Rome=China?

[Baradas]

So, I've been wondering recently if it was possible for the Roman empire to be like the Chinese empire. By that I mean that the borders of the Roman empire remain generally stable and the people see themselves as Roman and stay united up until the current day. Is it possible? What would the effects be?

Also, a book I've been reading has been talking about how the nation-state was really a product of a divided Europe, so if there was a stable Roman empire would the nation-state ever evolve or would we still be in large empires?

 

[ninebucks]

I think that that's possible, but it'd need a huge POD, and bugger me if I know what that would be...

The Roman Empire followed a universalist ideology, that held that there was no reason other than practicality that the whole world shouldn't run under one temporal power (their own). This wasn't unique, most ancient empires were universalist, (China was untill quite recently, and there are several strains of modern universalism: Socialist Internationalism, Liberal Internationalism, etc...)

A world with more universalist states would be much more interesting. Assuming of course, such a change in Rome doesn't butterfly away universalism in China.

 

[Hendryk]

It could be argued that until the 2nd/3rd centuries CE, the Roman Empire wasn't all that different from China. Both polities were universalist states which saw themselves as the center of civilization surrounded at the periphery by a limes of acculturated vassal peoples, and beyond that by barbarians that had to be kept at bay. Both were politically centralized but religiously pluralistic, with an official religion that the people were intended to pay lip service to for civic purposes but that didn't require devout belief, and various cults, some homegrown and some foreign, that promised a more fulfilling spiritual life.

What Rome would need to remain that way instead of devolving into separate kingdoms and falling under the yoke of a monopolistic religion, IMHO, is a dedicated cadre of scholar-officials to staff its administration. China had its Confucian bureaucrats, for whom the highest calling in life was that of the civil service, and for whom the preservation of state institutions was an end in itself. Give the same thing to Rome, and you're almost there.

Of course, whatever happens, geographical factors will always make the Roman Empire more prone to break-up than the Chinese one, but those aren't insurmontable.

 

[MerryPrankster]

Could one use Christian clergy to that purpose?

Some people here have theorized that if Charlemagne and company had been a bit more successful, you'd end up with a China-like situation in Europe.

 

[Typo]

If you believe Diamond's theory then European geography dooms the Roman Empire to be broken up.

 

[Hendryk]

Could one use Christian clergy to that purpose?

It was in OTL--for several centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, members of the clergy were pretty much the only people around who could read and write--and while Europe did eventually rise from the Dark Ages, it did so in a perennial state of political division.

The problem is that, by definition, the loyalty of members of the clergy wasn't to the State, it was to the Church, and the Church had a vested interest in making sure the State remained dependent on its good graces. China would have had the same problem if the administration clerics had been members of, say, the Buddhist clergy (between the Three Kingdoms period and the early Tang dynasty, it seemed as though Mahayana Buddhism could become to China what Catholicism became to medieval Europe). What made the difference was that in China, bureaucrats belonged to a school of thought that recognized no higher authority than that of the State, so both out of ideal and out of self-interest, they did their best to make the State the strongest institution in the Empire.

 

[Zyzzyva]

I doubt it - China is far more culturally homogenous. Rome was the stapling together of a half-dozen more-or-less distinct cultures. China, by even the time of the Han, had a common history, literature, writing, &c, &c. The thing was unsinkable. In China, all the forces are centripetal; in the Mediterranean everything goes the other way.

 

[MerryPrankster]

The problem is that, by definition, the loyalty of members of the clergy wasn't to the State, it was to the Church, and the Church had a vested interest in making sure the State remained dependent on its good graces. China would have had the same problem if the administration clerics had been members of, say, the Buddhist clergy (between the Three Kingdoms period and the early Tang dynasty, it seemed as though Mahayana Buddhism could become to China what Catholicism became to medieval Europe). What made the difference was that in China, bureaucrats belonged to a school of thought that recognized no higher authority than that of the State, so both out of ideal and out of self-interest, they did their best to make the State the strongest institution in the Empire.

The nature of the Church makes things a bit different, but you could still have one revived Roman Empire instead of several different successor states.

The Church and State might squabble, but could Romanitas be preserved regardless?

 

[General Zod]

Well, it might be argued that Western Catholic clergy developed to be the bunch of power-grabbing, theocratic bastards we all know and love also because it never met effective checks to its political encroaching till late in its cultural evolution, the time of absolute monarchies. Had the Popes lost the fight for the investiture, or the Roman Western Empire never fallen, the picture could have much more different, and Christian clergy developed a tradition of loyalty to the state instead of theocratic power-grabbing. See the Byzantine Empire and the Orthodox clergy, it shows that with different politcal conditions in Western Europe, Catholicism might have been rather different (I've always thought Europe might have been way better with Gregory VII and Innocence III being put on the stake by outraged Emperors).

Besides, the Roman Empire in the 2nd Century had the buds of an organized empire-wide secular bureaucratic service, had the Empire been more longeve it might have blossomed into something quite similar to the Chinese civil service, and that could have stabilized the Empire in the long term.

I think this kind of TL is quite feasible IF the Empire manages to conquer and Romanize all of Germania in the 1st-2nd Centuries (they never lose at Teutoburg and keep the momentum for the conquest of Germania). They bring the border of the Empire to the Vistula-Carpathian Mountains-Dneister line. Occupation of Germania spurs the Romans to develop the improved ploughshares to till the Northern soils effectively. Germania is Romanized to be as prosperous as Gallia. With the extra resources they gain from the new provinces, and they can spare from the way shorter border, they conquer Scotland, Ireland, Nubia/Axum, Mesopotamia and Persia, and bring the Eastern border to the Indus. At this point, further expansion to the Dvina-Dnieper border becomes feasible. By assmiliating almost all of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East in her fold, Rome has expanded to her natural borders (The Atlantic, European Russia, the Sahara, the Indus, Ethiopian basin) and increased her economic/demographic pool (and drained the one of the barbarians) so much that barbarian invasions stop being a serious threat to her long-term political unity (apart from the occasional Hun/Mongol breakout from nomad Central Asia).

Such an Empire is still exposed to the threat of recurrent political disintegration from internal unrest, but if the Empire uses the breathing space from expansion to develop an effective universalist bureaucratic elite to check the military power, its long-term political evolution may shift from permanent political feudal fragmentation to a Chinese cycle of recurrent breakups and reunification or permanent divison into Western and Eastern halves. Checking how much the universalist legacy of the Empire was strong in OTL EUropean culture, if the Empire Romanizes all of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, it stands to reason it would become too strong in the elites to allow permanent disunity of the continent.

This will have massive consequences. It will butterfly away the Dark Ages to one of the relatively short periods of dynastic collapse and political disorder, and the expansion of the Arabs. Christianity might or might not still become the dominant religion of the Empire (if it does, it will be something like Orthodoxy) and be upstaged by Mithraism or another mystery religion. The Renaissance and the Age of Exploration most likely are anticipated by half or two-thirds of a millennia, to the 800-1000s.

I highly doubt the Diamond theory is correct to the extent that geopolitical factors effectively prevent the permanent political unity of the preindustrial political unity of Europe and Mediterranean basin to anything substantially larger than OTL national kingdoms. It might be well argued that Rome fell because it had not reached her natural borders, since thanks to her very efficient assimilation capability, the more it expanded up to them, the stronger it became. At the very most, those factors might have prompted the permanent breakup into a Western Carolingian half and an Eastern Byuzantine half. Still quite a different pathway from a dozen warring kingdoms or feudal anarchy.

 

[rcduggan]

It could be argued that until the 2nd/3rd centuries CE, the Roman Empire wasn't all that different from China. Both polities were universalist states which saw themselves as the center of civilization surrounded at the periphery by a limes of acculturated vassal peoples, and beyond that by barbarians that had to be kept at bay. Both were politically centralized but religiously pluralistic, with an official religion that the people were intended to pay lip service to for civic purposes but that didn't require devout belief, and various cults, some homegrown and some foreign, that promised a more fulfilling spiritual life.

What Rome would need to remain that way instead of devolving into separate kingdoms and falling under the yoke of a monopolistic religion, IMHO, is a dedicated cadre of scholar-officials to staff its administration. China had its Confucian bureaucrats, for whom the highest calling in life was that of the civil service, and for whom the preservation of state institutions was an end in itself. Give the same thing to Rome, and you're almost there.

Of course, whatever happens, geographical factors will always make the Roman Empire more prone to break-up than the Chinese one, but those aren't insurmontable.

I think you could also make a comparison to Crisis-era Rome and Sixteen Kingdoms era China: a great empire fracturing into multiple states, warlords and pretenders everywhere, with barbarians overrunning long-held frontiers.

In Rome you had the Gallic Empire, the Palmyrene Empire, Memor in North Africa, the Macriani in Egypt, Regalianus and Ingenuus in Pannonia, the Britannic Emperors, etc all declaring some measure of independence. You also had the Franks invading Gaul, the Alamanni and Suebi coming into Egypt, and the Goths and Heruli invading Greece and Anatolia. IIRC the Rhoxolani were invading Pannonia at this point.

And in China, you have the various kingdoms (the only one I can recall of the top of my head is Han Zhao... ), most of which were short-lived. Also, the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Rouran, etc were raiding across the Great Wall and setting up their own kingdoms.

Or I could be completely wrong.

 

[Jaded_Railman]

I would argue that the Mediterranean basin civilization didn't significantly depart from the normal dynastic/political cycle that effected the entirety of Eurasian civilization until the 7th century, with the invasion of the Arabs, the great plagues, and the collapse of the Empire in the east. Rome suffered through the 3rd century exactly like the Chinese, unified again at the end of it all only to fragment once more in the 5th. There was a general effort at re-unification in the 5th and 6th centuries in both cultural spheres. The change came when the Eastern Empire drowned in the Arab tide and China continued on to the glories of the Tang.

 

[Faeelin]

What Rome would need to remain that way instead of devolving into separate kingdoms and falling under the yoke of a monopolistic religion, IMHO, is a dedicated cadre of scholar-officials to staff its administration. China had its Confucian bureaucrats, for whom the highest calling in life was that of the civil service, and for whom the preservation of state institutions was an end in itself. Give the same thing to Rome, and you're almost there.

I wonder if we're projecting when we think of this; certianly the Confucians weren't overpowerful in the Tang bureacracy, and I have no clue what happened during the Five Dynasties period...

 

[Faeelin]

I doubt it - China is far more culturally homogenous. Rome was the stapling together of a half-dozen more-or-less distinct cultures. China, by even the time of the Han, had a common history, literature, writing, &c, &c. The thing was unsinkable. In China, all the forces are centripetal; in the Mediterranean everything goes the other way.

But to Rome's rule of peace we owe it that the world is our home, that we can live where we please, and that to visit Thule and explore its once dread wilds is but a sport; thanks to her all and sundry may drink the waters of the Rhone and quaff Orontes' stream. Thanks to her we are all one people.

 

[Hendryk]

I wonder if we're projecting when we think of this; certianly the Confucians weren't overpowerful in the Tang bureacracy, and I have no clue what happened during the Five Dynasties period...

Indeed, the political influence of Confucianism suffered a long eclipse between the fall of the Han and about halfway into the Tang, when the dominant group, much as in post-imperial Europe, was the barbarian-descended military aristocracy. Not entirely coincidentally, it was also the time when Mahayana Buddhism spread like wildfire in Chinese society, and the Buddhist clergy rose in influence to almost become a state within the state, much as the Catholic Church in Europe. So perhaps the time when the definitive divergence between Europe and China took place was when the civilian bureaucracy regained the upper hand in the Tang dynasty, and when Emperor Wuzong (though for partly unrelated reasons) checked the rise of Buddhism.

 

[Keenir]

I doubt it - China is far more culturally homogenous. Rome was the stapling together of a half-dozen more-or-less distinct cultures.

whereas a man from Mongolia or Turkestan is identical to a man from the Na and Hui regions, or from Taiwan.

clearly.

China, by even the time of the Han, had a common history, literature, writing, &c, &c. The thing was unsinkable.

the Manchu, the Song, and various others would disagree.

 

[Joseph Solis in Australia]

Don't compare Rome with China. Roman Empire were composed of dozens of different cultures, races, and histories while China were composed of common culture, race, and history. When Rome falls in 476 AD, Rome didn't restore its glory while China restores its glory in Tang Dynasty after the fall of the Han Empire.

 

[ray243]

Don't compare Rome with China. Roman Empire were composed of dozens of different cultures, races, and histories while China were composed of common culture, race, and history. When Rome falls in 476 AD, Rome didn't restore its glory while China restores its glory in Tang Dynasty after the fall of the Han Empire.

The Tang did surpass the glory of the Han...