The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture

"I’ve always liked Garnsey and Saller’s book on the Roman Empire because they come up with this concept of ‘government without bureaucracy’. Discussions of empires had always talked about these super mighty structures. There will be no end to the number of history books that tell of how empires petrify under bureaucratic overgrowth. But most empires in history have had tiny, tiny bureaucracies. Compared to modern states, empires are virtually not states at all. The administrations are so small that explanations of decline that point to empires somehow collapsing under the weight of their over-bloated bureaucracies are, we have to say, just myths. In all the empires we were studying, the bureaucracies are so small that they would never have been able to impose the kind of bureaucratic domination that is implied by that myth. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Garnsey and Saller’s book is so good on trying to ask, ‘how we can understand these empires as government without bureaucracy?’ In the Roman Empire, most provinces have tiny governing groups. If a Roman governor goes out to a province the size of Syria, or Gaul, he would bring with him perhaps a handful of other high-ranking people and maybe 20 or 30 servants and secretaries, and some soldiers to assist him, too. This is not a super-strong bureaucratic structure with which you can count and register everything in the most minute detail and then shuffle things around. First of all, it was the army. The army was by far the biggest institution. And that goes for all these empires. One of the reasons the Roman army functions so well and is so strong is not that there are never rebellions in the Roman Empire. Most emperors had to face a rebellion somewhere in the Empire. But these rebellions are only locally organized, so they are relatively restricted in scope. For instance, the famous Jewish rebellion which led to the destruction of the Temple—which is why we have the Wailing Wall today—is basically confined to Judea and the districts around it. So, the Roman army can lose once or twice, but you can send in the army from all over the place, and carry on. The zealots of the Jewish Revolt took refuge at Masada. There are a few hundred Jewish diehards who decided to take refuge in Herod’s desert fortress. And the Romans sent an entire legion, which could stay there for a year or so. They build a huge ramp and take the fortress. Those kind of resources most local rebels can’t really match in the long run. They can win one or two battles, but in the long run they are simply ground down. The other thing is that because you have these big territories, the army is then big enough to be able to hold off outside rivals, at least for long periods of time. It creates an enormous stability. You can easily challenge it from inside, because it’s very decentralised, but it’s too big to be unseated. On the other hand, it’s strong enough to keep competitors away. Therefore, you have these relatively stable empires, the Ottoman Empire lasts half a millennium, the Roman Empire even longer. In the Chinese Empire, you have a number of dynasties, but for very long periods it’s very, very stable. “Most empires in history have had tiny, tiny bureaucracies” Stephen Howe wrote a small introduction to empires 20 years ago . It’s very, very good, but he argued that ancient empires came and went and were very unstable, whereas modern empires were stable structures. There he may been a little misled by a modernist perspective. Modern empires were certainly strong, but to insist on the ephemeral nature of ancient empires is a mistake. That is probably an illusion that you get from looking at it from a modern perspective where you assume that because there were, say, a number of dynasties it looks as if everything changed very quickly. But actually, we are talking about hundreds of years for each one. In a world history perspective, European colonialism is actually surprisingly short-lived. It has shaped how the modern world looks, and also many of the conflicts of the modern world. So it’s certainly not ephemeral. It’s a very, very intrusive phenomenon. But in terms of stability, it was surprisingly unstable. That was one of the other things which really came out of this project."