Rome, China and the Tenacious Dream of World Empire
(written by Lancelot Finn, September 2003 / December 2004)
Hadrian’s Wall is visible to this day, running across hills and moors in a narrow section of the island of Great Britain. For almost three centuries it marked the end of Roman Britain; marked it as much as defended it, for it is a low wall. The Celts might be able to get over it, but they knew they risked the Roman legions by doing so. It is a perfect example of an ancient limes, or border. The Great Wall of China served a similar role on a much larger scale, and is more famous. (It was also better equipped than Hadrian's Wall to serve as a defensive fortification.)
Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China marked the edge of civilization. Beyond was only “barbarism.” The Roman and Chinese empires saw themselves as world governments, and were ideologically incapable of recognizing other states of equal rank. The notion of multiple states was not alien to them. Each empire had a memory of a period of warring states which preceded their empire. But they had no desire to go back to it. Political unity, pax Romana, was a new and better age in the world.
The ideal of a single world government is a tenacious one. For a thousand years Europe clung to the legacy of the Roman empire. Today, 410 A.D., the “fall of Rome” to the Visigoths, is often taken as a convenient end-date for the Roman Empire, to avoid the story of its gradual unraveling and disintegration. Justinian’s effort to re-conquer the West is seen as misguided. And hardly anyone has taken the Holy Roman Empire seriously since Voltaire aptly and pithily dismissed it as “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” But contemporaries did take it seriously. They agonized over the question, who was the emperor, the successor of Rome—was it the Carolingians, crowned in Rome, or was it the Greek emperor in Constantinople?
Two great intellectuals will serve to illustrate the tenacity of the idea of the Roman Empire. Dante (1265-1321) was a fervent partisan of the Roman imperial ideology. He was expelled from Florence by the Guelfs, who were notionally partisans of the pope against the emperor. The way Guelfs and Ghibellines, who notionally supported the German “Holy Roman Emperor,” grappled for power in many Italian city-states tempts one to think that the terms had become empty partisan labels. Not so. In Dante’s political treatise On Monarchy, he derives the legitimacy of the emperor directly from the Romans, whom, Dante believes, God led to world mastery himself. Four and a half centuries after Dante, Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, understood, unlike Dante, that the Roman Empire had fallen. Yet the book has a sense of regret, of nostalgia, of loss that seems strange, considering that Gibbon was writing during the very years when the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution were taking place, two great events that launched the modern age of rising liberty and prosperity. Gibbon’s own England was even then creating an empire far larger, more populous, more progressive than Rome ever was. Gibbon’s masterpiece is a reminder of how long Rome’s shadow lay across the European mind. They had grown accustomed to a world of multiple states, but they did not necessarily like it.
Bearing in mind the delusions of Dante and the regrets of Gibbon, we can re-visit China and understand the mindset that Europeans found so strange when they began to arrive there in strength in the 19th century. In China, the mindset of the ancient Romans, for whom their empire was the world and beyond the frontiers was only barbarism, had been allowed to live on. The Chinese empire had lapsed, had been overrun, had been divided. But it had been repeatedly restored, and Chinese historians who believed that emperors must rule by “the Mandate of Heaven” were able to draw plausible threads of continuity backwards, through a succession of dynasties, to the first emperor. A mentality similar to that of the pax Romana endured, and became ever more entrenched. The Chinese were amazed and baffled when, in the 19th century, they encountered a world of strong modern nation-states—and found it as difficult to understand as our hypothetical time-traveling Roman would.