British Isles held out. Then, between 4300 and 3800 BC, they too went Neolithic. Others again, like the Australian Aborigines or the Kalahari Bushmen, retained a hunting-gathering economy into recent times.

Farming may always have been a reluctant choice, but once begun there was no going back. Because farming exploited the landscape more intensively, it could support much larger populations than hunting-gathering. This meant that if farmers were to abandon their work, their community would starve, for there were now too many people simply to live off the wilderness. Humanity was trapped in toil by its own success.

By c. 5000 BC Neolithic farmers (known to archaeologists as the Linear-bandkeramik culture) had settled across much of Europe. They lived in villages of two or three dozen timber longhouses, up to 30–40 m long and 5 m wide. Building them would have required collective effort. Each one would have accommodated an extended family group. Neither houses nor burials give any indication of social inequality; one assumes that everyone contributed and everyone consumed on an equal basis according to their ability. So Early Neolithic society had neither class divisions nor nuclear families. There is nothing ‘natural’ about either. Like hunter-gatherers, the first farmers were what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels called ‘primitive communists’.

But this was a communism of scarcity. Early agriculture was wasteful: land was cleared, cultivated, exhausted, and then abandoned. Fallowing and manuring to keep the land ‘in good heart’ were not yet common practice. And as the population expanded, so accessible and workable land began to run out. These contradictions of the Early Neolithic economy eventually exploded into warfare.

The Origins of War and Religion

The bodies of 34 people, half of them children, had been dumped in a 3 m-wide pit. Two of the adults had been shot in the head with arrows. Twenty others, including children, had been clubbed. The archaeologists were in no doubt that it was a massacre site. The Talheim death pit in south-west Germany revealed a gruesome truth about the Early Neolithic world of 5000 BC: humans had begun to engage in warfare.

In the beginning, there had been no war. For 2.5 million years, throughout the Old Stone Age, small bands of hominids had roamed the land in search of food by hunting, gathering, and scavenging. Meetings were few; clashes of any kind scarcer still. Only later, as the numbers of people increased, were there occasional conflicts over resources. Cave art shows hunters with bows shooting not only animals but sometimes each other. But this was not war as such. War is large-scale, sustained, organised violence between opposing groups. There is no evidence for this before the Agricultural Revolution which began around 7500 BC.

Farming was a much more efficient way of getting food than hunting, so the population increased enormously in the New Stone Age. Palaeolithic fossils number in the hundreds, Neolithic skeletons in the tens of thousands. But herein lay the problem. Technique was primitive, productivity low, surpluses small. People lived close to the edge, susceptible to natural disasters like crop blight, animal disease, and extreme weather. Early Neolithic farming communities were haunted by the spectres of famine, hunger, and death.

The problem was rooted in the very success of the Early Neolithic economy, for the population kept growing, but the land was finite. As the nutrients were taken from the soil and not replenished, new fields had to be hacked from the wilderness. As populations grew, existing villages could not feed everyone, and groups of pioneers headed off to found new settlements. As the last tracts of wilderness close to the earliest settlements were cleared, the wasteful Early Neolithic economy reached its limits. Land hunger and food hunger could then drive neighbouring groups into conflict.

Early farmers had communal property – fields, animals, store houses, permanent homes – to defend in hard times. This combination of poverty and property, scarcity and surplus, was the root cause of the first wars. The starving might eat by seizing the grain and sheep of their neighbours. The Talheim death pit seems to bear witness to just such a primeval struggle.

But if you want to wage war, you need warriors, allies, and defence works. Groups with more of these will defeat those with fewer. Groups that invest surplus in warfare will dominate those that do not. Archaeologists now see the decades around 3500 BC as the time of the first wars in Britain, for example, just a few centuries after the start of the Neolithic Revolution there. Great hilltop causewayed camps were built. Windmill Hill in Wiltshire, enclosed by three concentric rings of bank and ditch, is the size of 15 football pitches. It was probably used for political meetings, religious rituals, and defence. It symbolised a new order – one that united people from distant villages in a single tribal polity. At the same time, people were buried in communal tombs of monumental stone slabs and mounds of earth. West Kennet long barrow in Wiltshire is 100 m long and 20 m wide. Built to impress, it was an assertion of territorial control. That it was necessary shows that control was contested.

Causewayed camps like Windmill Hill were places of worship; long barrows like West Kennet were mausoleums. The larger polities of the Early Neolithic were being cemented together by collective belief and ritual. Magic and religion were taking on new functions, becoming mechanisms for creating stronger social groups, better able to compete with other groups for control of territory and scarce resources.

Magic (an attempt to get what you want by mimicry) and religion (an attempt to do so by supplicating higher powers) have long histories. Upper Palaeolithic hunters had painted game beasts on the walls in the dark depths of their caves. In the prehistoric mind, the symbol, the painted image, seems to have conjured the reality, the future kill. Not only in art, but through dance, music, and personal ornament, magic was performed. Choreographic movement, rhythmic noise, and costume embodied collective desires and hopes. Psychically charged by ritual, hunters then resumed the quest for food with renewed confidence.

The human group – its cohesion, fertility, and survival – was also a matter of cult. Totemism is a primeval amalgam of magic and religion: it equates the human group with an animal and then venerates that animal to secure the well-being of the group. Ancestor worship is equally ancient: it conceives dead kinsmen as benevolent spirits hovering protectively over living progeny. But full-fledged religion involves the worship of deities – the sun, the moon, the earth-mother. Alienation – lack of control over nature – then acquires its most elaborate expression. Humans seek to protect themselves from forces they cannot control through entreaties (prayers) and bribes (sacrifices and offerings) to those they imagine can.

Early forms of religion – totemism, ancestor worship, cults of the sun, the moon, and the earth – survive ‘fossilised’ in later cults. Much of what we know derives from this. Artemis, Greek goddess of wild nature, was worshipped in Ancient Athens by dancing girls dressed as she-bears. Lupercus, an Italian god of the countryside, was worshipped in Ancient Rome by young noblemen who feasted in a cave and then raced around the city wearing the skins of slaughtered goats.

Religion took on new significance as Early Neolithic villages were welded into tribal polities. Competition and war over territory forced small groups to seek security in larger units. Common worship of totems, ancestors, and deities created new social identities. Shared beliefs and rituals fostered solidarity. But the result could be murderous clashes between rival groups. The Early Neolithic causewayed camp at Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire was attacked and burned. Over 400 flint arrowheads were found around the perimeter. Many of the dead found in Early Neolithic long barrows were killed by arrowshot or by clubs, picks, axes, or stones.

A combination of radiocarbon determinations (based on the decay of carbon-14 in organic remains) and Bayesian statistics has produced new dates for these events. The construction of causewayed camps and long barrows and the advent of mass killing were broadly simultaneous. Between c. 3700 and 3400 BC, a new order, one based on territorial control, tribal groups, large-scale ritual, and warfare, was established in Britain. This order empowered a new social layer of war chiefs and high priests. From them, in the course of time, a ruling class would evolve.

The Rise of Specialists

The Early Neolithic economy, riddled with intractable contradictions, was doomed. Technique was primitive and wasteful. Society lacked reserves to see them through natural disasters and hard times. Virgin land ran out as old fields became exhausted and populations grew.

War was an expression of these contradictions. It offered some groups a way out of poverty by seizing the property of others. But it was not a solution, for it did nothing to increase productivity; it merely redistributed existing reserves of wealth in land, animals, and grain stores.

A defining characteristic of Homo sapiens is inventiveness. Modern humans respond to challenges by developing new tools and techniques. They are adapted to adapt. They flourish through cultural innovation. The economic impasse of the Early Neolithic was broken by revolutionary advances in agriculture, transport, and tool-making.

Plough-based ‘agriculture’ (the tillage of fields) replaced hoe-based ‘horticulture’ (the working of garden plots). An ox-drawn plough allows farmers to work large fields, to break up the soil, and to tap reserves of nutrients. Traction animals also produce manure to fertilise the soil.

Irrigation schemes brought water to arid land. When communities of farmers organised themselves to dig, maintain, and operate networks of dams, channels, and sluices, this compensated for the risk of irregular rainfall and brought fertile land into permanent cultivation. Drainage schemes, on the other hand, turned swamps into fields, bringing nutrient-rich land into cultivation where none previously had existed. Again, communal labour was necessary, both to dig the channels and to keep them clear.

Land transport was transformed by the invention of the wheel and the breeding and rearing of pack animals (oxen, asses, horses, and camels). Loads were no longer limited to what a human could carry or haul. Water transport was transformed by the sail. In this case, wind power was harnessed to replace (or supplement) the muscle power of the rower.

Tools made of stone, bone, and wood are limited. They can be fashioned only by hacking bits off. Once broken, they have to be discarded. Metals seemed magical by comparison. They could be melted, mixed, and moulded into countless different forms. On cooling, they became solid, hard, and durable. And there was no waste: scrap metal could be endlessly recycled.

Copper was the first metal to be worked. Later, it was mixed with others to make harder alloys. By 3000 BC it was being mixed with tin to make bronze. For the next two millennia, this was to be the preferred material for making weapons, ornaments, and prestige items.

Metalworking technology was altogether new. Ceramic technology was already established, but it now developed apace with the introduction of the potter’s wheel. A serviceable vessel – and, if desired, one of finer quality and decoration – could be formed on a wheel in a fraction of the time taken to mould one by hand from coils or slabs of clay.

In sum, between c. 4000 and 3000 BC, a series of innovations transformed the work of farmers in Western Asia. Land was reclaimed by irrigation and drainage, was more easily worked with the plough, and was improved by regular manuring. Metalworkers added to the range of artefacts, and potters used wheels to manufacture more and better containers. Pack animals, wheeled vehicles, and sailing vessels allowed heavy loads to be moved and goods to be traded.

Though many of the new ideas originated in Western Asia, some were imported from elsewhere. The steppe nomads of Central Asia may have been the first to domesticate the horse and construct carts. The metalworkers of Europe were in the forefront of their craft. Good ideas soon catch on. The improved farming methods of the Late Neolithic spread quickly from Western Asia to Europe. In more far-flung regions there was independent development at a later date. The Chinese, for example, invented the wheelbarrow, terraced hillsides, and pioneered the laborious cultivation and transplanting of rice seedlings.

The new techniques brought social change. The low-tech economy of the Early Neolithic did not require specialised labour: everyone participated. The high-tech world of the Late Neolithic, the Chalcolithic (Copper Age), and the Bronze Age depended on a range of specialists. Skilled carpenters were needed to make ploughs, carts, and boats. Potters mass-produced wheel-thrown vessels in exchange for a share of farm produce. Metalworkers served long apprenticeships to learn the mysteries of smelting and smithing.

Specialisation separated labour from the homestead. Traders travelled long distances with valuable loads of copper, obsidian, lava, ornamental shells, and semi-precious stones. Many prehistoric craft workers, like their historical descendants, were itinerants, selling their skills from village to village. As a result, ties of family, clan, and tribe weakened. In addition to social relationships based on kinship, there were now new relationships based on patronage and commerce.

Relations between the sexes also changed. If social groups were to survive and prosper, they required a steady supply of adolescents and young adults for economic labour. To provide this, and because of high mortality rates, young women had to spend much of their lives either pregnant or suckling. But whereas Palaeolithic gathering and Early Neolithic hoeing could be combined with child care, Late Neolithic ploughing could not.

In hunter-gatherer and early farming communities, women had performed different roles but had had equal status with men. There was a sexual division of labour, but no oppression of women. Men hunted, women gathered, and everyone discussed when to move camp. The nuclear family did not exist in its modern form. Early Neolithic long-houses accommodated extended families. Group marriage may have been common practice. Matrilocal residence (men living with their wives’ families) and matrilineal descent (tracing family membership through the female line) almost certainly were.

But the Late Neolithic was a man’s world. Herding, ploughing, long-distance trade, and itinerant craftsmanship could not be combined with carrying children. The plough, the ox-cart, and the forge created the social preconditions for male domination.

A second agricultural ‘revolution’ – more accurately, a slow accumulation of radical innovations – had transformed the Neolithic economy and subverted the Neolithic social order. The hoe and the temporary garden plot had been replaced by the plough and the irrigated and manured field. Because of this, matriarchal, family-based, and egalitarian communities were being transformed by new notions of authority and hierarchy.

2. The First Class Societies (3000—1000BC)

In certain parts of the world, from around 3000 BC, especially in the fertile river valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Pakistan, and China, the first fully formed class societies emerged. Priests, war leaders, and civil officials used their positions to monopolise control over surpluses, impose their authority on the rest of society, and begin to exploit the labour of others in their own interest.

In this period, known to archaeologists as the Bronze Age, metals were used to fashion weapons, ornaments, and trinkets, but the main tools of everyday labour continued to be made of stone, wood, and bone. Because of this, productivity remained low and surpluses small, the spread of civilisation was limited, and, while empires rose and fell, most of humanity continued to live beyond their reach.

Owing to the conservatism of the Bronze Age elites, technical innovation occurred on the periphery of the world system rather than at its core, and, by c. 1000 BC, one such innovation was helping to topple the old empires and start an economic revolution: ironworking.

The First Ruling Class

Prehistoric Sumer, a tract of land in the Tigris–Euphrates delta of southern Iraq, was made up of swamp and desert. But here, by c. 3000 BC, Neolithic pioneers had created a real-life version of the mythic Garden of Eden.

They drained the swamps and irrigated the sandbanks between them. In doing so, they created fields of exceptional fertility. By 2500 BC, the average yield on a field of barley was 86 times the sowing. We know this from written records inscribed on baked clay tablets. The Sumerians had invented writing because the complex, urban, class-based society they created required them to maintain detailed records – especially records of tax and other dues.

Ancient Sumer was roughly the size of modern Denmark. Once its rich soils were under cultivation, it could produce massive agricultural surpluses. These made possible a qualitative shift from living in villages to living in towns. Sumer accomplished what the great interwar archaeologist Gordon Childe called the ‘Urban Revolution’.

The main archaeological markers of this revolution are the ‘tells’ of Sumer (and other parts of the Middle East) – flat-topped artificial mounds formed by thousands of years of settlement. Layers of soil representing levelled, mud-brick buildings tell the story of successive generations of inhabitants. They show Copper Age villages expanding into Bronze Age cities between the fourth and third millennium BC.

Excavations have revealed cities dominated by large temples and artificial mounds known as ziggurats. At Erech, a ziggurat of Early Dynastic date (c. 2900-2300 BC) was 10 m high, built of sun-dried bricks, faced with thousands of pottery goblets, and topped by an asphalt platform. The city as a whole, with its residential and industrial districts, covered 5 square km.

The temples, and the estates in the surrounding countryside that supported them, belonged to the gods. The territory of Lagash was divided among some 20 deities. The goddess Baü owned 44 square km. Some of this was allocated to individual families, and some was worked as Baü’s personal estate by wage-labourers, tenant-farmers, or ‘clansmen’ doing customary labour-service.

In the absence of Baü herself, the property was managed on her behalf by temple priests. Many of Baü’s people held only 0.32–1 ha of land. But one high temple official is known to have held 14.4 ha. So the priests formed a social elite, with both private wealth from their own estates and collective control over the wealth of temple estates.

Wealth made them powerful, and their power was used to accumulate more wealth. A decree aimed to restore the old order of Lagash ‘as it had existed from the beginning’; it records that priests were stealing from the poor, practising various kinds of extortion, and treating temple land, cattle, equipment, and servants as their private property or slaves.

From the ranks of the priests came city governors (later styled kings). At Lagash, the city governor was both high priest of the chief god and commander-in-chief of the citizen army. He enjoyed the use of 246 ha of Baü’s estate. The city governor of Lagash was one of many rulers, for Sumer was divided into separate city-states. These were often at war. The Standard of Ur – a highly decorated box from a royal tomb dating to around 2600 BC – depicts four-wheeled chariots trampling enemies, spearmen wearing helmets and metal-studded cloaks, and naked prisoners in front of the king.

Each polity lived in fear of its neighbours. Each had land, flocks, granaries, treasure, and a workforce to protect. Military power was imperative for defence. But military power, once acquired, could be used proactively. Pre-emptive aggression might be the best guarantee of future security. Predatory aggression might enhance the wealth and power of a ruler.

Military power also had an internal function. The state – the ruler, the priests, a bureaucracy of officials and clerks, and the armed bodies of men they commanded – was a mechanism for maintaining the new social order of the city. Bureaucracy was itself an instrument of class power. The complexity of urban society demanded writing for record-keeping, standardised weights and measures for trade, and geometry and arithmetic for land measurement. In an increasingly complex and class-dominated society, who owed what to whom needed to be measured, written down, and enforced.

New sorts of specialists were trained in these arts. Their education was esoteric and exclusive. The state hierarchy imbued them with authority and status. Older categories of specialists – traders and artisans – were also embedded in the new class structure. There was no free market. The economy of the ancient city was embedded in the political order. Rulers controlled what was traded, where it was sold, and by whom. In particular, they maintained a monopoly of metals, especially bronze and gold.

Early Dynastic Sumer, in short, was the world’s first fully developed class society. At the bottom were slaves. Above them were commoners of subordinate status. Above these were free citizens. One baked-clay tablet refers to 205 slave girls and children, probably employed in a centralised weaving establishment. Another describes the occupational hierarchy at the temple of Baü in Lagash. At the top were clerks, officials, and priests. At the bottom were bakers, brewers, and textile workers, many of them women, many of them slaves.

The houses excavated at Eshnunna reveal clear class differences. The larger houses on the main roads occupied 200 m² or more. But smaller houses, often only 50 m² and lining narrow alleys, were far more numerous.

Class inequality was resented and resisted. Sumerian tablets allude to the tensions. It was not based on consensus. It had to be imposed and maintained by force.

How had a minority acquired the power to elevate itself above the majority? What enabled the few to accumulate wealth at the expense of the many?

Class is both a social relationship between rich and poor, and an economic process of exploitation and surplus accumulation. It has to be continually reproduced. And because it is contested, it involves class struggle. The rulers’ drive for wealth and power gained traction from the combination of poverty and property – a combination that holds all pre-industrial class societies in a vice-like grip.

Poverty is a general condition. Traditional agricultural economies do not produce enough to provide abundance for all. Sometimes they do not produce enough to provide even the necessities. Property is a privileged, a priori claim to scarce resources. It allocates wealth to certain individuals, families, landowners, temples, tribes, or city-states. Property can be private or collective, but is never universal.

This contradictory pairing – poverty and property – gave rise to class inequality, state power, and warfare. The religious and military specialists of prehistoric Sumer had been granted control over the surplus so that they could carry out their functions on behalf of society as a whole. At first, their position had depended on public sanction. But control over surplus made them powerful, and as they consolidated their authority, they found that they could use it to enrich themselves further and maintain their position without public sanction. In this way, the high priests, war chiefs, city governors, and petty kings of urban Sumer evolved into an exploitative ruling class accumulating and consuming surplus in its own interest: a power over society, no longer a power of society.

The Spread of Civilisation

Something similar occurred at around the same time or somewhat later in several other places. Civilisation did not spread outwards from a single centre: it arose independently where circumstances made it possible.

In Sumer, priests formed the core of the ruling class, temple estates provided their wealth, and temple ziggurats their most imposing monuments. City governors and war leaders were recruited from the theocracy. In Egypt, the reverse was true. Menes, chief of the Falcon clan and legendary first pharaoh, united the Nile Delta (Lower Egypt) and the Nile Valley (Upper Egypt) by military conquest. Having created a centralised state, he proclaimed himself a god-king (pharaoh). Priests, officials, merchants, artisans, and peasants were all subordinate to the pharaoh. The ruling class – priests and officials – owed their estates and position to royal patronage. The pyramids, iconic monuments of Old Kingdom Egypt (2705–2250 BC), were not temples, but royal tombs.

Like the Sumerian priests and city governors, the pharaohs fostered the cultural prerequisites of the Urban Revolution: irrigation works, long-distance trade (especially in metals, timber, and stone), literacy and record-keeping, numerical notation and geometry, standard weights and measures, the calendar and timekeeping, and the science of astronomy.

This urban package reflected the needs of the state and the elite. Control of the waters of the Nile ensured abundant harvests, large surpluses, and a healthy workforce. Official trade missions secured the raw materials needed for arms manufacture, monumental architecture, and luxury consumption. A literate and numerate bureaucracy managed the tribute and labour services on which state power depended.

Independent Urban Revolutions occurred in several other places. This shows that all humans are capable of the highest achievements. There are no ‘superior races’ or ‘nations’ that give the lead to the rest. It is culture and circumstance – not biology – that determine historical differences.

Around 2600 BC, urban civilisation emerged in the Indus Valley in modern Pakistan. The great monuments and residential suburbs of Mohenjo-daro cover 2.6 square km. The walled perimeter of Harappa is 4 km long. Inscribed seal stamps and standard weights and measures indicate complex administration.

Ancient Anyang in the Yellow River region of northern China was an unwalled complex measuring almost 10 km in length by 4 km in width. It was probably the capital of the Shang Dynasty in the thirteenth century BC. Excavations have revealed rich royal tombs, great caches of decorated bronzes, and tens of thousands of cracked and inscribed ‘oracle bones’.

If we glance forward in time, we see the same pattern elsewhere. Teotihuacan in Mexico, at its peak between AD 450 and 650, was a city of 20 square km and around 150,000 people. At its centre was a monumental complex dominated by giant pyramids. The Pyramid of the Sun is 210 square m at the base and 64 m high.

Great Zimbabwe (AD 1100–1500) in the heart of Africa was a city of 20,000 people. Its wealth was based on cattle, crop cultivation, and trade in gold, copper, ivory, and slaves. Its territory extended over 100,000 square km between the Rivers Zambezi and Limpopo.

It was once believed that civilisation was exported from a single centre. Scholars wrote of ‘light from the Ancient East’. This fitted with nineteenth-century notions of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ – the ‘civilising mission’ of European imperialists. Archaeology has demonstrated something different: civilisation developed independently at different places at different times. The message is that all people share a common humanity and similar creative potential.

But the major centres of civilisation did have an impact on surrounding societies. There was interaction between ‘core’ – more advanced metropolitan areas – and ‘periphery’ – less-developed areas economically dependent on them.

The Egyptian pharaoh obtained wood from Lebanon, copper from Cyprus, and gold from Sudan. Sometimes this was a matter of peaceful exchange. The city of Byblos in Lebanon grew rich on the timber trade. Local merchants employed clerks who could read Egyptian. There was cultural interaction. But it could also be a matter of conquest. Northern Sudan was annexed and forced to pay gold tribute. The interaction between core and periphery was therefore multifaceted – it had economic, political, military, and cultural dimensions.

The demands of trade encouraged merchants, sea captains, and shipbuilders. Longboats powered by rowers were used in the Aegean from c. 3000 BC onwards. The citadel of Troy in 2700 BC (known as Troy II) was built to guard a harbour at the entrance to the Dardanelles in north-western Turkey. The Thalassocracy (sea power) of Minos rose to dominance in c. 1950–1450 BC on the basis of Crete’s central location in the Eastern Mediterranean and the islanders’ revolutionary design of deep-hulled, high-capacity, sail-powered cargo ships. The rulers of Minoan Crete lived in sprawling stone palaces decorated with frescos, and had storerooms packed with giant ceramic containers.

The Greek poet Homer, describing Odysseus’ travel-worn appearance, says he was like ‘some captain of a merchant crew, who spends his life on a hulking tramp, worrying about his outward freight, or keeping a sharp eye on the cargo when he comes home with extortionate profits’. Seafarers and merchants were familiar figures in many Bronze Age societies.

Trade drove change on the periphery of the great empires. So, too, did the threat of war. Sargon of Akkad united the cities of Mesopotamia some time after 2330 BC, forging an empire that eventually extended from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. The Old Kingdom pharaohs conquered Sinai for its copper. Threatened by superpower militarism, the minor states and tribes of the periphery therefore organised for war. Warriors, weapons, and war fleets dominated the Bronze Age world. An arms race gathered pace through the centuries. Frescos depict merchant ships loaded with goods, but also warships filled with armed men.

Through trade and war, and by the movement of goods, people, and ideas, the societies of core and periphery influenced one another. The sharing and spreading of culture is what archaeologists call diffusion. It is one of the primary mechanisms by which knowledge and productivity advance. Progress is impeded by barriers and facilitated by bridges.

But a world of competing elites and rival armies also harboured the potential for waste and regression. As we shall see, the contradictions of Bronze Age civilisation repeatedly plunged humanity into crisis and barbarism.

Crisis in the Bronze Age

Bronze Age empires rose and fell. The 140-year Akkadian Empire, based in Iraq, collapsed suddenly around 2190 BC. Equally sudden had been the overthrow of the Old Kingdom pharaohs in Egypt a short time before, around 2250 BC.

Why did Early Bronze Age civilisation fail? Detail is lacking, but Egyptian sources record famine, a fragmentation of the state, and incursions by Libyan raiders from the west and Nubians from the south. What is not clear is why these events should have happened. Why was the once-strong centralised state of the pyramid builders no longer able to feed the people, enforce its authority, and defend its borders?

This pattern of rise and fall repeated itself. New empires emerged from the chaos of the Early Bronze Age crisis. Between 1600 and 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean was again divided among rival empires – New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittites of Anatolia (Turkey), the Mitanni of northern Mesopotamia (Iraq), and the Mycenaean Greeks. But this Late Bronze Age geopolitical system also collapsed amid storm and strife during the twelfth century BC. The embattled New Kingdom pharaohs record coordinated attacks by Libyans and ‘northerners coming from all lands’. The latter were the more dangerous. The multi-ethnic Sea Peoples amassed great pirate fleets. ‘All at once,’ declared Ramesses III, ‘these peoples were on the move ... No country could stand up to them.’

Pre-eminent as seafarers and warriors, Greeks were among these Sea Peoples. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are probably based on an oral record of real events that took place around 1190 BC. His epics have transformed them into tales of derring-do by legendary heroes. The kernel of truth about the Trojan War appears to be that it was a massive seaborne raid by Greek pirates out for plunder.

So the Late Bronze Age empires collapsed as the Early Bronze Age empires had done. And when we look beyond the Mediterranean, to places where civilisation developed at different times, we see the same pattern of rise and fall.

The Indus civilisation of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in Pakistan collapsed around 1900 BC. Excavators found numerous unburied remains of people suddenly and violently killed in the uppermost levels of the great city of Mohenjo-daro.

Chinese history, from the Shang of the second millennium BC to the Manchu of AD 1644–1911, records the rise and fall of a long succession of imperial dynasties, with occasional periods, sometimes lasting centuries, of division and civil war. Throughout this epoch, despite impressive technical achievements and huge increases in output and population, Chinese civilisation remained essentially conservative. The socio-economic order simply replicated itself, from generation to generation, from dynasty to dynasty. China provides an extreme example of the cyclical trajectory of ancient civilisation.

So we have two historical problems. Why did ancient empires rise and fall? And why did this contradictory social form replicate itself over such long periods of time?

The ancient world was characterised by stagnation of technique. On several occasions, humans had escaped the contradictions of an existing ‘mode of production’ (an economic and social system) by transforming it. Climate change had destroyed the habitats of the big game on which Upper Palaeolithic hunters depended. The response – the Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution – had achieved massive increases in productivity, output, and population through the adoption of crop cultivation and stock raising. Soil exhaustion and population pressure had later created a crisis for this Early Neolithic mode of production. In the Urban Revolution, the contradictions were resolved with a second leap forward, based on land reclamation, irrigation schemes, and ploughing. But the Urban Revolution also erected an impediment to further progress: the existence of a ruling class. We have charted its emergence. We have noted its roots in specialised religious, military, and political functions, and in the shortages and insecurities inherent in a primitive economic system: the first rulers were those whose social roles gave them control over scarce resources.

Why should the ruling class have been a barrier to new ideas? Surely it was in their interest to improve techniques in order to increase surplus? Yes and no: as with all things in social life, there were contradictory pressures.

The new ruling classes sat uneasily on their pedestals. They were divided among themselves, family against family, city against city, tribe against tribe, empire against empire. To overcome domestic rivals, top families had retinues of loyalists and bodyguards. Against foreign enemies, they needed armies and fortresses. The rulers were also divided from the mass of the people, who, because they were exploited, were potentially rebellious and had to be cowed by a judicious combination of force and fraud.

Force meant the threat posed by aristocratic retinues and state forces. Fraud meant the ideological claim that the rulers played an essential role and acted in the public interest. Both were embodied in the great monuments that dominate the archaeological record. Take the pyramids of Old Kingdom Egypt. They were the royal tombs of god-kings who were expected to live for eternity: monuments to a false ideology by which the ruler was elevated into a figure of awesome and intimidating power. The pyramids were designed to teach people their place. They were ideological weapons in a class war.

So the Bronze Age elites did not invest the surplus they controlled in improved technique and higher productivity. Instead they squandered resources on military competition, prestige monuments, and, of course, luxury lifestyles. Power, propaganda, and privilege – not productivity – consumed the surpluses created by the labour of Bronze Age peasants.

Innovation, indeed, was more likely to be perceived as a threat than an opportunity. The ruling class itself did not get its hands dirty; productive labour was performed by the common people. For this reason, new inventions, in so far as they appeared at all, were likely to come from below, empowering ordinary people, disrupting established economic arrangements, and perhaps destabilising the social order. They were therefore viewed with suspicion.

Bronze Age rulers were rarely interested in new technology unless it had military applications. Their focus was on accumulating power in a competitive geopolitical system. That is why the greed of the rich was never sated. The grandeur of past monuments set a standard to be surpassed by those who followed. Rulers competed in the luxury of their palaces, the splendour of their tombs, the art and architecture of their great cities. But above all, they competed militarily as rival polities expanded and clashed. A slow-motion arms race can be detected in the Late Bronze Age world. There seem to be more soldiers, better armed, defending stronger fortresses in 1200 BC than there had been in 1600 BC. The world was becoming ever more militarised.

Technique was stagnant, therefore, but surplus consumption was rising. War, monuments, and luxury meant higher levels of exploitation were necessary, and over-accumulation at the top was mirrored by the degradation of society’s agricultural base. The proud warrior-lords of the Late Bronze Age were a parasitic social elite whose economic cost was increasingly unsustainable. That is the fundamental reason for the implosion of their world in the twelfth century BC.

But this was a problem without an internal solution. Stagnant technique meant socio-economic conservatism. There were no new forces developing inside the old society. The choice, therefore, was between the barbarism of invading hordes and a reincarnation of the old (failed) imperial civilisation. Humanity was again at an impasse. Only this time, the existence of classes and states had raised formidable barriers to human creativity and progress.

How History Works

The Bronze Age impasse provides a useful occasion to pause and take stock. All the elements of a complex society are now in place, so it is convenient to ask: how does history work?

Three engines drive the historical process. First, there is the development of technique. Progress can be defined as the accumulation of knowledge that makes possible better control over nature, increases in labour productivity, and a bigger store of economic resources available for the satisfaction of human need.

Progress in this sense is not inevitable. Entire generations of peasants in, say, Shang China, Mycenaean Greece, or Norman England might live out their entire lives without experiencing a significant innovation in either agricultural or domestic equipment. Only in modern capitalist society is the development of technique inherent in the mode of production. In making this point, Marx explicitly states: ‘Conservation of old modes of production in unaltered form was ... the first condition of existence of all earlier industrial classes.’

Progress in pre-capitalist society was haphazard, not intrinsic to the dynamic of the socio-economic system. In pre-class society, for example, ecological crisis threatening the survival of human groups was probably of critical significance. The Neolithic Revolution seems to have been a response to climate change and a sharp decline in game. In early class society, on the other hand, the development of technique was subject to a wider variety of influences, some of them catalysts of innovation, others barriers to progress. To understand this, we need to review the other two engines of the historical process.

The second engine is competition among rulers for wealth and power. This takes the form of conflict within ruling classes – among rival aristocratic factions, for example – and conflict between ruling classes, as in wars between rival states and empires.

In modern capitalist society, such competition has both economic and politico-military dimensions. The two world wars were essentially wars between rival national-capitalist blocs.

In pre-capitalist class societies, by contrast, competition between rulers was essentially political and took the form of competitive military accumulation. The world was divided into rival factions and polities. Political insecurity was a permanent condition. The result was military competition – a relentless drive to amass soldiers, fortifications, and armaments faster than one’s rivals.

The third engine of the historical process is the struggle between classes. In the ancient world, competitive military accumulation required the ruling class to increase the rate of exploitation and extract more surplus from the peasantry. But there were two limits to this process. First, the peasantry and the economic system had to be able to reproduce themselves: over-taxation would – and sometimes did – destroy the material foundations of the social order. The second was the peasants’ resistance to exploitation.

We know very little about the class struggle in the Bronze Age. One exception is provided by documents of the second millennium BC from Thebes (modern Luxor) in Egypt. They concern a community of skilled quarrymen, stonemasons, and carpenters who made the temples and tombs of the elite. These documents record class tension. Though the craftsmen were relatively well paid and worked moderate hours, bullying managers sometimes tried to tighten the screws. On one occasion, those deemed ‘surplus’ to requirements were made to undertake forced labour. But the exploited sometimes fought back. One of the documents records that, in 1170 BC, backed by their wives, the craftsmen went on strike – the first recorded example in history – when their rations were delayed and their families faced hunger.

So we see three engines of history at work: the development of technique, competition among rival rulers, and a struggle between classes. Each engine is very different. Each operates in a different register, at varying speed, and with intermittent effect. Because of this, the historical process is immensely complex. Not only is each engine itself a nexus of contradictions, but all three engines operate simultaneously, pulling sometimes in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. For this reason, each historical situation is unique. Each one is a distinctive conjuncture of economic problems, social tensions, political antagonisms, cultural differences, and personal influences. The conjuncture provides the context in which historical action takes place. But the context does not determine the outcome. It is the clash of social forces – of organised human groups – that decides history’s future direction.

Let us return to the successive crises of Bronze Age civilisation. Waste expenditure drained resources from productive technique and effectively choked off experiment and innovation. More than that: the advance of knowledge was blocked by magic, religion, and other forms of mystification, and by the ruling class’s innate suspicion of things they did not understand and feared might prove subversive.

Progress is contingent on ‘true consciousness’ – knowledge of the world which, because it corresponds with external reality, is an effective guide to human action. ‘False consciousness’ – belief in god-kings, divine inspiration, or the efficacy of ritual, for example – has the opposite effect: it is a barrier to knowledge, to practical work, and therefore to social progress. Instead of theory and practice interacting in the real world to improve technique and productivity, the two – mind and matter, literacy and labour – became separated in the imperial civilisations. Egyptian priests studied the stars, not the soil, and wrote manuals on mummification, not of natural science. The wealth produced by Egyptian peasants was wasted on monuments to mysticism. The skills of Egyptian artisans were despised precisely for being manual.

So progress was blocked in the old civilisations. No new forces capable of breaking through the impasse were fostered. History’s energy was wasted turning the wheel of imperial rise and fall.

But if the core of the world system in c. 1200 BC can be seen as a froth of geopolitical turmoil above stagnant depths of socio-economic conservatism, the periphery was more dynamic. Here, relatively free of the control of kings, priests, and bureaucrats, the nomads, farmers, and artisans of the wider Bronze Age world were pushing at the limits of knowledge and skill.

Many were the innovations, but one was to be of supreme importance. Bronze was expensive, aristocratic, and too soft to make strong tools and weapons. A metal that was cheap, hard, and available to all would conquer the world.

Into the storm and strife of the Late Bronze Age crisis came new invaders from the North: men of iron.

Men of Iron

Many revolutions occur on the periphery rather than at the core of global systems. Life on the periphery is less secure, less entrenched, and therefore less conservative.

Manual labour was both exploited and despised in the old imperial civilisations of the Bronze Age. Vast surpluses were extorted and wasted on war, monuments, and luxury. There was little left for investment in new technology and little incentive to use it for that purpose. Innovation involved thought, questioning, imagining new possibilities. So human creativity was not only denied the material resources on which to work; it was also mesmerised by the spells and mysticism of priests.

The occasional spark of ingenuity stands out against a backcloth of stagnation. The Egyptians invented glass-working, the Babylonians accounting, the Phoenicians the alphabet. The exceptions to the rule are revealing: a luxury commodity, a way of measuring wealth, and a script for recording it. Such inventions are of little use to farmers or artisans. They concern the consumption and control of wealth, not its production. They reflect a society in which the world of learning was divorced from the world of labour.

Not so in the periphery. Here, around 1300 BC, an industrial revolution had begun that was to transform the world. Where exactly it took place we do not know; but it was for sure beyond the reach of over-mighty rulers.

The archaeological record is unequivocal: from this time onwards, the quantity, range, and sophistication of metal objects exploded. Mining technology advanced to provide an ever greater supply of copper, tin, and gold. Smelting technique improved. And metalsmiths began to use multiple moulds and the lost-wax technique to produce objects of unprecedented complexity.

There are bronze figurines of warriors from Sardinia, bronze trumpets from Danish bogs, bronze breastplates moulded to look like pectoral muscles, bronze shields, swords, scabbards, spearheads, axes, horse harnesses, knives, and much more. Sometimes it is found in massive hoards. Thousands of Late Bronze Age hoards are known to archaeologists. One at Isleham in Cambridgeshire contained 6,500 pieces of metal.

Soon something even more momentous occurred: metalworkers started experimenting with ways of extracting iron from its stubbornly intractable ores.

Iron was not new. For centuries, crude implements of wrought iron had occasionally been used. But no technique had been developed for the mass production of quality ironwork at an economical cost. This may have been the achievement of a barbarian tribe living in the Caucasus mountains in remote antiquity. The new technology seems to have spread from there to the Hittite Empire of Anatolia (Turkey). Its further spread was then delayed by the determination of the Hittite imperial ruling class to monopolise iron weaponry.

Iron artefacts did not become widespread until after 1200 BC, when ironworking took off amid the collapse of the Bronze Age empires. As it did so, the greatest advances in technique, productivity, and output were registered on the periphery of, and in the interstices between, the great powers.

Ironworking launched a chain of economic, social, and political changes. Bronze was expensive and relatively soft, which is why most Bronze Age farmers continued to work with tools of wood and stone. Iron is abundant, cheap, and hard, but the barrier to its use until then had been its high melting point.

Smelting required specialised bloomeries – furnaces in which bellows were used to force air through iron ore and charcoal to achieve very high temperatures. Once the technique had been invented, ordinary farmers could build their own bloomeries and equip themselves with metal tools.

Anyone who doubts the increase in productivity made possible by iron should try digging with a wooden spade or chopping wood with a stone axe. Three thousand years ago, iron revolutionised agriculture, industry, and war. Its impact was as transformative as that of steam power in the nineteenth century. It also threatened to turn the social world upside down. Bronze was the prerogative of the aristocracy. The Bronze Age world was dominated by chariot-mounted warlords equipped with expensive arms and armour. They were supported by peasant masses bound to ceaseless toil with primitive tools.

Iron was the supreme chopper and cutter. Men with iron axes could clear thick forests and jungles to create new farms. Then, with iron ploughs, they could till heavy clay soils. Iron technology unleashed a new wave of agricultural pioneers and free peasants.

Iron was also democratic. The bronzesmiths worked for the palaces, the blacksmiths for the villages. Iron gave the common man a spear, even a sword. If he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other men – if he formed a phalanx – he could stop a chariot charge. And if he could do that, he could kill the landlord. The ironworkers of 1000 BC, had they but known it, were smelting revolution.

Moving from settlement to settlement in zones ruled by petty chieftains, trading his wares and his skills, the metalsmith of the Early Iron Age was the unwitting agent of a new world order. Rival chieftains competed for his services, which raised his economic value, his social standing, and his own valuation of himself and his craft. This, in turn, gave him the rewards, independence, and self-confidence to be an innovator.

Homer captures something of this. The Iliad and the Odyssey span four centuries. They purport to describe events in the twelfth century BC, but, as they were orally transmitted, they achieved their final form only in the eighth. Sometimes Homer describes the Late Bronze Age, sometimes his own Archaic Age. When he says that ‘a soothsayer, a doctor, a singer, and a craftsman are sure of a welcome everywhere’, he tells us how things were in a post-imperial age, in the ‘Dark Age’ of the eighth century BC, in a world of petty chieftains and itinerant ironsmiths. The new class of free artisans that first emerged in the barbarian north had, by Homer’s time, been long established in the eastern Mediterranean.

In the twelfth century BC, the Late Bronze Age empires had collapsed, exhausted by military struggle against one another, and broken by resistance from within and attack from without. The geopolitical system that replaced them was a mosaic of smaller polities – shrunken imperial states like Egypt, mercantile city-states like Ugarit, and barbarian settlements like Palestine. Ironworking flourished in this new, more open, less top-down world. Cyprus, a centre of maritime commerce, pioneered the iron-based industrial revolution of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC in the eastern Mediterranean. The old cycle of rise and fall, the recurrent rhythm of Bronze Age civilisation, was broken. A new technology was creating a new economy, new social relationships, and new political forms. History was carving out fresh channels.

3. Ancient Empires (1000—30BC)

Iron was the basis of humanity’s third great technological leap. It made possible a steep increase in labour productivity comparable with those achieved by the transition from hunting-gathering to farming around 10,000 years earlier, and then that from shifting hoe-based cultivation to intensive plough-based agriculture around 6,000 years earlier. One consequence of each of these technological leaps was that the scale of human social organisation was transformed.

The Bronze Age empires had been small and discrete. They were based on the great alluvial floodplains of the Nile in Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, the Indus in Pakistan, and the Yellow in northern China. Vast tracts of desert, steppe land, and mountain had divided these early centres of civilisation. With tools made of wood and stone, productivity was low and surpluses small. Using Bronze Age technology, only the extraordinary fertility of the great river valleys had yielded sufficient wealth to build cities, sustain armies, and create empires.

This changed in the centuries after 1000 BC: the scale of civilisation and empire increased exponentially. Iron Age farmers hacked fields out of the wilderness and ploughed the heavy soils they exposed. Productivity and population soared, and the surpluses available to Iron Age empire-builders dwarfed those of their Bronze Age predecessors.

In this chapter, we analyse the great Iron Age civilisations and empires of the first millennium BC – Persian, Indian, Chinese, Greek, and Roman.

Persia: the Achaemenid Empire

In the mid to late sixth century BC, three great Persian conquerors, Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius (the Achaemenid dynasty), built an empire that extended from Bulgaria in the west to Pakistan in the east, and from the Caucasus Mountains in the north to the Nubian desert of Sudan in the south.

The Persians were settled farmers of the rugged mountain valleys in south-western Iran. The Medes were nomadic horsemen of the great steppes in north-eastern Iran. In 550 BC, Persia and Media were united by conquest. Within two generations, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan had been added to the empire. The Persian Empire of the sixth century BC therefore encompassed three of the four original centres of civilisation – the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Indus river valleys. These, and the territories between, were integrated into a single imperial polity and ruled as a patchwork of tribute-bearing provinces. There was no attempt to weld the provinces of the empire into a unified cultural whole. The Persian emperor was styled the ‘Great King’ and ruled over distinct subject peoples who retained their own ethnic and religious identities, their own economic and social organisation, their own political structures.

Stone relief-sculptures decorate the ceremonial stairway leading to the principal audience hall of the imperial palace at Persepolis. They depict delegations from 23 subject-peoples bringing gifts or tribute to the Great King, including clothing, metal vessels, gold, elephant tusks, horses and camels, and such exotic animals as antelope, lions, and okapi. Building inscriptions at Persepolis list the principal peoples of the empire, while thousands of inscribed clay tablets record disbursements of food or silver to royalty, officials, and workmen.

How was the collection of tribute from such a vast area enforced? The empire was divided into large provinces ruled by satraps (viceroys). A network of roads and an official postal system linked the satraps with the imperial capital. The Royal Road, for example, ran from the provincial capital at Sardis in western Turkey to the imperial administrative capital at Susa in western Iran. Satraps controlled large armies and fleets. But in the event of a major rebellion or foreign expedition, a grand army would be formed under the leadership of the Great King. Its composition would reflect the polyglot character of the empire: each separate ethnic component would fight in its own manner.

The wealth of the Great King is evident from the size of the royal palaces at Persepolis, Susa, Hamadan, Pasargadae, and Babylon. Persepolis was a vast complex of audience halls, reception rooms, royal residences, store-rooms for tribute, barracks for imperial guards, a walled hunting park, a huge ornamental lake, and a sprawling town of artisans, traders, and labourers. When Alexander the Great captured Persepolis in 331 BC, it contained treasure equal in value to the annual income of Athens, the richest of the Greek city-states, for 300 years.

Despite its wealth, the Persian Empire was relatively unstable and short-lived. Cyrus had created a powerful instrument of conquest when he united the Persians and the Medes. The Persians fought as infantry with spears and bows; the Medes were first-class light cavalry. This combination of mobility, firepower, and shock action produced a maelstrom of conquest. But military supremacy does not equate to political hegemony or social transformation. The Persians merely incorporated existing ruling classes and appropriated part of their surplus. Their empire lacked all cohesion save that imposed by force.

The sheer size and diversity of the empire weakened the centre. Native kings and provincial satraps wielded immense power. Rebellion was endemic, especially on the more remote frontiers. The Persian Empire was an attempt to cement together geopolitically separate and culturally alien entities – Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Because of this, its tendency was to disintegrate rather than cohere.

It was an external force, however, that shattered the fragile carapace. As it reached its fullest extent in the late sixth century BC, the Persian Empire collided with another civilisation on its furthest north-western fringes. This collision pitted the wealth of the greatest empire the world had ever seen against small communities of peasant-farmers. It tested to the limit two entirely different social and political orders. Both were products of the Iron Age. But while one was simply a replication of ancient imperialism on a global scale, the other was a new social order created in the storm and strife of revolution. It was in the tiny city-states of Ancient Greece that the Iron Age transformation achieved its most advanced social form. Before turning to it, however, we must chart the course of civilisation in India and China.

India: the Mauryan Empire

In the late fourth century BC, the Mauryan warlord Chandragupta founded the first Indian empire. Reaching its peak a century later, it eventually encompassed much of the Indus Valley, the whole of the Northern Plain, and also the Ganges Valley, Nepal, and a large part of the Deccan. This Iron Age empire of the late first millennium BC was about ten times the size of the Indian subcontinent’s Bronze Age civilisation of the late third millennium. Let us consider what had changed.

Farming began in India around 7000 BC in the Kacchi Plain west of the Indus Valley. Here, the wild progenitors of wheat, barley, cattle, sheep, and goats were available for domestication. These natural resources offered a way out of the ecological crisis represented by climate change and over-hunting.

The people of the Indus Valley, however, remained largely immune to the influence of the agriculturalists for three millennia. Until about 4000 BC, the continuing natural abundance of the alluvial floodplain made the toil of farming unnecessary. Thereafter, the spread of farming was rapid. During the fourth millennium BC, the Indus Valley filled with agricultural villages. In the middle of the third, the huge surpluses generated by river-valley cultivation sustained an Urban Revolution. The Indus became one of only four places where independent civilisations existed in the Early Bronze Age.

Around 1900 BC, after only half a millennium of existence, Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and the other Indus cities were abandoned. Early Bronze Age civilisation in the Indian subcontinent collapsed under its own weight. Over-accumulation of surpluses by urban-based elites probably crippled the reproductive capacity of an agricultural economy based on wooden spades and stone sickles.

To the north, a very different culture developed among the nomadic pastoralists of the Central Asian steppes. This vast territory comprised grassland hundreds of miles deep, extending from the Carpathians in the west to Manchuria in the east: ideal for stock-raising. A combination of low rainfall, bitterly cold winters, and scorching summers impeded the spread of cultivation in this region.

The steppe nomads domesticated the horse, invented the horse-drawn cart, developed the composite bow (made from horn, wood, and sinew laminated together), and produced stunning artefacts of copper, bronze, silver, and gold. Formidable natural warriors, they were the world’s finest horse-archers.

Life on the steppes was precarious. The numbers of people, the size of herds, and the adequacy of pasture were in fine balance. If a hot summer burnt out the grasslands, war, displacement, and mass migration might follow. Then, the steppe peoples might impact on the wider world with devastating force. Periodically – but unpredictably – they poured out of Central Asia, heading west, south, and east, from desiccated grasslands to abundant plough-lands, in search of food and fodder, plunder and riches, and new territory on which to settle. Such were the Mongols of the thirteenth century AD, the Huns of the fifth century AD, and the Xiongnu against whom the Chinese built the Great Wall in the third century BC.

Long before, in the years around 1500 BC, a people we know as the Aryans left the steppes, crossed the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush, and entered the Indus Valley of Pakistan. They came first as nomadic pastoralist invaders, relatively few in number, and their lifestyle and culture seem to have continued as before. Over the centuries, however, they spread across the Northern Plain into the Ganges Valley, and later again, southwards into the Deccan.

By then, they had iron, which reached India around 800 BC, enabling the Indo-Aryans (a thoroughly mixed population by now) to hack down forests and jungles and settle northern and central India with farms.

The Aryans introduced horses, chariots, and the warrior culture of conquerors. As they imposed themselves, they created the rudiments of both a new social structure – the caste system – and a new ideological framework – Hinduism. By defining themselves as warriors (kshatriyas), priests (brahmans), or landowners (vaishyas), they formalised the social exclusion and domination implicit in conquest. Mixed-race peasants formed a fourth group – the shudras – and others were integrated into the social order as members of a growing mass of sub-castes, or, in the case of those deemed wholly outside the Aryan tribal system, as ‘outcasts’.

The beliefs that eventually coalesced into Hinduism – a religion notable for its conservatism, elaborate ritual, and fearsome power-deities – legitimised the caste system. The social order was natural, divinely approved, and advancement was an individual matter. The virtuous were those who conformed; they would be reincarnated in a higher caste. Dissidents, on the other hand, could expect relegation in the next life.

Iron technology filled the Ganges Valley with productive farms, powerful monarchies, and large armies. For some three centuries, rival states battled for supremacy. By 321 BC, when Chandragupta Maurya usurped its throne, Magadha had emerged as the strongest of these states. One Greek writer estimated its army’s strength to be 200,000 infantry, 20,000 cavalry, 3,000 elephants, and 2,000 chariots; an exaggeration, no doubt, but an indication of how impressed he was. Between 321 and 303 BC, Chandragupta conquered the Ganges Valley, the Northern Plain, and the Indus Valley. His immediate successors waged further wars of conquest in southern India, and by 260 BC the Mauryan Empire encompassed almost the whole of what is today India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Mauryan conquest was violent. The Kalingans were the last to hold out, but the Mauryan emperor Ashoka crushed them totally: ‘150,000 people were deported, 100,000 were killed, and many times that number perished ...’ Exploitation of conquered territory was systematic. Slaves – usually war captives – were employed in mining, construction, industry, and household service. Peasants toiled on the land. The government maintained dams, reservoirs, and canals. Individual peasants paid rents on their plots and taxes on their produce. Merchants and artisans also paid taxes and tolls.

The Mauryan Empire was a military superstructure resting on a base of tribute-paying peasants and petty-traders. This is clear from the Arthashastra, a treatise on government and economics written in the reign of Chandragupta. All land was owned by the emperor and all peasants owed him tribute. The only intermediaries were state-appointed officials. The empire was divided into provinces. These in turn were subdivided into districts, these into groups of villages, and the smallest unit was the village. Each village had a headman. Each group of villages had an accountant and a tax-collector. And so on up the hierarchy, with subordinates accountable to those above them, not those below.

A network of informers reported dissidents to the authorities. Ashoka (269–232 BC), the emperor who completed the Mauryan conquest and then refined the imperial administration, attempted to achieve an overarching ideological hegemony by promoting the concept of Dhamma. A social ethic that stressed toleration and the suppression of differences in the interests of harmony, it was an attempt to fossilise the contradictions of Mauryan society.

It did not work. In the 50 years after his death, the Mauryan Empire disintegrated. There were tensions between Hindu and Buddhist sections of the ruling class, subjugated states rebelled, and external enemies seized fragments of territory.

The military superstructure had been huge: one Roman writer quotes figures of 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, and 9,000 elephants. But the Mauryan state remained a hastily assembled amalgam of smaller polities onto which an imperial apparatus had been imposed. The essential glue of a broad-based ruling class united by common culture, good communications, and effective mechanisms for social integration and political cohesion was lacking.

The Persian Empire was destroyed by foreign conquest. The Mauryan Empire imploded for lack of internal coherence. The Chinese Empire, by contrast, was destined to last for 2,000 years. It is to China that we now turn.

China: the Qin Empire

At the end of the third century BC, China was united by the Qin warlord Shi Huangdi. He ruled a territory five times larger than that of the Shang Dynasty of the Late Bronze Age. How had this been achieved?

China’s Agricultural Revolution had begun around 6000 BC. The first farming villages were in the Yellow River valley of northern China. Pigs were domesticated and millet (later wheat) was cultivated on irrigated hillside terraces. Farming spread southwards from here across the vast Central Plain over the succeeding millennia. Much later, starting around 2000 BC, China’s Urban Revolution produced a Bronze Age civilisation centred on ancient cities like Anyang. It culminated in the Shang Dynasty, which ruled north-eastern China for 400 years (1523–1027 BC).

Shang power rested on control of grain surpluses to pay for horses, chariots, and bronze. But it followed the trajectory of other Bronze Age civilisations: the dynamic of geopolitical competition caused Shang China to become over-militarised and overextended. Thus weakened, the Shang were overthrown by Zhou invaders from the west during the eleventh century BC.

Zhou China (1027–221 BC) was never effectively centralised; it remained divided into rival polities. In each state, the king appointed his own kinsmen, retainers, and officials to key territorial commands. These regional lords ruled from walled cities, extracting surplus from peasant cultivators in the surrounding countryside.

Civilisation advanced. Under the Zhou, rice was cultivated and buffalo herded in the Yangtze River Valley on the southern edge of the Central Plain. A network of canals was constructed for long-distance transport of surpluses and luxuries. The boundaries of agriculture extended into the mountains to the north, the west, and the south. But with only wooden and stone tools, surpluses were small. And with an infrastructure of walled cities and regional armies to support, the proportion creamed off by the Zhou elite was high. A peasant folk-song from Ancient China records the endless toil and political alienation of civilisation’s human ‘beasts of burden’:

Work, work from the rising sun,

till sunset comes and the day is done.

I plough the sod,and harrow the clod,

and meat and drink both come to me,

so what care I for the powers that be?

In the fourth and third centuries BC, regional violence reached a peak in ‘the Age of Warring States’. But as the Zhou states of the east fought one another, a new power was rising in the west.

From around 500 BC the Chinese began iron-casting on a large scale. Huge quantities of cast-iron tools – axes, ploughs, hoes, spades, sickles, chisels, and knives – appear in the archaeological record. Iron also facilitated a military revolution engendered by the intensification of warfare. By increasing productivity, iron tools guaranteed the surpluses needed to support armies; and iron weapons increased the killing power of those armies.

The chariot was the shock weapon of Ancient China. These could now be greatly increased in number. But the chariot was also the weapon of a narrow warrior elite. Iron, on the other hand, put powerful weapons in the hands of infantry. An iron-tipped bolt fired from a crossbow could pierce the armour of a great lord. The iron sword, with its hard, razor-sharp edges, could slice through harness and horses and send him crashing from his chariot.

As well as more chariots, and more and better armed infantry, there were also advances in fortification, war machines, and siege warfare. Finally, as important as any of these, there was the introduction of cavalry, making a Chinese army a truly combined-arms force.

For many centuries, along the northern frontier of Zhou China, the Xiongnu horse nomads of the steppes, ancestors of the Huns and the Mongols, had waged campaigns of raid and plunder. The Xiongnu taught the Chinese the value of light horse-archers, who represented an unprecedented combination of mobility and firepower. The lesson was learned best in the semi-barbarous north-western state of Qin. Other Chinese rulers regarded this mountainous frontier kingdom, ruled by warrior-kings, as beyond the pale of civilisation. Qin stood in the front-line against the Xiongnu. Military effectiveness was the sole priority. Tradition and conservatism could not be allowed to stand in the way. The Qin were innovators by necessity.

Local lordship was weak in the far north-west. Taxes, labour services, and military conscription were imposed directly on independent peasant-farmers. The tribute-levying parasitism of the walled cities was much less burdensome than elsewhere.

So it was in wild Qin, on the outermost fringe of Zhou China, that the Iron Age revolution in agriculture and war achieved critical mass. The architect of the new order was the King of Qin. In the bloody climax of the Warring States period, Qin chariots, crossbowmen, and horse-archers defeated their Zhou rivals one after another.

The cost in human life was colossal. After one victory, 100,000 prisoners were beheaded. And after the final victory, 120,000 of the ‘rich and powerful’ were deported. The King of Qin now adopted the title Shi Huangdi – Divine Emperor.

The victory created a centralised empire controlled by a military-bureaucratic elite. That it was five times larger than its Shang predecessor was due to the enlarged surpluses made possible by China’s new iron-based farming technology. The road system was longer than that of the Roman Empire. The canal system was unparalleled. Weights and measures, road and wagon gauges, even the forms of agricultural tools were standardised.

The Great Wall of China, the greatest construction project in human history, was built by the First Emperor as a barrier against the Xiongnu. Some 3,600 km long, the original wall was 7.3 m high and wide enough for eight men to march abreast along the rampart. Set at varying intervals along the length were around 25,000 projecting towers. The wall took just twelve years to build. Its construction required the conscription of hundreds of thousands of forced labourers and consumed the grain surpluses of millions of peasants.

Created by conquest and terror, the short-lived Qin Empire was characterised by extreme centralisation, military-style exploitation, and murderous repression. Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, has been portrayed as a warlord and tyrant of exceptional brutality, paranoia, and derangement. Perhaps he was; certainly his enemies considered him so. The regime attempted to destroy the intellectual underpinnings of dissent by ordering all books to be burnt. Scholars who had hidden books were either beheaded or worked to death on the Great Wall. Political insecurity was expressed in an attempt to erase all previous history and start again from a new ‘year zero’.

The First Emperor’s mausoleum, guarded by the now celebrated Terracotta Army, represents waste on a scale that dwarfs even the Great Pyramid and the Tomb of Tutankhamen. (The mausoleum itself is known from ancient descriptions; it has not yet been excavated.)

The Qin Dynasty collapsed after Shi Huangdi’s death in 210 BC. A power struggle within the palace coincided with a series of aristocratic and peasant revolts across China. The eventual victor was a peasant revolutionary, Liu Pang, who became the first emperor of the new Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220).

The Han succession represents the consolidation of the Qin revolution. The centralised imperial superstructure was retained, but its ruling class of bureaucrats, officers, and scholars was no longer threatened by the arbitrary murderousness of an unstable dictator, and the exploitation of the masses was reduced sufficiently to quell popular discontent. The question was whether this new imperial order, the culmination of China’s Iron Age transformation, would facilitate or hinder subsequent social development. Was the Chinese Empire a starting-gate or a barrier?

The Greek Democratic Revolution

Iron technology made possible huge increases in the productivity of human labour and the size of the surplus. Appropriation of the new wealth by centralised ruling classes allowed them to construct the Persian, Indian, and Chinese Empires. But iron technology also made possible an alternative. Because the raw material was abundant and the production process simple, iron tools and weapons were available to all. While bronze empowered only the aristocracy, iron had the potential to empower the masses.

Whether or not this happened depended on the outcome of the class struggle. In one small corner of the world, it was the masses who triumphed. The landed aristocracy was defeated by revolution from below, a radical experiment in participatory democracy was launched, and the conditions were created for one of the greatest explosions of cultural achievement in human history. The epicentre of the democratic revolution was the Greek city-state of Athens. Between 510 and 506 BC, revolutionary class struggles inside the city brought about a transition from dictatorship to democracy.

The movement passed through three distinct stages. First, a 30-year-old dictatorship was overthrown and replaced by an interim aristocratic government. Second, attempts by conservative aristocrats to block reform provoked a popular uprising and installed a government of democrats. Third, a Spartan military intervention in support of aristocratic counter-revolution was defeated by a second popular uprising.

The Athenian democracy was to last for almost two centuries. It was copied in other city-states across the Greek world, so that by the mid-fifth century BC virtually every city-state in the Aegean was a democracy.

Athenian democracy empowered the small farmers who made up the bulk of the citizen-body. During the sixth century BC, big landowners had attempted to expand their estates through debt-bondage. This mechanism was so central to the class struggle in the ancient world that it requires explanation.

Small farmers in a traditional society have no protection against hard times. Sometimes, in order to survive, they must borrow from the rich. Their only security for a loan is their land and their labour. The big landowners’ main incentive to lend is the prospect of acquiring more land. If debts can be repaid, so be it. If they cannot, so much the better. Small farms can then be taken over, and small farmers may become debt-bondsmen, forced to work for the big landowner as serfs. The Athenian masses broke this chain of debt and debt-bondage through struggle. They emerged at the end of the sixth century BC secure in possession of their property and their freedom. The basic building-blocks of Athenian society were not great estates but peasant oikoi (singular, oikos): patriarchal households based on ownership of a small farm or workshop.

The small citizen-farmers formed a city-state militia. The rich peasants, perhaps a third of the total, fought as heavy infantry (hoplites). The poorer peasants fought as light infantry or as rowers in warships (triremes: essentially rams powered by three banks of oarsmen).

War between the city-states was rife. Greece was divided into a thousand or more miniature polities, each competing for land, resources, and mercantile advantage. Democracy united citizens within each city, only to turn them into a military force against other cities. Democracy was the political expression of a specific citizen-body, not that of a universal social class. Athens, for example, the premier city-state democracy, was at war three years out of every four during the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

Success in land warfare depended on the size and resilience of the city’s hoplite phalanx (a tight formation of spearmen). Success at sea depended on the number, speed, and manoeuvrability of the trireme fleet. Landownership and militia service made the small citizen-farmers of Athens into a revolutionary force. The democratic revolution of 510–506 BC was, on the one hand, a revolution of farmers, artisans, and petty-traders, and on the other, a revolution of citizen-soldiers and citizen-rowers.

Ancient Athenian democracy was both more limited and more profound than our own. Women, foreigners, and slaves had no political rights; only adult male citizens could vote. But a majority of the latter were working people, and the power they wielded was very real. The ten leading city officials (strategoi) stood for election every year. The Council of Four Hundred (boule), the main deliberative body, was selected by lot. The Popular Assembly (ekklesia), a mass, open-air meeting of all citizens, was the sovereign decision-making body of the state. Justice was administered by jury courts of up to 2,500 ordinary citizens. Ostracism was an election in reverse: anyone who secured 6,000 negative votes was expelled from the city for ten years.

The democratic constitution meant that small property was secure – only the rich paid taxes, and any decision to go to war was made by those who would have to fight. Anyone who has any doubts about the reality of Ancient Greek democracy should read the vitriolic opinions of its aristocratic enemies. The Greek world was bitterly divided between oligarchs and democrats – those who favoured the rule of ‘the few’ (oligoi) as against those who favoured the rule of ‘the citizen-body’ (demos). Hatred of democracy inspired much of Greek philosophy, history, and the arts. The work of intellectuals like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle can be interpreted as in large part anti-democratic polemic.

In most ancient societies, education and culture were restricted to a tiny minority preoccupied with defending wealth and power. In Ancient Athens, 30,000 men shared political power. This created a huge mass base for education and culture. The result was an explosion of creativity. Much of the content of this was right-wing – a reaction against democracy more often than a celebration of it – but that does not alter the fact that it was democracy that made this possible and necessary. There were great architectural monuments like the Parthenon, and superb naturalistic representations of the human form in sculpture and painting. There was the history of Thucydides, the philosophy of Socrates, and the tragic drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Not least, there was a working-out in theory and practice of democratic politics. This is how Pericles, the greatest of Athens’ democratic leaders, described the government of the city:

Our constitution is called a democracy, because power is in the hands not of a minority, but of the whole people ... everyone is equal before the law ... what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses ... No one ... is kept in political obscurity because of poverty... We give our allegiance to those whom we put in positions of authority ...

Equally impressive were the democracy’s military achievements. Twice, the mighty Persian Empire attempted to subjugate Greece. Twice, the Athenians led the Greek resistance, first on land at Marathon in 490 BC, then at sea at Salamis in 480 BC. Though heavily outnumbered, though farmer-amateurs fighting military professionals, on each occasion the Athenians were victorious. In the Persian Wars, an army of free men, representing the most advanced political order the world had ever seen, triumphed over the crude militarism of a traditional empire. Yet, as we shall see, Greek democracy proved to be an historical cul-de-sac.

The Macedonian Empire

As well as being the foremost democracy in Greece, the city-state of Athens was also the richest. Its wealth came from silver mines in southern Attica, from maritime trade, and from its leadership of an anti-Persian alliance of Aegean city-states which gradually mutated into an empire.

The democratic form of Greek society contradicted the division of the Greek world into rival city-states. The former promoted the empowerment and cultural development of the working population. The latter meant military competition, war, and imperialism.

To the more conservative city-states of mainland Greece, Athens was a double threat. Athenian democracy made oligarchs elsewhere fearful of revolution from below; and the growing wealth of the Athenian Empire threatened the delicate balance of power between the rival city-states.

By the middle of the fifth century BC, democratic-imperialist Athens appeared poised to achieve hegemony over Greece. The Peloponnesian War of 431–404 BC pitted a conservative alliance led by Sparta against a democratic confederation led by Athens. When Athens was finally defeated, her empire was dissolved, and the democratic cause overshadowed by a new Spartan supremacy. The war was, in effect, the first phase of a protracted counter-revolution by which Greek aristocrats, Macedonian kings, and Roman viceroys destroyed the democratic experiment which had begun with the Athenian Revolution of 510–506 BC.

The second phase centred on the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, when the Macedonian army of King Philip II defeated the combined army of the Greek city-states. Thereafter, the Greek city-states came under foreign rule. Formal democracy continued in Athens and some other cities for a while, but real power henceforward lay elsewhere. When, in 336 BC, the city-state of Thebes defied Alexander the Great, it was attacked, captured, and razed to the ground.

The Kingdom of Macedonia was a hybrid state. The royal court was a centre of Hellenism (Greek culture), and Philip II (360–336 BC) had forged an army modelled in part on the heavy infantry phalanx of the Greek city-states. But Macedonia was also a confederation of feudal landowners and tribal chieftains loosely strapped together by a would-be autocratic monarch. This makeshift state was plagued by internal revolt. The central preoccupation of the Macedonian king was to keep his throne and prevent the state from falling apart.

Instability spawned imperialism. The king’s power rested on his ability to reward his barons for loyalty and service. The easiest way to fund royal patronage was through war and booty. Under Philip, the kingdom swelled into an empire in control of the whole of the southern Balkans. Conquest yielded booty and tribute, and these paid for soldiers. The Macedonian army expanded and became a fully professional force. Philip’s distinctive contribution was to mix three separate elements to create a combined-arms force.

The hill tribes on the frontiers of the kingdom supplied light infantry. The aristocratic retinues of Macedonian lords formed a feudal-type heavy cavalry. And the free peasantry provided a Greek-style phalanx. The royal state combined the traditional martial qualities of its human raw material with the methods and principles of Greek warfare. The result was a military machine of unprecedented power.

In 338 BC, the Macedonian army had destroyed the independence of the Greek city-states at the Battle of Chaeronea in central Greece. Seven years later, at the Battle of Gaugamela in northern Iraq, it destroyed the Persian Empire. The Athenians had defeated the Persians in 490 and again in 480 BC, and then liberated the Greek cities of western Turkey. But they later succumbed to the relatively backward Kingdom of Macedonia. And it was then the Macedonians, under Philip’s successor, Alexander the Great, not the Athenians, who conquered Western Asia. Why was this?

Only 15 per cent of Greece can be cultivated. The many, small, scattered agricultural plains are separated by mountain ranges. This was the basis for the independence of each city-state. In total, there were about a thousand city-states in the fifth century BC. Democracy was cocooned inside these tiny rival polities. Athens, the largest and richest, contained only about 30,000 adult male citizens. The total population – including women, children, foreigners, and slaves – was probably around 200,000. Greek democracy rested on a narrow and fragmented social base.

Geopolitical division meant endless local wars, and the struggle between the major states and their respective allies escalated into occasional full-scale wars. Greek society, always highly militarised, became more so as its surpluses increased and geopolitical rivalries intensified. The Peloponnesian War was the supreme expression of this tendency.

No state was ever strong enough to establish a lasting hegemony. Athens was defeated by Sparta in 404 BC. Sparta was in turn defeated by Thebes in 371 BC. The Greek city-states remained divided among themselves while Philip II, ‘the Lion of the North’, built the empire that would eventually subjugate them all.

At the same time, city-state democracy was eroded at home by growing militarisation. Long, distant, hard-fought campaigns saw the emergence of professional commanders, mercenary bands, and military specialists. Power in Greece was projected by hoplite spears. When these were wielded by citizen-farmers, democracy was strong. When wielded by professional mercenaries, it was undermined.

Ancient Greek civilisation was of unprecedented sophistication and dynamism, but it existed in sharp contradiction to the geopolitical and sociological framework within which it was set. Democracy was generalised neither within the city-state nor across city-states. The division of the Greek world into rival polities meant that, in the long run, military professionals gained ground at the expense of democratic assemblies. Macedonia, on the other hand, appropriated the advances of Greek civilisation and used them to create a military system capable of transforming a medium-sized royal state into a Balkan empire. Technique mattered, but so did size: only the King of Macedon controlled the territory and surpluses necessary to wage major wars of conquest and then to unite the Greek world.

Because Greece was united by force from above rather than by revolution from below, democracy was doomed. Greece became the logistical base for the conquest of Western Asia. Later, after the disintegration of Alexander’s empire, it became a mere province within a wider Macedonian ‘successor’ state. The appropriation of the territory and surpluses of the Persian Empire – representing wealth hundreds of times greater than that of Greece – enabled the transformation of Greek civilisation from a network of city-state democracies into a global imperial system.

Meanwhile, further west, a yet more dynamic form of military imperialism was rising. The ancient city-state of Rome was also being transformed into a global empire. In time, it would bring down even the mighty Macedonian kingdoms of the new world order in the East.

Roman Military Imperialism

Rome was a fusion of Greek-style citizenship with Macedonian-style militarism. The result was the most dynamic imperialist state in the ancient world.

Rome evolved from an Iron Age village in the ninth century BC into a Latin chieftain’s hill-fort during the eighth century BC. It was then re-founded as a small town by Etruscan invaders in the mid to late seventh century BC, and thereafter ruled by a dynasty of Etruscan kings until about 510 BC. The last of these kings was overthrown in an aristocratic revolution, and the next two centuries were characterised by both internal class struggle and external imperial expansion. These two processes were closely linked.

The internal struggle – ‘the Struggle of the Orders’ – pitted patricians against plebeians. The former constituted a hereditary landowning aristocracy who enjoyed exclusive control over the state apparatus. Only patricians were admitted to the Senate, the ruling aristocratic assembly, and only patricians could hold senior magistracies, the top government posts.

Most plebeians were ordinary citizen-farmers. As in the Greek city-states, small farmers, with no margin against hard times, frequently got into debt. The rights of creditors were protected by laws enacted by patrician senators and enforced by patrician magistrates. Debt was the primary mechanism by which big estates were enlarged at the expense of small farms.

A minority of plebeians were better-off. Some were even very wealthy. But they were still excluded from political power. The plebeian movement was therefore a class alliance between plebeian nobles and plebeian masses. Its principal weapon was secession – a military mass strike. Like the citizen-farmers of Greek city-states, the Roman plebs formed the city militia – the legio (‘levy’) – and their periodic refusals to fight were used to press social and political demands.

The Greek masses had taken revolutionary action and won full-blooded democracy. The Roman masses never succeeded in overthrowing the Senate. But they did make huge gains, the cumulative effect of which was a radical redistribution of power within Roman society. Rich plebeians were admitted to the Senate and senior magistracies. The mass of plebeians won effective veto powers. New laws had to be approved by the Assembly of the Plebs (a civic body), and any decision to go to war by the Assembly of the Centuries (a military body). Unpopular proposals could be blocked by new magistrates, the Tribunes of the Plebs.

The Struggle of the Orders ended with a class compromise and a mixed constitution. The ruling class was not overthrown, but its ranks were opened to newcomers, its political power was constrained, and its decisions became contingent on popular consent. This meant that the property of small farmers was protected against tax and debt. The ability of big landowners to enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens was reined in. Instead, Roman aristocrats’ ambition was redirected against foreign enemies.

The Roman aristocracy was highly competitive. Top families competed for senior state posts, and the rewards were power, prestige, and rich pickings. Wealth was the means rather than the end: aristocrats required wealth in order to accumulate political power. Rival factions built up retinues of dependants and clients through patronage. They amassed supporters and consolidated voting blocs through bribery. Families that failed to accumulate power declined. Membership of the aristocratic classes – senators and equestrians – depended increasingly on wealth. Patronage, public office, and the political power struggle were essential to maintaining class status.

Plebeian resistance to exploitation determined the form of intra-aristocratic competition. On the one hand, plebeian support became essential to factional power. On the other, plebeian landownership limited opportunities to amass wealth by enlarging existing estates.

War and conquest offered an alternative. Victory over foreign enemies meant booty (especially bullion), captives (who became slaves), and land (to create new farms and estates). Some was shared with ordinary citizen-legionaries, who thus acquired an interest in voting for war and fighting effectively. But the lion’s share went to the state and its senator-generals.

Thus Rome became a predatory imperial system of robbery with violence. Instead of accumulating surplus by raising the rate of exploitation at home, the Roman ruling class seized by force the surplus, labour, and means of production controlled by foreign ruling classes.

During the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the Romans conquered peninsular Italy. During the third, they fought two major wars against the Carthaginian Empire for control of the Western Mediterranean. During the second, they fought two major wars against the Kingdom of Macedonia for control of Greece. The process of military accumulation was self-feeding. The surpluses seized in one war provided the resources to launch the next. Defeated ruling classes were ‘Romanised’: granted Roman citizenship, they were encouraged to adopt Roman elite culture and offered a share in future Roman conquests. This ensured a steady supply of new recruits for the expanding legions.

With the Struggle of the Orders resolved, Rome was stable at home but relentlessly aggressive abroad throughout the third and second centuries BC. The one depended on the other: social peace was funded by imperial surpluses. Thus Rome grew from a small Latin city-state in the late seventh century BC into the most powerful empire of antiquity by the late second century.

Iron Age technology had generated the massive surpluses necessary to construct the imperial polities of the first millennium BC – Achaemenid Persia, Mauryan India, Qin China, the Macedonian successor kingdoms, and the Roman Empire. But Roman imperialism had an exceptional dynamism and durability. At the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, the culmination of a four-year lightning campaign, Alexander the Great destroyed the Persian Empire. At the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC, Hannibal of Carthage inflicted an equally shattering defeat on the Roman Republic. But Rome refused to surrender and eventually triumphed. The critical difference was the social base of Roman imperialism. Achaemenid Persia levied tribute on subject peasants to pay professional soldiers. The army of the Roman Republic was a militia of free citizens. The Roman peasantry was not only numerous, but, unlike the Persian peasantry, it had a stake in the system. The Romans lost 80,000 men at Cannae. But their reserves are estimated to have been 700,000 infantry and 70,000 cavalry; and both aristocracy and peasantry had an interest in continuing the struggle.

The superiority of the Roman imperial polity was to be tested again in the great crisis of the Late Republic (133–30 BC).

The Roman Revolution

In 133 BC, Tiberius Gracchus was elected Tribune of the Plebs on a radical platform of land reform. Because of aristocratic opposition, he bypassed the Senate and passed his land bill into law by taking it direct to the Assembly of the Plebs. The following year, he was assassinated by a right-wing mob. A new period of crisis had opened in Roman politics. It would last a century, passing through several phases of civil war, and at times threatening the survival of the empire. It eventually brought about a radical restructuring of the ruling class, a bureaucratic recasting of the state, and the military dictatorship of the emperors.

The crisis arose from the inability of the city-state form inherited from the past to accommodate the new social forces created by world empire. The patrician–plebeian nobility that controlled the Senate had ossified into an exclusive aristocratic caste hostile to ‘new men’. The senatorial elite’s monopoly of high office was resented by other sections of the aristocracy – minor senatorial families, second division ‘equestrian’ families, and many Italian provincial families now involved in the government and commerce of empire.

Inherited privilege was in contradiction with new social realities. After the mid-second century BC, the ruling class could not continue to rule in the old way. A minority favoured reform. Another minority were diehard reactionaries. The majority vacillated, but, preoccupied with the defence of property and privilege, usually favoured the reactionaries in a crisis. Because of this, the reformers looked to wider forces to defeat senatorial opposition.

Fighting wars of conquest on distant frontiers was ruinous for small farmers in Italy. The Third Spanish War (154–133 BC) required tens of thousands of soldiers. In a typical year, more than one in eight Roman citizens would be serving in the army. Many of those shipped to Spain remained there for years.

Farms were left uncultivated. Often they were bought up by big landowners. Roman citizens were then replaced by foreign slaves. The rich, explained one contemporary historian, ‘used persuasion or force to buy or seize property that adjoined their own, or any other smallholdings belonging to poor men, and came to operate great ranches instead of single farms. They employed slave-hands and shepherds on these estates to avoid having free men dragged off the land to serve in the army.’ The result was a double-edged social crisis. The decline of the Italian peasantry was draining the manpower pool on which the military vitality of the Republic depended. And a countryside populated with slaves posed a major security problem.

The new slave economy was centred in Sicily and southern Italy. Hundreds of thousands of captives were sold as slaves and sent to work on aristocratic estates. On three occasions slave revolts exploded across the region – in Sicily in 136–134 BC and again in 103–101 BC, and finally in mainland Italy in 73–71 BC. It is no accident that the crisis of the Late Republic began during the First Sicilian Slave War. The immediate concerns of Tiberius Gracchus and the reformist wing of the ruling class were army recruitment and internal security. The debates took place against a backdrop of burning Sicilian villas.

Many demobilised soldiers and ruined small farmers ended up in Rome. The fast-growing imperial city – fuelled by war booty, public works projects, and aristocratic patronage and consumption – sucked in impoverished ‘surplus’ citizens. The Roman mob became a factor in politics.

The growth of empire had also changed the relationship between Romans and non-Romans in Italy. At least half the legionaries were not Roman citizens, but ‘Latin’ or ‘Allied’ citizens. Increasingly, those who did an equal share of the fighting demanded an equal share in the spoils. The franchise became an explosive issue. The Social War of 91–88 BC was a full-scale civil war between Romans and Italians fought on the issue of equal political rights.

Italy was filled with combustible material: decayed senators, equestrian officials, and provincial gentry; small farmers ruined by debt; demobilised conscripts living in poverty after years fighting at the front; the swelling mass of the urban poor; and the many non-Romans who served the state but were excluded from its politics. But the Roman Revolution – for revolution it became – had this peculiarity. No single class among the discontented was able to dominate the movement. None was able to establish leadership over the others by offering a coherent vision of a world transformed and a strategy for achieving it. None was able to provide a revolutionary alternative. The aristocratic opposition feared the popular masses and threats to their property. Small farmers feared the landless poor. Free citizens feared the competition of slaves. Romans feared the dilution of citizen privileges with the mass enfranchisement of Italians.

The popular movement, therefore, was a multi-class alliance riddled with contradictions. It was this that made the Roman Revolution a complex, distorted, century-long process.

Reform through the Senate was blocked. The Populists (populares: those who favoured the rule of ‘the People’) remained a minority of the ruling class, unable to bring about a revolution from above against the entrenched opposition of the Optimates (optimates or ‘best men’: those who favoured the rule of the Senate). But without a revolutionary class able to break the impasse, only military force could decide the matter. The Roman Revolution became, therefore, a struggle of warlords.

Ambitious politicians sought prestigious and lucrative military commands. Booty and veterans became high-value counters in the game of Roman politics. The revolution was transformed into civil war between Populist and Optimate generals, Marius against Sulla, then Caesar against Pompey.

The decisive figure was Julius Caesar. A top-ranking aristocrat, single-minded careerist, and murderous imperialist, he was also a brilliant commander, politician, and reformer. Caesar embodied the contradictions of the Roman Revolution whose principal protagonist he was.

Caesar was victorious in the Civil War of 49–45 BC, but, being the leader of a popular movement rather than a revolutionary class, he was forced to seek an accommodation with the old order. In the short run, this proved impossible. The ruling class was too divided and embittered. Caesar attempted to straddle the contradictions through personal dictatorship – something that culminated in his assassination and a renewal of civil war.

The senatorial opposition led by Brutus and Cassius was quickly defeated by the leaders of Caesar’s faction, Antony and Octavian. But these two then divided the empire between them and set about building rival power-bases. The final struggle of the Roman Revolution was therefore a factional civil war between Antony and Octavian.

Octavian became Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor. He founded a military dictatorship based on ‘new men’, moderate reform, and imperialist war. His regime represented the final transformation of an Italian city-state into a bureaucratically administered global empire. But even this, the most successful of the ancient empires, contained the seeds of its own decay and eventual disintegration.

4. The End of Antiquity (30BC—650AD)

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which had embodied the greatest achievements of the Iron Age civilisations of the first millennium BC, was of global significance. From the disintegration of the imperial superpower emerged the new social forces and geopolitical order that would form the basis of medieval Europe.

The Iron Age empires, though writ large across the map, shared many of the weaknesses of their Bronze Age predecessors. Political unity was a function of military power, not of economic, social, or cultural homogeneity. Imperial rulers ratcheted up exploitation to accumulate surplus and waste it on war. Society was organised in rigid, top-down rankings of status groups. Creativity and innovation were suppressed, and the common people became mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. Technology stagnated, poverty festered, and alienation spread. The Iron Age empires eventually proved as conservative as the Bronze Age empires had been.

Because of this, though the collapse of the Roman Empire represented the passing of an entire social order, this process did not give rise to new forces capable of raising humanity to a higher cultural level. It merely resulted in what Marx called ‘the common ruin of the contending classes’.

In this chapter, we analyse the internal contradictions which doomed the Roman Empire, the character of the ruling classes (mainly Germanic, Gothic, and Arab) which displaced it, and the creation, in the context of Rome’s crisis, of the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The Crisis of Late Antiquity

The Roman Empire represented a powerful fusion of citizenship and imperialism. Citizenship provided an expanding social base of stakeholders and soldiers. Conquered elites were slowly assimilated and acculturated: they were allowed to become ‘Roman’ and share the benefits of imperial rule. Imperialism, at the same time, provided a continual flow of booty, slaves, and land. This strengthened the state, enriched the ruling class, secured the allegiance of subject elites, and funded the patronage which bound client groups to the system.

But it came at a heavy price. Empire and civilisation are expensive. While some benefit, others lose. Roman rule safeguarded property and power. But the wealth of the army, the towns, and the villa-owners depended on a system of exploitation in which taxes, rents, interest payments, and labour services were extracted from the rural population.

The majority of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire worked on the land as peasants, labourers, serfs, or slaves. They were the beasts of burden on whose backs empire and civilisation were built. At first, the burden – the rate of exploitation – was relatively moderate and sustainable. Much was taken, but enough was left to enable peasant families to feed themselves, sow their fields, restock their pastures, and obtain the essentials of Iron Age rural life in local markets. This was possible because others paid a much heavier price. The empire was subsidised by wars of conquest. The defeated were robbed to enrich the victors. The victims paid the bulk of the cost of supporting the state, the army, and the rich. As long as the empire continued to expand, robbery at home was moderated by robbery abroad.

The system was inherently expansionist. It was fed by the military appropriation of foreign surpluses. Its vitality therefore depended on the continuing availability of such surpluses. After each imperial leap, another became necessary if the system was not to face stagnation and crisis. But foreign surpluses were a finite resource. By the first century AD, Roman military imperialism was running up against barriers to further expansion.

The limits of Graeco-Roman imperial civilisation corresponded with the limits of Iron Age agriculture. Iron Age technology had created an extensive plough-based agriculture stretching from southern Britain to Syria, from the Rhine and the Danube in Europe to the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. This was an opulent land, full of cultivated fields, villages, and hard-working peasants. Surpluses were large. Those who organised themselves to seize these surpluses could build armies and cities. But beyond the plough-lands lay wilderness: the hills of northern Britain, the forests of Germany, the deserts of Arabia and North Africa. And when imperial armies marched into the wilderness, they became mired in unwinnable guerrilla wars against scattered and elusive opponents who were too impoverished to yield a profit even if they could be subjugated.

In 53 BC, a Roman army of 30,000 had been destroyed by Parthian horse-archers at the Battle of Carrhae in Syria. In AD 9, another Roman army of 30,000 was annihilated by German tribesmen at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. In AD 208–11, the final Roman attempt to conquer northern Britain was defeated by guerrilla resistance. ‘Let no one escape utter destruction at our hands,’ was the chilling injunction of the Roman emperor Septimus Severus to his men. ‘Let not the infant still carried in its mother’s womb, if it be male, escape its fate.’ But they did escape. Severus died at York, and Scotland was never conquered. In the bogs and glens of the British North, the imperial leviathan, lashing out in the mist and drizzle, was reduced to despair by bands of blue-painted skirmishers.

The Roman Empire, then, had limits. Its foundation stone was Iron Age agriculture. It depended on cultivated land and abundant labour to yield the large surpluses necessary to support the army, the ruling class, and the essential infrastructure of roads, forts, and towns. War was profitable where the plough ran. But it was waste where it did not, and the empire became overextended when armies entered the wilderness.

Expansion peaked in the second and first centuries BC, slowed sharply after the early first century AD, and then ceased almost entirely after the early second century AD. The flow of war booty was cut off. External subsidy ceased. The Roman Empire became entirely dependent on internally generated resources.

Yet the cost of empire and civilisation did not diminish. A strong army and extensive fortifications were required to defend thousands of miles of open frontier. The cohesion of the imperial elite and the loyalty of its client groups, above all of the army’s rank and file, depended on luxury consumption and state largesse.

From the first century AD onwards, and with increasing intensity, especially from the late second century, the imperial state faced chronic financial crises. Its response – increased agrarian surplus extraction to maintain its politico-military infrastructure – led inexorably to a slow spiral of economic decline. Increases in taxation, forced labour, and military requisitioning ruined the marginal peasant farmers. This shrank the tax base – such that in the next round taxes had to be raised even further, pushing another tranche of farms over the edge. And so it went on. The Late Roman imperial state, increasingly militarised and totalitarian, ended up consuming its own socio-economic capital in its effort to maintain essential expenditure. The military predator had turned cannibal.

These pressures had three main political effects. First, the ruling class repeatedly fragmented along regional lines, each group attempting to retain control of its own surpluses and soldiers. Civil wars, usually between army factions led by rival emperors in different parts of the empire, became endemic.

Second, foreign invasions became more frequent and increasingly menacing. On the European frontiers they involved large barbarian tribal confederations, and in the East the dynamic Sassanian Empire, based in Iran and Iraq. Rome’s military decline is symbolised by two battles. At Adrianople in Thrace (Bulgaria) in AD 378, the entire field army of the Eastern Roman Empire was destroyed by the Goths. Sixteen years later, at the River Frigidus in the Julian Alps on Italy’s north-east frontier, the bulk of the reconstituted army of the Eastern Roman Empire was formed of Gothic mercenaries. Such was the internal crisis of finance and manpower that the Roman Empire had become dependent on ‘barbarian’ soldiers.

The third consequence of the empire’s financial crisis was a resurgence of class struggle. The local peasantry, squeezed by the demands of the military-bureaucratic state, reduced to serf status and subject to ever-harsher exploitation, found ways to fight back. Many farms were abandoned. Social bandits stalked much of the countryside. Resistance to tax-collectors, press-gangs, and bailiffs was widespread. And sometimes, discontent spilled over into peasant insurrection and the creation of rural communes.

Ancient aristocratic writers tell of mysterious rural rebels called bagaudae, under whose rule people lived by popular laws, peasants made speeches, death sentences were pronounced under an oak tree and recorded on pieces of bone, and ‘anything goes’. Apparently, under the bagaudae, ‘the Bretons were slaves of their own domestics’. Here, it seems, dimly understood and darkly described, we have a world turned upside down, a world without landlords and tax-collectors.

Fragmentation, invasion, and internal revolt: these symptoms of imperial decline reflected the rottenness of the system. Consequently, between AD 410 and 476 the Western Roman Empire disintegrated, with successive chunks of territory taken over by barbarian war-bands until eventually nothing was left.

By the end of the fifth century, Europe had been divided into a patchwork of independent proto-states. A new world order had been forged in the firestorms of Late Antiquity. The primary agents of this transformation were tribal confederations from Central and Eastern Europe and from Central Asia.

Huns, Goths, Germans, and Romans

The Eurasian steppe is a belt of land several hundred miles wide which extends from the Hungarian Plain to the Pacific Ocean. A grassland of climatic extremes, devoid of trees, it was, from earliest prehistory until medieval times, populated mainly by nomadic pastoralists.

The history of Europe, Turkey, Persia, India, and China is punctuated by military crises brought on by incursions of steppe nomads from their homeland. But it was the Huns who, between the 370s and 450s AD, precipitated the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

The Huns combined hunting and gathering with the herding of horses, cattle, sheep, and goats. The barrenness of the steppe and the primitiveness of their way of life meant that numbers were few and scattered, social organisation loose and non-hierarchical. Specialisation was extreme. The Huns were first-class horsemen. They fought tribal wars as light cavalry armed with composite bow, lasso, and sword. The bow and the lasso were the equipment of the steppe; the sword was a prized trade good.

It is impossible to be sure why the Huns began to move west in the mid-fourth century AD. But their poverty meant that they had no margin of safety: drought meant death on the steppe. So probably they were set in motion by an ecological crisis. Violence, subjugation, and westward expansion were an escape route from an exhausted, overpopulated homeland.

When they reached the Ukraine, they overran the Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths). As they pressed further west, they drove the Visigoths (Western Goths) to seek refuge inside the Eastern Roman Empire. The tensions between Goths and Romans then exploded into war, and the army of the Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople, was annihilated at the Battle of Adrianople in AD 378. The steppe nomads, indirectly, were beginning to remake the old world.

As they did so, they were themselves transformed. The Goths, like the German tribes further west on the Roman Empire’s Rhine and Upper Danube frontiers, were prosperous peasant-farmers. When conquered by the Huns, they were forced to pay tribute to their new masters. The steppe nomads were therefore enriched by agricultural surpluses, and they used these surpluses to increase their military retinues and thus their ability to make further conquests.

Yet greater prizes awaited them within the Roman Empire itself. And, as the Goths had proved at Adrianople, the empire was militarily much weakened. The Roman provincial peasantry had been turned into serfs. Exploitation and alienation had depleted the traditional manpower base of Roman military imperialism. Increasingly, instead of citizen-legionaries, Roman emperors relied on bribes and barbarian mercenaries to defend their frontiers. At times the Huns were hired as Roman allies. Sometimes they might be bought off. Either way, Roman treasure was added to Gothic tribute to complete the transformation of the Huns from tribal nomads into continent-straddling militarists: a transformation marked by the accession of Attila as King of the Huns in AD 434.

At its height, Attila’s empire extended from the Baltic to the Alps, from the Rhine to the Caspian. Into the Hunnic capital – half-permanent village, half-nomadic encampment – flowed tribute from within the empire and subsidies and bribes from beyond. Half a century earlier, the Huns had fought as tribal forces of a few hundred under elected war-chiefs. Now, war was a permanent condition, the militarisation of their social world complete, the power of their supreme commander absolute.

The Hunnic war-state fed off the decay of the Roman Empire, devouring the surpluses made possible by the Iron Age revolution in technique. In the heyday of Roman military imperialism, the Roman surplus had supported armies of free peasant citizen-soldiers. In its decline, a mercenary military imperialism evolved in which the surplus fed a monstrous nomad empire centred on the Hungarian Plain.

As a war leader, Attila controlled the military surpluses, and as war was now permanent, so too was his authority. The king was able to sever the anchor chain of tribal obligations and social constraints that had once limited the power of any single individual. But the vast network of patronage that bound Attila’s client-kings, subject-chiefs, and leading retainers depended on an unbroken flow of tribute and subsidies, plunder and prestige goods. So Attila was a robber-baron, a warmonger, a restless conqueror pushing ever onwards. Dynamism was inherent in the Hunnic state.

Attila was the ‘scourge of God’ to the Late Roman ruling classes. Many of the poor saw him differently. Huns and Gallic bagaudae sometimes formed alliances against the Romano-Gallic landlords in the 440s AD. But the kingdom of the Huns was too crude, predatory, and unstable to become a force for progressive social change. When Attila attacked Gaul (France and Belgium) in AD 451, his lunge westwards lacked diplomatic finesse. The bagaudae had been alienated and did not move, and Romano-Gallic landlords and Visigothic free peasants had joined forces. So the West, briefly united, inflicted a decisive defeat on Attila at the Battle of Châlons. He was forced to withdraw to his Central European heartland. Two years later he was dead, and his empire disintegrated, destroyed by territorial struggles between his successors and revolts from below among the subject peoples.

The intervention of the steppe nomads had been sudden and catastrophic, but they made no positive contribution to history. The Western Roman Empire fragmented into myriad barbarian kingdoms ruled by Germans or Goths. The Eastern Roman Empire ossified, becoming bureaucratic, conservative, and inert. But the Hunnic Empire simply vanished from the face of the earth.

Why was its collapse so sudden and total? In the space of a generation, the Huns had been transformed from nomadic pastoralists into military predators. They ceased to have any productive forces of their own, depending entirely on their ability to extort from others the tribute, subsidy, and plunder essential to sustain their polity.

They were few in number, but their domains were vast, so theirs was an overextended empire subject to extreme manpower shortage. Fear and force enabled them to sustain the system as long as it appeared powerful. But an end to expansion would have cut off the flow of extorted surplus necessary to sustain the state infrastructure of chieftains, retainers, and warriors. Thus was over-extension inherent in a dynamic system of robbery with violence which lacked its own productive base. There was no ballast, only an engine hurtling through history to its own destruction. Yet the violence of that engine’s motion had propelled the Germans and the Goths into the Western Roman Empire, ensuring the eventual collapse of the imperial state apparatus and its replacement by a patchwork of new states ruled by barbarian kings.

The change, however, was less than might appear. Much of ancient civilisation was embraced by the barbarian kings, so that Rome contributed richly to the making of the medieval world. The principal vehicle of cultural transmission was the Christian Church. To grasp the significance of this, we must backtrack to analyse the growth of monotheistic religion within the womb of an ancient pagan culture rooted in the prehistoric past.

Mother-Goddesses and Power-Deities

Myth, ritual, and religion are multifaceted. Their deepest root lies amid the insecurities of primeval hunter-gatherer existence. Anxiety about the food-quest was soothed by magical representations of the beasts of the hunt in art, dance, music, and personal ornament.

Early farmers, equally prey to the vicissitudes of nature, conceived of the earth as a mother-goddess, a fount of fertility and food, who could be petitioned and bribed into delivering her bounty. The fertility deities of early farmers were invariably female. The woman – menstruating, giving birth, lactating – was the obvious symbol of natural fecundity. But there was another reason she was female: women were powerful in pre-class societies. Descent was often matrilineal (through the female line), residence matrilocal (in the wife’s village, not the husband’s), and authority matriarchal (where women’s voices were predominant).

Why was this? Because women were the fixed points in simple societies based on cooperative labour and collective ownership. Their child-bearing and child-feeding functions made them less mobile, both geographically and socially, and the absence of private property and the privileges to which private property gives rise precluded alternative sources of social power. Women were society’s centres of gravity. Men orbited around them. The great earth-mother goddess of early farmers was the mirror image of a social reality.

Private property, class division, and state power came into being simultaneously, the one dependent on the others. Sharing and a rough equality were intrinsic to communal property. But the division of land into private farms, or of cattle into separate herds, allowed some to grow rich at the expense of others. The resulting tensions called for some sort of control if society was not to fragment. The state – armed bodies of men – evolved to defend the new property-based status quo. And now it was men who had power. For it was men, not women, who herded the stock and ploughed the fields. When stock and fields were held in common, everyone benefited. When they were in private hands, they enriched and empowered only those who worked them.

What Frederick Engels called ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’ was represented in myth and ritual. The old mother-goddesses were cast from their thrones, replaced by a new generation of male power-deities. The Greek heaven was ruled by Zeus, the Roman by Jupiter, the Jewish by Yahweh, the Arab by Dushara, and so on, across the world. And just as the old earth-mothers symbolised the forces of nature, the new power-deities symbolised the force of tribes, city-states, and empires. A mythic superstructure was implanted in the mind as a military one was constructed in reality.

At Olympus, the holiest site in ancient Greece, the oldest cults were those of the mother-goddesses, Gaia, Rhea, Hera, and Demeter. But by the Classical Age, the fifth and fourth centuries BC, they had long since been displaced, and it was Zeus who was honoured with the richest offerings, the grandest temple, and the famous games. In the ‘War of the Giants’ myth, Zeus leads the new gods to victory over the Titans – his father Kronos and the other old gods. Zeus represents order, patriarchy, and civilisation. Kronos is the embodiment of barbarism: his is a world of chaos and matriarchy. Matriarchy became myth-code for a world of disorder. When the Greek hero Agamemnon returns home from the Trojan War, he is slain by his own wife, Clytemnestra, who has taken another man as her lover and king. The world is turned upside down and the moral order collapses. Then Agamemnon’s son Orestes slays Clytemnestra to avenge his father. Murder begets murder. A cycle of slaughter is the price of woman-power.

Misogynist myth sanctified Greek civilisation’s patriarchal order. The male-run oikos (a property-owning household) was the basic building-block of the social structure. The city-state was run by assemblies of citizen-men, of oikos patriarchs, of small property-owners. Not the least of the contradictions that doomed Greek democracy was the political exclusion, social segregation, and domestic oppression of women.

Other social tensions also found expression in the myth-worlds of ancient peoples. Myths are good to think with. They provide ways of describing, narrating, and analysing social contradictions. They represent and project social norms, but they also debate them when they are contested. Who are we? Where have we come from? Who are our friends, who our enemies? In a divided world, what is it that defines and unites us? Cultural identities are forged in struggle, and it was myth, ritual, and religion that give them form and expression in the ancient world.

Rome was a class-ridden, militaristic, imperial state. Little wonder that its supreme deity was a war-god. Jupiter Optimus Maximus – Best and Greatest – was the patron deity of the city-state of Rome. As such, in the totemic form of an eagle, he was carried into battle on the standard of every Roman legion. As such, he was worshipped at special altars in every army camp in the empire. And as such, he was the recipient of sacrifice and honour at the climax of every Roman triumph, when victorious troops and enslaved captives paraded through the city, and defeated enemy leaders were ritually strangled in the Forum.

But if the violence and exploitation of empire had their religious expression, so did the resistance of the oppressed. Myth could both legitimate the social order and inspire resistance to it. One ancient faith stands out in this respect. Over centuries of struggle it was fashioned into a cudgel of counter-cultural resistance – resilient, ineradicable, deep-rooted in the hearts and minds of the common people of Palestine. Later, it would produce two offspring, also weapons of ideological struggle, and between them, these three religious faiths would eventually conquer half the world. They are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Though capable of endless recasting as deeply conservative ideologies, the three great monotheistic religions produced by the contradictions of the ancient world owe their extraordinary power to their origins in the myths and rituals of the oppressed.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

In 537 BC, Cyrus the Great, the Persian ruler of Babylonia (modern Iraq), granted the descendants of a group of Jewish aristocratic exiles permission to ‘return’ to their homeland. Cyrus wanted loyalists in control of newly conquered imperial territory. The Jewish exiles aspired to become a new ruling class.

The return from Babylonian captivity is one of the central events in Judaeo-Christian historical tradition. The reality was that the Jewish elite was planted in Palestine as the quisling administration of an imperial superpower. But they brought with them an ideological powder-keg. Forged in decades of disunity, defeat, and dispersal, the Jewish cult of a supreme power-deity, Yahweh, had been transformed into an intolerant monotheism that denied the existence of all other gods.

In the past, the Jewish prophets had railed in vain against false idols. Now, the frustrated nationalism of an exiled leadership found expression in Yahweh’s claim to worldwide dominion. Political impotence had its religious counterpoint in divine megalomania. If, instead of a pantheon of warring deities, there was one all-powerful god, then history moved to a single divine purpose, and those chosen for God’s special favour were bound to win out in the end – just so long as they remained loyal and obedient.

The myths of Abraham and Moses and the legends of Saul, David, and Solomon were largely constructs of the sixth century BC: a rewriting of Jewish history and the proclamation of a new set of religious ‘truths’ designed to legitimise the tenuous grip on power of a newly installed Jewish elite that claimed descent from these heroic founders. This was the belligerent myth-history of an embattled elite fighting for its place in the world.

Thus, the one and only god was Yahweh, the Jews were his Chosen People, and Palestine was their Promised Land. This, though, was the view of a marginal sect, a small exile group whose restorationist ambition took the form of religious fantasy. Alone, they could have done nothing but hope and pray. It was Persian imperialism that lifted them out of historical oblivion and placed them on a global stage. It was Cyrus the Great who planted the New Judaism in Palestine and allowed it to flourish.

It proved to be a complex hybrid. The Jews were overshadowed by greater peoples – the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Palestine was a small country, occasionally capable of precarious independence, more usually subordinate to a foreign empire. The Jewish aristocracy was therefore torn between fighting for independence and collaborating with imperialism. The risks of fighting were high. Defeat could mean losing everything – but so could victory if mass mobilisation to fight for independence conjured a popular revolutionary movement from below. The Jewish peasantry was also torn – between fear of authority, a sense of powerlessness, and a deep-rooted hatred of the exploiter. So Judaism splintered into rival sects, some aristocratic and collaborationist, others popular, radical, and calling openly for resistance.

Religion welded the Jewish masses into a powerful revolutionary force on at least four occasions. When a Seleucid Greek king attempted to replace the worship of Yahweh with that of Zeus, he provoked nationwide resistance, and the Maccabaean Revolt of 167–142 BC eventually secured an independent Jewish state.

As Roman rule tightened, the Jews rose in revolt three more times, in AD 66–73, 115–17, and 132–6. Each time, the fighting was long, hard, and bloody. Each time, tens of thousands were killed, hundreds of thousands displaced. The final revolt was suppressed with such genocidal ferocity that the Jewish population was reduced to a rump. Thereafter, the ten million Jews of the ancient world were almost entirely a people of the diaspora, living mainly in towns across the eastern Mediterranean.

Among those involved in the Jewish anti-imperialist movement was a preacher from Nazareth called Jesus. A charismatic radical, he attracted a growing following among the village poor, so he was arrested, tried, and executed. The group he had founded survived as a small sect, but it soon split into two distinct tendencies. One remained committed to the Jewish national-revolutionary movement. This group was destroyed in the defeat of the First Jewish Revolt of AD 66–73. The other, led by Paul of Tarsus, a Greek-educated Jewish merchant, adopted a conservative ideology of spiritual – not material – redemption. And this, the Pauline Christians argued, was a message not just for Jews, but for all of humanity.

The New Testament, which records the mission of Jesus and the early history of the Church, is a work of revisionism, written by Pauline Christians of the Jewish diaspora in the aftermath of the defeat of the First Revolt. Jesus, it turned out, was both a man and a god, his kingdom was not of this earth but of heaven, and his message was universal and spiritual rather than revolutionary. The Gospel writers created a depoliticised and de-nationalised Jesus capable of surviving the ‘war on terror’ which swept the Roman Empire in the wake of the revolt.

Yet something of the original remained. In a way that the awesome power-deities of the pagan pantheon could not, the all-powerful and supremely benevolent Christian god offered what Marx called ‘a heart in a heartless world’ – a message with a strong appeal to the oppressed of the Roman Empire.

Pauline Christianity was a potent synthesis. It represented a fusion of Jewish prophecy and popular preaching with an essentially Greek tradition of salvation cult. Jesus the Jewish prophet was transformed into Jesus the universal saviour-god. To this were added two distinctively Christian elements, both derived from the religion’s roots in the Jewish revolutionary movement: in contrast to the rigid class hierarchies of Roman society, the idealisation of an egalitarian and democratic community; and, in place of the greed and violence legitimised by mainstream paganism, an emphasis on compassion and cooperation.

The exploitation and oppression of the Roman Empire inflicted misery on millions, but the violence of the state usually prevented effective resistance. This was the contradiction that allowed the Christian Church to grow and grow. Recruiting among slaves, women, and the poor, the Church was viewed with deep suspicion and was repeatedly battered by repression. It did not work. The men and women burnt, eaten by animals, or nailed to wooden crosses provided the Early Church with a roll call of martyrs as impressive as any in history.

By the early fourth century AD, the Church had become the most powerful ideological apparatus in the Mediterranean world, with an underground network of priests, congregations, and meeting places extending across the empire. Many army officers, government officials, and wealthy landowners eventually converted, and in AD 312 the Emperor Constantine the Great decided to adopt Christianity himself, to legalise the religion, and to make the state the protector and patron of the Church. Before the century was out, his successor, Theodosius the Great, would make paganism illegal and hand over the temple estates to the Church.

Judaeo-Christian monotheism was now recast as an ideology of state power, empire, and war. The Roman emperor became at once a defender of civilisation against barbarism, a crusader for the Church against paganism, and a champion of Christian orthodoxy against heresy. In consequence, Christianity became as fragmented as Judaism by the social contradictions it encompassed. Competition between rival factions and states, and tensions between antagonistic classes, destroyed the ideal of a single, universal Church.

The growing political division between an Eastern Roman Empire based on Constantinople and a Western Roman Empire based on Rome – a division which became complete and permanent after AD 395 – was mirrored in the separation of the eastern Orthodox and western Catholic traditions. The class struggle between landlords and peasants similarly found expression in the split between the more conservative Catholic and more radical Donatist Churches in North Africa. Every group, pursuing different and sometimes conflicting aims, claimed the one all-powerful god as its ally. At its most extreme, the ideological ferment could produce entirely new offspring, just as Judaism had brought forth Christianity. One such development was destined to produce another great world religion.

Out of the cultural crucible of two Arabian caravan-cities, where ancient pagan traditions from the desert mingled with versions of the Jewish and Christian faiths, emerged a new synthesis of monotheism: Islam. This faith would bind together the traders and tribal nomads of the Arabian Desert and turn them into a revolutionary force capable of bringing down the ancient empires of the Eastern Romans and the Persians in a whirlwind military campaign of a few short years. These conquerors would then build a new civilisation which fused the language and religion of Arabia with the cities, techniques, learning, and arts inherited from antiquity.

Arabs, Persians, and Byzantines

Turmoil is intellectually fertile. It created each of the great religions. Judaism was forged in the struggle of an embattled ruling class to establish itself in Palestine in the sixth century BC. Christianity has its origins in the bitterness of the oppressed under Roman imperial rule during the first century AD. Islam was a third branch from the same stem. Its early growth, in the 620s AD, took place beneath the gaze of history, a matter of minor squabbles in two remote desert towns in the Hijaz region of western-central Arabia. But its violent eruption would change the world forever.

The Huns had been nomads without any leavening of towns, merchants, and urban culture. Cut adrift from the lifeways of the steppe, they were weightless. Because of this, their military onslaught streaked across dying antiquity and, equally suddenly, was extinguished without a trace. Not so the Arabs. The desert nomads, herders of sheep and goats, breeders of camels and horses, were much like the Huns. But the camel, first domesticated in about 1000 BC, could cross great expanses of desert carrying heavy burdens, and many of the camel breeders had become merchants. Luxury goods arriving at the coastal ports of Iraq, southern Arabia and the Red Sea were then carried overland northwards and westwards by Arab traders. Mecca, Medina, and other Arabian towns grew rich on this trade. The towns, along with the oasis villages on the desert routeways, were also home to communities of artisans and cultivators.

In Arabia, in short, in contrast to the Central Asian steppe, there were complex settlements, social classes, and urban culture. In particular, coexisting with the tribal customs, oral traditions, and polytheistic beliefs of the desert nomads, there was the written Arabic and Judaeo-Christian religion of traders and townsmen.

Often, too, there was conflict. Long-distance trade cut through ties of kinship and tribal allegiances. The desert raid was booty to the tribesman, but robbery to the trader. The tribal blood feud offered protection to local kin, but none to a trader in a distant town.

In places like Mecca and Medina, where nomads and peasants bartered, tribesmen and traders squabbled, and the traditions of desert and town collided, men and women discussed how the world worked – or rather, how they felt it should work. When they did this, they viewed matters in a religious frame. For, in the early medieval world, to consider such things was to reflect on God’s purpose.

Amid this ferment, and experiencing it as inner mental anguish, was a young man of a minor Meccan merchant family. He had visions and believed that God – Allah in Arabic – spoke directly to him. He persuaded a small group of followers that this was true, and some of them began to write down the words he reported Allah as saying to him. His name was Muhammad and his reports of Allah’s words became the Koran.

Islam retained many of the Judaeo-Christian myths and traditions. Abraham and Moses are prophets for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Also common to all three religions is their universalism. Islam cut through both tribal codes and class differences. In place of the many competing gods of rival tribes, there was now one supreme deity. Where clan loyalty and the blood feud had reigned, there were now universal rules of conduct. Instead of abuse of the oppressed – women, slaves, the poor, the marginal – being a matter of indifference, compassion, charity, and protection became moral imperatives. The Muslims formed a community (umma) based on formal equality, universal rights, and a single code of laws. Islam was an attempt to create order in a fractured world.

Little wonder that Muhammad encountered fierce opposition. His mission began around AD 620, but he was driven out of Mecca in AD 622 and forced to find refuge in Medina. There, he built the nucleus of what was to become a mass movement. To his growing politico-religious cadre of eager young men and women, he joined traders seeking commercial advantage, tribal leaders bent on plunder, and townsmen and peasants longing for peace and civil order. Returning to Mecca with an army in AD 630, he was victorious, and the Muslims took control of western-central Arabia.

When Muhammad died in AD 632, his movement might have disintegrated, torn apart by the traditional raiding and feuding of the desert tribes. But it did not, for the first two caliphs (successors), Abu Bakr and ’Umar, chose to direct the violent energy of Arabia against external targets: the Persian and Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empires.

When the Arab-Islamic armies struck, the old empires shattered. The great cities of antiquity fell like dominoes – Damascus in Syria in AD 636, Ctesiphon in Iraq in AD 637, Babylon-Cairo in Egypt in AD 639, and Alexandria in Egypt in AD 642. Within ten years of his death, the followers of Muhammad had created a huge Middle Eastern empire.

Just as the Huns and Goths had done in Europe two centuries before, the Arabs had found the old empires, for all their pomp and pageantry, to be hollow. Persia and Byzantium had engaged in massive, and ultimately inconclusive, wars for centuries. The most recent, between AD 613 and 628, had left both exhausted, their treasuries depleted, manpower decimated, and populations made resentful by taxation, conscription, and forced requisitions.

The empires had fortifications, armoured warriors, and sophisticated weaponry. The Arabs had the desert and the camel. The Arabian Desert projects northwards, a tongue of sand and gravel, between Syria in the west and Iraq in the east. In these wastes, the camel is supreme, and armies mounted on camels can move like ships at sea. From the desert, suddenly, anywhere, the Arabs would emerge. When they did, lightly equipped and highly mobile, they would destroy the ponderous armies of tight-packed foot and heavy horse deployed against them in a dust cloud of swirling manoeuvres.

The sullen peasants of Syria and Iraq cared nothing for the defeat of their masters. Often they welcomed the Arabs as liberators. Many of the old landlords left. Taxes were lower. Judaism, Christianity, and Persian Zoroastrianism were tolerated; and many soon converted to Islam. Arab rule usually meant a marginally better life.

The Arab conquests continued. Their armies swept along the North African coast, taking Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, before finally crossing the Mediterranean and invading Spain, which was completely overrun by AD 711. Other armies pushed east; Kabul in Afghanistan fell to Islam as early as AD 664.

It had been one of the most extensive, sudden, and transformative campaigns of military conquest in history. But in transforming the world, the conquerors had also transformed themselves; and both processes were highly contradictory and contested. The people of the desert – nomads, traders, and raiders – first exploded across the Middle East and North Africa, and then, having inherited the riches of antiquity, imploded into acrimony, murder, and civil war.

5. The Medieval World (650AD—1500)

6. European Feudalism (650AD—1500)

7. The First Wave of Bourgeois Revolutions (1517—1775)

8. The Second Wave of Bourgeois Revolutions (1775—1815)

9. The Rise of Industrial Capitalism (1750—1850)

10. The Age of Blood and Iron (1848—1896)

11. Imperialism and War (1873—1918)

12. The Revolutionary Wave (1917—1928)

13. The Great Depression and the Rise of Fascism (1929—1939)

14. World War and Cold War (1939—1967)

15. The New World Disorder (1968—present)

Conclusion: Making the Future