War: What is it good for? (12 page)

I have commented several times on Elias's argument in his classic book
The Civilizing Process
that the key to peace is getting the rich to calm down, and in this regard the Pax Sinica perhaps outdid the Pax Romana. As each empire made its internal provinces more peaceful, it shifted its troops to the frontiers. But while Rome continued to recruit soldiers from all over its empire, and honorable men like the geographer Pliny and the historian Tacitus shuttled back and forth between lawyering, writing, and commanding armies, China went further. It moved to staffing its armies with convicts or hired swords from outside the empire, leaving Han dynasty gentlemen to make do with just lawyering and writing. Where Romans
embraced Stoicism, which taught them to live with things they did not like rather than going berserk and killing someone, the Han elite took on various forms of Confucianism, in which the man who knew how to use a pen far outranked the man who could use a sword. Even more than in Rome, the path to success ran through education and culture.

Something rather similar was going on in South Asia too, although the outlines of the Pax Indica are a little harder to pin down than the Chinese or Roman versions. Bad workmen, the saying goes, blame their tools, and bad historians regularly blame their sources, but the hard fact is that we just do not know as much about India's Mauryan Empire as about the Roman or the Han. Very few documents survive from ancient India, and the most important—the
Arthashastra,
an eight-hundred-page treatise on statecrafts
¹
—was in fact lost for many centuries. It only resurfaced in 1904, when a local scholar (whose name none of the officials bothered to note) walked into the Mysore Oriental Library in southwest India with the last surviving manuscript, written on palm leaves, tucked under his arm.

Along with pronouncements on everything from how to build a fort to how many hairdressers a king should have, the
Arthashastra
describes an elaborate judicial system, laying down the rules magistrates must follow to investigate murder and assault. Doctors who suspected foul play in a patient's death were required to file reports; so too village headmen who witnessed cruelty to animals. The law prescribed penalties for every imaginable kind of violence, distinguishing, for example, between assaults involving spitting and those involving vomiting on someone, with fines further subdivided according to whether the fluid in question struck the victim below the navel, above the navel, or on the head.

The
Arthashastra
certainly makes the Mauryans sound serious about suppressing violence, and its author, Kautilya (also known as Chanakya, and perhaps as Vishnugupta too), should have known what he was talking about. He had led the uprising that established the Mauryan dynasty around 320
B.C.
and then served as prime minister to its first king, Chandragupta.

Kautilya was perfectly placed to describe Mauryan institutions, but that is where the problems begin. Scholars cannot agree on whether Kautilya was describing reality or prescribing what an ideal king ought to do, and some even question whether Kautilya wrote the
Arthashastra
at all. The
book mentions objects (like Chinese silk) that apparently did not reach India till later, and analyses of its language suggest that it might have been compiled long after Kautilya's death from a ragbag of materials spanning centuries.

We have some other evidence to compare with the
Arthashastra,
but each piece has its own problems. Megasthenes, a Greek diplomat who spent time at the Mauryan capital Pataliputra around 300
B.C.
(and would surely have met Kautilya), wrote that Indians were extremely law-abiding—so much so, he said, that when Chandragupta went to war, his troops never devastated the countryside, let alone killed farmers. However, given that Megasthenes also thought that some Indians had their feet attached back to front and that Indian dogs bit so hard that their eyeballs popped out, doubts necessarily remain about his testimony.

The most important source to set alongside the
Arthashastra
is a group of thirty-nine inscriptions erected by the later king, Ashoka, after he conquered Kalinga in the 250s
B.C.
In striking contrast to the kind of bombast that typically fills royal proclamations, Ashoka announced that “on conquering Kalinga, the Beloved of the Gods [that is, Ashoka] felt remorse, for, when a country is conquered, the slaughter, death, and deportation of the people is extremely grievous to the Beloved of the Gods.”

Ashoka had won “victory on all his frontiers to a distance of fifteen hundred miles,” but now announced that he would follow
dhamma
. There is some debate among Indologists over whether
dhamma
was a straightforwardly Buddhist concept or was Ashoka's own idea, but the king tells us that what he meant by it was “good behavior … obedience … generosity … and abstention from killing living things. Father, son, brother, master, friend, acquaintance, relative, and neighbor should say, ‘This is good, this we should do.'”

Ashoka set up “officers of
dhamma
” in the cities and countryside, charged with implementing a battery of new laws. He sent out inspectors to check on his officers' success and followed up with personal tours. As in Rome, what Hobbes would later call “commonwealth by acquisition” and “commonwealth by institution” apparently went together, and Ashoka learned that “legislation has been less effective, and persuasion more so.” But the bottom line, he concluded, was that “since [
dhamma
had been instituted], evil among men has diminished in the world. Among those who have suffered it has disappeared, and there is joy and peace in the whole world.”

Once again, what we really need is proper statistics on violent death in
ancient India to set alongside these sources, and once again, none exist. Nor, in this case, is the archaeology very helpful. Few graves of any kind are known, so we cannot tell whether people went on seeing weapons as a normal part of male fashion. Fortifications spread along the Ganges Valley in the sixth century
B.C.
, suggesting that fighting was increasing. In the Roman Empire, most cities let their walls decay once the initial wars of conquest were over, but in India fortifications remained normal throughout the life of the Mauryan Empire. Why remains an open question. Possibly the Mauryan Empire was less settled than the Roman, or possibly its brief life (created around 320
B.C.
, it fell apart after a coup in 185
B.C.
) meant that its cities did not have time to outgrow walls that had become redundant. Without more excavations, we cannot know.

The agreements among Kautilya, Megasthenes, and Ashoka, combined with the general similarities between the rule of law in India and China, make me suspect that the Mauryan Empire, like the Han and the Roman, made its subjects safer. But while this question must for the moment remain open, there is less room for debate over the fact that all three empires made their subjects richer.

In China, texts and archaeology agree that economic life intensified as states became larger. Canals, irrigation ditches, wells, fertilizer, and oxen became common sights in the fields. Iron tools proliferated. Coinage spread from city to city, and traders shipped wheat, rice, and luxury goods to wherever they fetched the best price. Governments slashed customs duties and invested in roads and harbors. From the mighty capital of Chang'an with its half a million residents down to the humblest village, Han-era markets bustled with rich and poor, selling what they could produce cheaply and buying what they could not. Philosophers worried over whether it was right for merchants to get quite so wealthy.

Chinese archaeologists have not (yet) quantified enough data to produce a Chinese equivalent of
Figure 1.4
, charting rising living standards. But since 2003, excavations at the little village of Sanyangzhuang have been providing the next best thing.

One day in
A.D.
11, the levees broke along the Yellow River. The rain must have been coming down in sheets for days, and floods had been reported upriver, but the farmers of Sanyangzhuang apparently kept on working the fine, fertile soil and hoping for the best. It is hard to tell, two thousand years on, what would have been the first sign of catastrophe. Perhaps it was a dull, distant roar as the dikes collapsed and billions of gallons of brown water surged through. Most likely, though, the rain pounding on
their tile roofs drowned that out. Only, I suspect, when muddy water started oozing under their doors would the awful truth have dawned: this was not just a storm anymore. The unthinkable had happened. Dropping everything, the farmers ran for their lives. Their village had stood on this spot for a thousand years, but within a few hours it was gone.

Archaeology is a ghoulish profession. It has turned the tragedy of
A.D.
11 into a scientific triumph, uncovering a Han village so perfectly preserved that journalists have labeled it “the Chinese Pompeii.” Meticulously separating the mud carried in by the flood from the mud that fills any normal village, excavators have exposed the imprints left by bare feet and iron-shod hooves as villagers and horses fled across the plowed fields.

Gripping stuff, but archaeologists tend to get even more excited about the humdrum remains of what the farmers left behind than about the human drama. These Han villagers lived in sturdy, mud-brick houses strikingly like those found four thousand miles to the west, in the Roman Empire. The tile roofs were very similar in both empires, as was the impressive quantity and variety of iron tools and well-made pottery.

Naturally, there were differences too. Careful excavation at Sanyangzhuang has recovered impressions on mud from the mulberry leaves used to feed silkworms, a resource Romans would have loved to have had. In the 70s
A.D.
, the learned but curmudgeonly Roman geographer Pliny grumbled that fine ladies were squandering millions of sesterces on filmy Chinese silk so they could flaunt their charms in public. But on the whole, the finds at Sanyangzhuang are remarkably like those from Roman villages, or even Pompeii itself.

Our evidence from India is again less full but again points the same way. Like the Han and Romans, the Mauryans standardized weights and measures, minted coins on a huge scale, clarified commercial law, built roads, and helped villagers clear new lands. They also promoted trade guilds, which played important parts in commercial life.

India struck the Greek ambassador Megasthenes as a prosperous place, and archaeology bears him out. The subcontinent has yielded no Pompeii or Sanyangzhuang, and the biggest samples of Mauryan housing are still those excavated at Taxila and Bhita in the days of the British Raj. But despite the deplorable standards of these digs (out-of-date even in their own era), they still produced enough information to show that third-century-
B.C.
houses were bigger, more comfortable, and better furnished than earlier ones. Like Han and Roman houses, they had brick walls and tile roofs,
with several rooms clustered around a courtyard. Most had wells, drains, kitchens with ovens, and storerooms.

The bad news (for archaeologists) is that there were no tragedies here, and the occupants had time to clear out their houses when they left. The good news, though, is that Mauryans were messy people. They left behind enough fragments of broken pottery, kitchen implements, iron tools, and even a little jewelry to show that they were much better-off than earlier Indians.

Greek and Roman visitors to India found much to astonish them (talking parrots! boa constrictors! and, of course, elephants!), but what impressed them most was the sheer scale of the trade that grew up between the Mediterranean and the subcontinent after about 200
B.C.
“In no year,” Pliny wrote, “does India drain less than 550 million sesterces [enough to feed a million people for a year] out of our empire, giving back in exchange her own goods—which are sold among us for fully a hundred times what they cost!”

Pliny's arithmetic cannot be right, because his numbers would mean that a few thousand merchants realized profits of 55 billion sesterces, which was nearly three times as much as the entire Roman Empire's annual output. Many classicists therefore suspect that there has been a copying error and that Pliny originally wrote that the trade with India was worth 50 million sesterces, not 550 million. Recent discoveries suggest that 50 million sesterces, while still a staggering sum, may be about right. In 1980, the Austrian National Library acquired a papyrus scroll looted from a Roman site in Egypt, dating around
A.D.
150. When studied, it turned out to describe the financial arrangements for a ship returning to Egypt from Muziris in India. The ivory, fine cloth, and perfume in the ship's hold was valued (in Roman prices) at nearly 8 million sesterces—enough to feed more than fifteen thousand people for twelve months. Rome taxed these imports at 25 percent; five hundred such shipments would have covered the entire empire's annual military budget.

We have not yet found written records at the Indian end of the chain, but in 2007 excavations began at Muziris (modern Pattanam in Kerala), and the first four seasons of digging generated more Roman wine containers than are known from any other site outside the empire. India was clearly a prosperous place.

In Rome, China, and India, then, it seems that large empires were making people safer and wealthier in the late first millennium
B.C.
In Parthia, there was a large but apparently rather less safe empire; in Mesoamerica
and the Andes, smaller states that were perhaps less safe still; and beyond this band of latitudes, roughly 20 to 35 degrees north of the equator in the Old World and 15 degrees south to 20 degrees north in the New, were tiny societies where rates of violent death probably remained in the 10–20 percent range.

What explains this pattern? Why was it only people within these lucky latitudes who started getting to Denmark, and why did some of them get so much farther along the path than others?