{"id":2171,"date":"2021-05-18T18:12:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-18T15:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bricsmagazine.com\/en\/?p=2171"},"modified":"2025-06-16T16:47:23","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T13:47:23","slug":"the-byzantine-republic-and-the-chinese-empire-some-similarities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bricsmagazine.com\/en\/soft-power\/science\/the-byzantine-republic-and-the-chinese-empire-some-similarities\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00abThe Byzantine Republic\u00bb and the Chinese Empire: Some similarities?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I liked the book although I was not convinced by its main theses. What are they? Kaldellis argues that the Eastern Roman Empire (often known as the Byzantine Empire) does not naturally follow ideologically from the \u201ctroubled century\u201d of civil wars and defeats of Romans where most of the links to the \u201cold\u201d Roman empire were broken. It does not represent a shift towards a new Christian and autocratic government. According to Kaldellis, on the contrary, when the Roman Empire was stabilized thanks to Constantine in the 4th<\/sup> century, it went back to the seemingly \u201crepublican\u201d rule that existed not only in Republican Rome but also during the Principate. Kaldellis uses the term \u201crepublic\u201d not in its current meaning of non-monarchical rule, but in its etymological meaning of the rule of the people. Thus, defined republic is indeed, as Kaldellis writes, invoking among others Cicero, Cassius Dio and Rousseau (\u201cla volont\u00e9 g\u00e9n\u00e9rale\u201d), compatible with monarchical rule. In such terminology, the Netherlands is a republic, but North Korea is not. (Note that the idea survives in today\u2019s United States when people quote Benjamin Franklin by saying \u2013 especially during the Trump era to remind the then-president \u201cwe are living in a republic\u201d. They do not thereby mean a trivial fact that the US is not a monarchy, but a more substantive one that it is ruled by people.) In fact, to the term \u201crepublic\u201d, Kaldellis prefers its Greek equivalent \u201cpoliteia\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Terminology is the easy part of Kaldellis thesis. A more difficult part is to argue for a continuity between the Principate and the Empire after year 313.  And the most difficult part is to argue that Eastern Roman emperors were constrained by popular will. Continuity is hard to prove, and also counter-intuitive given the enormous revolutions that occurred during the chaos of the 3rd<\/sup> century and under the \u201coriental-despotic\u201d Dominate. Unlike the definition of the Byzantine Empire which sees it as \u201cChristian by religion, Greek by language, and Roman by government\u201d, Kaldellis insists on its Roman (Latin) character \u2013 by pointing out to the official use of Latin well into the 11th<\/sup> century, and the population\u2019s self-description as \u201cRomanoi\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second part of the thesis (popular mandate) is demonstrated by Kaldellis by the frequency of imperial changes (often violent), and the attention that was at least verbally proffered by the emperors for their subjects\u2019 feelings or opinions. Here, in the absence of any formal mechanism which made emperors subject to popular will, Kaldellis\u2019 approach seems to me the weakest. One could argue that similar \u201cchecks and balances\u201d in the form of rulers being killed or overthrown, or rulers claiming a popular mandate, were the \u201cbread and butter\u201d of every autocratic rule. It is difficult to see \u2013 despite Kaldellis\u2019 best effort \u2013 how it was different in the Byzantine Empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I would rather defer to other, more competent and knowledgeable, critiques such as here<\/a> and here<\/a>. The book is certainly iconoclastic (may one use the term in this context without sounding a bit silly?) and has attracted, and will attract, lots of attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the book made me think however is the similarity between Byzantium and China in both (1) Keldellis\u2019 idea of a politeia and the \u201cmandate of heaven\u201d and (2) social structures. Now, the Byzantine Empire lasted for at least 900 years, and the Chinese Empire for more than 2 millennia. So what exactly to compare? It may be useful, perhaps, to focus on the Byzantine Empire under the Macedonian dynasty, and especially at its peak under Basil II (around the year 1000) and on China under the Sung dynasty. How similar\/different were Constantinople and Hangzhou?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have written about Basil II Byzantium here, creating the first social table for Byzantium and trying to calculate the subsistence basket, overall real income and  to estimate income inequality. The table on p. 465 gives the social structure of Byzantium. Let me summarize it. In urban areas (around 10% of overall population and a quarter of total income): (1) beggars and \u201cmarginals\u201d, (2) unskilled workers, (3) qualified workers, professional solders and craftsmen, and (4) important officials, judges, \u201cstrategoi\u201d (high military officials) and wealthy merchants. Group (4) that accounted  for about \u00bd of a percent of the total population included civilian and military nobility that were constantly vying for power with emperors (and this leads us to Kaldellis\u2019 hypothesis). Their per capita incomes were some 50 times the estimated mean income; for comparison today\u2019s top \u00bd percent in the US has an average (after-tax) income that is nine times greater than the mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In rural areas (90% of total population), there were (1) small landholders (most numerous but decreasing in numbers), (2) tenant-farmers, (3) owners of latifundias, (4) wage workers on latifundias, and (5) slaves. The social structure in rural areas was, in the 10th<\/sup> and 11th<\/sup> centuries, rapidly changing in favor of large landholders. Because of excessively high taxes peasant-owners were abandoning their farms to become tenants on large estates. Landholders were taxed on their land, but once they became tenants, they were tax-free; although obviously they had to pay land-rent. But it seems that for many small farmers this was cheaper than paying taxes. There were even laws that prevented, or tried to reverse, the trend toward land concentration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was a very unequal social structure \u2013 such that practically the entire surplus above the subsistence was appropriated by high income classes. But this structure is, I think, fairly similar to China\u2019s under Sung. The emperor on the top, surrounded by civilian and military nobility (exactly like in Byzantium), a mandarinate (again similar in its function to bureaucracy in Byzantium), and lots of small land-owning peasantry interspersed with merchants and large landowners.  In neither society was there the standard structure of West European feudalism: serfdom (that is, very few land-owning peasants) and a nobility relatively independent of the ruler. Bureaucracy which emanates from the emperor and rules the realm was, probably, much stronger in both Byzantium and China than in Western Europe (e.g., France or Spain). This is somewhat contested in the case of Byzantium by authors who believe that the Empire was \u201cfeudal\u201d or was moving in that direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I argued here, there were probably no endogenous forces of capitalist development in Byzantium \u2013 or for that matter in the Roman Empire (a point argued more or less forcefully by Moses Finley, Michael Rostovtzeff, Walter Scheidel, Bob Allen, and Aldo Schiavone but disputed by Peter Temin).  If there were, a millennium would have been, one guesses, a sufficient time for them to emerge. By analogy one may wonder if such forces existed in medieval China. But beyond that question, a more thorough comparative study of China and Byzantium would be, I believe, highly useful and might yield new insights.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several years ago, Anthony Kaldellis, professor of classics, published a book with an intriguing title\u00a0\u201cThe Byzantine Republic\u201d. The book attracted my attention, not the least because of its title, when I saw it at my publisher\u2019s offices; for my refereeing services I was paid in kind \u2013 by that book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[945,947],"country":[71],"authors":[808],"class_list":["post-2171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-945","tag-book","country-china","authors-milanovic-branko"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u00abThe Byzantine Republic\u00bb and the Chinese Empire: Some similarities? - BRICS Business Magazine - EN<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/bricsmagazine.com\/en\/soft-power\/science\/the-byzantine-republic-and-the-chinese-empire-some-similarities\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"ru_RU\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u00abThe Byzantine Republic\u00bb and the Chinese Empire: Some similarities? - BRICS Business Magazine - EN\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Several years ago, Anthony Kaldellis, professor of classics, published a book with an intriguing title\u00a0\u201cThe Byzantine Republic\u201d. 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