DISSIMILARITIES

"At the political level, there was a difference in topography. Rome was both a land and a sea power, Han China, except episodically, only a land power. The Chinese world turned its back on the sea, because, till the third century AD, its local seas led nowhere. River power was significant in the regional wars of the San-guo period (221-280), but the significance was limited in that the Huang-he, the principal river of China down to 500 AD, with its shifting bed and rapid rises and falls, was more suited to irrigation than navigation. The Roman world, on the other hand, was built round the amphitheatre of the Mediterranean, an extended version of Plato's frogs round a pond. If warfare deserted the Mediterranean after Actium (the battle between Mark Antony and Octavian in 31 BC, btw), sea power was still required to safeguard the grain fleets from Africa and Egypt from piracy. When Caesar and the Julio-Claudians incorporated the manpower of the Celtic world, military sea power had a role in the narrow seas of the Circumterranean (one of this guy's fancy terms for "North Sea" limes and its admirals played a part in the regional wars of the third century AD. In AD 400, the emperor of the West Honorius had his capital in Ravenna, primarily a naval base, while his brother of the East Arcadius sat at the juncture of two seas."

"On land, the Chinese, like the Romans, built roads of standardized design, but they built fewer of them: 22,000 miles, an average of 14 miles per 1,000 square miles of territory, compared to the Roman 48,000 miles, an average of 28 miles per 1,000 square miles of territory. Topography again was a factor. The Chinese built most of their roads radially out from the imperial capitals of Chang-an and Luoyang into the loess-lands of Shensi and Shansi, a much dissected plateau of deep valleys, terminal ravines and sudden dead-ends, inimical to intercommunication. The Romans, on the other hand, could begin with the coastal plains of Latium, Campania, Apulia and Emilia, and once free of the Appennines and the Alps had only the plain of Celtic Europe and its forest cover to contend with."

"The advantage of a double communication system and the greater facility it afforded to mobilize resources and information affected the agenda of the Roman state and its agents. It enabled it to undertake welfare functions such as the annona: the free distribution to citizens not only of bread but also of olive oil, salt, pork and wine, along with free entry to the baths and games. Caesar's munificience set the tone for his patricians: the euergetist mode of distribution which provided, at private cost but to public benefit, so many provincial cities with their amenities--baths and their fuel, amphitheatres and their animals, theatres and their actors, basilicas and their orators. Jean Durliat may have exaggerated the dependence of the ancient macro-city on the annona, but "bread and circuses" became a defining characteristic of urban Romanitas and a source of its greater magnificence and fragility in comparison to the polity of Han-Jin China."

"At the economic level, however, China enjoyed the advantage in the basic technologies of agriculture and metallurgy. An obstacle to road-making, the loess soil of interior China was an asset in arable farming. Its porosity enabled it to replenish itself by absorption of both sub-surface and atmospheric nitrogen. More continuous cultivation and less frequent fallowing were thus possible. Chinese farming therefore showed higher average yields per area over time than those of the West. Moreover, its characteristic cereal, millet, produced both higher yields per unit sown and per area than did its rival in the West, wheat. Further, though needing it less, the Chinese manured more via stye-reared pigs and the use of human nightsoil. Thanks to the Guan-xian barrage and the Wei valley scheme higher percentage of Chinese farmland was irrigated in comparison with the West, which in those areas will have led to another doubling of areal yields. In addition, the Chinese farmer had better tools than his Western counterpart. Since as far back as 500 BC, the Chinese had been able to cast and not merely to work iron. Cast iron is more britle than wrought iron, but it is less likely to bend and can be sharpened to greater acuity. Consequently, the Chinese farmers employed superior hoes, ploughshares, sickles, axes, knives and spades. Similarly, the Chinese infantryman ahd the edge over the Roman infantry in the sharpness of his sword, spear and arrow heads, and it put him into a better position to defend his limes against the barbarians. Possession of high-carbon cast iron as well as low-carbon wrought iron allowed Chinese metallurgists, by a process akin to the Bessemer method, to make an intermediate product: steel, the Seric iron so much admired by Pliny, which escaped both brittleness and bending and could be sharpened to ane ven higher degree. This metallurgical precocity had deep roots. It went back to the ability, already displayed in the Shang and Zhou bronzes, to raise higher temperatures through stronger bellows. This greater mastery over fire may have derived from the fact that in East Asia, ceramics, possibly first produced in Japan, came before agriculture rather than the other way round as in Western Eurasia."

"Nevertheless, the Chinese economy was not without its bottlenecks, particularly in the field of energy. Never well timbered, a land of copses rather than forests, interior China suffered both from the Chinese preference for building in wood rather than stone and from the supeiority of the Chinese axe. Even the seemingly limitless timber resources of sub-Himalayan Sichuan were beginning to fail under the Han, where Rome and Constantinople with good local supplies and the Hyrcanian forest to command had no such problems. Timber was the major source of energy in antiquity. Whatever the use of stone, bronze, and iron, all ages before the Industrial REvolution were timber ages. Despite its inferiority in basic technology, the Roman world probably consumed more energy per capita and in total than the Chinese world. Whether it consumed it more efficiently and effectively is open to question, but it may be guessed that its ecological lavishness did provide its society with higher standards of living, at least in the things of culture. China migh be better at production, but the Roman world with its superior communications was better at distribution and consumption."

"At the social level, while at the apex both Rome and China were urbanized societies, there were more cities in the Roman world and a higher percentage of the population lived in them. One reason was again the greater mileage of communication in the West which allowed more cities to be supplied by roads and sealanes. Another was that while the Greeks, Macedonians and Romans multiplied cities; the Chinese empire, as evidenced by archaeology, reduced them. In China cities were primarily places of government. When government became united and centralized after 221 BC, there was less need for provincial capitals and no need for rival places of courtly glamour. Many former capitals therefore atrophied. IN the West, cities were primarily places of enjoyment and civic life. The Roman empire, a welfare state, had to provide these things either directly or through the liturgies of local oligarchies. Cities therefore were maintained, extended, or created. Under the Antonines the Roman empire became a federation of cities where the Han empire remained a territorial state with a primate capital. At the base, however, Chinese producers, the nong and the gong better endowed by technology in agriculture and metallurgy and less oppressed by their urban superstructure, probably enjoyed higher status than their counterparts in the West. As the Han period advanced and became the Three Kingdoms, and then the Jin, the imperial tax registers and muster calls shrank as farmers and artisans commended themselves as ke, "guests", that is tenants and retainers, to great aristocratic clientelae. Although the shift from smallholders to dependents was deplored by political theorists committed to the imperial state, it is not clear that the change represented a deterioration of social conditions: possibly an improvement, since the clientelae were vehicles of social mobility for their ke. Between the apex and the base, thanks to the greater availability of routes by both land and water, the third layer was thicker in the West than in China, particularly in regard to business. Sima Qian has a chapter in the Shi ji on millionaires in the Western Han, but they were transitional figures like the Russian oligarchs of the Yeltsin era and were not characteristic of the long aristocratic age which followed. Business in Han China did not match the sophistication of the Greco-Syrian connection in the West: the Antiochene inheritors of Athenian proto-capitalism, whose activities extended from Britain to India, diffusing Christianity to Lyon and Bath in one direction and to Muziris and Mylapore in another. Even subsequently, the new commercialism of salt, fish and overseas voyages associated in the San-guo period with Sun Quan and the kingdom of Wu at Nanjing did not reach the level of Antioch and its more etatiste competitor, Alexandria."