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Giovanni Arrighi, an authority on the political economy and geopolitics of world social change, here reflects comparatively on states and markets East and West at the dawn of capitalism. Ranging widely across Smith, Marx, Weber and Braudel, he assesses the logic and interplay of China’s tribute trade system and Europe’s emerging capitalism. This article draws on and extends a chapter from his new book, Adam Smith in Beijing. Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, which looks across the last five hundred years to consider the emerging position of East Asia in an epoch that marks the end of US hegemony. MS

The Five-Hundred Years’ Peace

One of the great myths of Western social science is that national states and their organization in an interstate system are European inventions. In reality, except for a few states that were the creation of European colonial powers (most notably, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines), the most important states of East Asia–from Japan, Korea, and China to Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Kampuchea–were national states long before any of their European counterparts. What’s more, they had all been linked to one another, directly or through the Chinese center, by trade and diplomatic relations and held together by a shared understanding of the principles, norms, and rules that regulated their mutual interactions as a world among other worlds. As Japanese scholars specializing in the China-centered tribute trade system have shown, this system presented sufficient similarities with the European interstate system to make their comparison analytically meaningful. [1]

Both systems consisted of a multiplicity of political jurisdictions that appealed to a common cultural heritage and traded extensively within their region. Although cross-border trade was more publicly regulated in East Asia than in Europe, since Song times (960-1276) private overseas trade had flourished and transformed the nature of tribute trade, the main purpose of which, in Takeshi Hamashita’s words, “came to be the pursuit of profits through the unofficial trade that was ancillary to the official system.” Analogies can also be detected in the interstate competition that characterized the two systems. The separate domains that were held together by the tribute trade system centered on China were “close enough to influence one another, but... too far apart to assimilate and be assimilated”. The tribute trade system provided them with a symbolic framework of mutual political-economic interaction that nonetheless was loose enough to endow its peripheral components with considerable autonomy vis-a-vis the Chinese center. Thus, Japan and Vietnam were peripheral members of the system but also competitors with China in the exercise of the imperial title awarding function, Japan establishing a tributary type relationship with the Ryukyu Kingdom, and Vietnam with Laos. [2] Sugihara explicitly maintains that the diffusion of the best technology and organizational know-how within East Asia makes it “possible to think of the presence of an East Asian multi-centered political system... with many features analogous to the interstate system in Europe.” [3]

These similarities make a comparison of the two systems analytically meaningful. But once we compare their dynamics, two fundamental differences become immediately evident. First, as argued elsewhere, the dynamic of the European system was characterized by an incessant military competition among its national components and by a tendency toward the geographical expansion both of the system and of its shifting center. [4] Long periods of peace among European powers were the exception rather than the rule. Thus, the “hundred years’ peace” (1815-1914) that followed the Napoleonic Wars was “a phenomenon unheard of in the annals of Western civilization.” [5] Moreover, even during this hundred years’ peace European states were involved in countless wars of conquest in the non-European world and in the escalating armament race that culminated in the industrialization of war. While the initial result of these involvements was a new wave of geographical expansion which dampened conflicts within the European system, their eventual result was a new round of wars among European powers (1914-1945) of unprecedented destructiveness. [6]

In sharp contrast to this dynamic, the East Asian system of national states stood out for the near absence of intra-systemic military competition and extra-systemic geographical expansion. Thus, with the exception of China’s frontier wars to be discussed presently, prior to their subordinate incorporation in the European system the national states of the East Asian system were almost uninterruptedly at peace with one another, not for one-hundred, but for three-hundred years. This three-hundred years’ peace was bracketed by two Japanese invasions of Korea, both of which precipitated a war with China–the Sino-Japanese wars of 1592-98 and 1894-5. Between 1598 and 1894 there were only three brief wars that involved China–the 1659-60 and the 1767-71 wars with Burma, and the 1788-89 war with Vietnam, and two wars that did not involve China–the Siamese-Burmese Wars of 1607-18 and of 1660-2. Indeed, in so far as China is concerned, we should speak of a five-hundred years’ peace, since in the two-hundred years preceding the 1592 Japanese invasion of Korea China was at war against other East Asian states only during the invasion of Vietnam in 1406-28 to restore the Tran dynasty. [7]

The infrequency of wars among East Asian states was associated with a second crucial difference between the East Asian and European systems: the absence of any tendency among East Asian states to build overseas empires in competition with one another and to engage in an armament race in any way comparable to the European. East Asian states did compete with one another. Sugihara, for example, detects a competitive relation in two complementary tendencies typical of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868): its attempt to create a tribute trade system centered on Japan instead of China, and its absorption of technological and organizational know-how in agriculture, mining and manufacturing from Korea and China. Through these tendencies, as Heita Kawakatsu put it, “Japan was trying to become a mini-China both ideologically and materially.” [8] This kind of competition, however, drove the East Asian developmental path toward state-and-national-economy-making rather than war-making and territorial expansion–that is in the opposite direction of the European path.

This contention may seem to be at odds with the long series of wars that China fought on its frontiers during the closing years of Ming rule and in the first 150 years of Qing rule. As Peter Perdue has noted, the history of the China-centered system appears in a different light when seen from a “frontier perspective.” The presence of nomadic horsemen who raided the borders and sometimes conquered the Chinese capital made military activity particularly prominent in the history of China’s north and northwest frontier. Military activity became more prominent when northern conquerors in 1644 established the Qing dynasty and set out to ensure that other northern invaders would not do to them what they had done to the Ming.

In the north and northwest, China faced much more powerful and more sharply distinctive peoples than on other frontiers. Here it was very clear that the threat of force undergirded the trading-ritual order. The Qing could only seriously claim to be the uncontested central pole of a tribute system focused on Beijing after they had created military alliances with the Eastern Mongols, exterminated the rival Western Mongols, conquered Xinjiang, and secured formal suzerainty over Tibet. [9]

The territorial expansion that ensued, and the military activities that sustained it, fixed the boundaries that all subsequent Chinese regimes would struggle to preserve. Their main purpose was the transformation of a hard-to-defend frontier into a pacified periphery and a buffer against raiders and conquerors from Inner Asia. Once the objective had been attained, as it was by the 1760s, territorial expansion ceased and military activities turned into police activities aimed at consolidating the monopoly of the Chinese state over the use of violence within the newly established boundaries. Although quite substantial, this territorial expansion paled in comparison with the successive waves of European expansion–the earlier Iberian expansion in the Americas and southeast Asia; the contemporary Russian expansion in north Asia and Dutch expansion in southeast Asia; not to speak of the later expansion of Britain in South Asia and Africa and of its offspring in North America and Australia. Unlike these successive waves, the Qing expansion was strictly limited in space and time by its boundary-drawing objectives, rather than a link in an “endless” chain of connected expansions.

The difference was not just quantitative but qualitative as well. China’s territorial expansion under the Qing was not embedded in the kind of “self-reinforcing cycle,” whereby the competing military apparatuses of European states sustained, and were sustained by, expansion at the expense of other peoples and polities of the earth. [10] No self-reinforcing cycle of this kind could be observed in East Asia. Qing China’s territorial expansion was neither driven by, nor did it result in, competition with other states in extracting resources from overseas peripheries. The logic of political economy associated with this latter kind of competition had little in common with China’s practices. “Rather than extract resources from peripheries, the Chinese state was more likely to invest in them. Political expansion to incorporate new frontiers committed the government to a shift of resources to the peripheries, not extraction from them.” [11]

These different dynamics of the European and East Asian systems were closely related to, and in key respects determined by, two other differences–a difference in the distribution of power among the systems’ units, and a difference in the degree to which the primary source of power was internal or external to the system. Even before the “extended” sixteenth century in European history (1350-1650) and the Ming era in East Asian history (1368-1643), political, economic, and cultural power in East Asia was far more concentrated in its center (China) than in Europe, where a center proper was much harder to identify. But the difference became sharper with the defeat in 1592-98 of Japan’s attempt to challenge militarily Chinese centrality by conquest in Korea and the institutionalization of the European balance of power by the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648.

The balanced power structure of the European system in itself contributed to the disposition of European states to wage war on one another. As Polanyi has underscored, balance-of-power mechanisms–the mechanisms, that is, whereby “three or more units capable of exerting power... behave in such a way as to combine the power of the weaker units against any increase in power of the strongest”–were a key ingredient in the organization of the nineteenth century hundred years’ peace. Historically, however, balance-of-power mechanisms had always attained the objective of maintaining the independence of the participating units “only by continuous war between changing partners.” [12] The main reason why in the nineteenth century those same mechanisms resulted in peace rather than war is that political and economic power came to be so concentrated in the hands of Britain as to enable it to transform the balance of power, from a mechanism that no individual state controlled and functioned through wars, into an instrument of informal British rule that promoted peace. [13]

The nineteenth century association between an increase in the imbalance of power and a decrease in the frequency of war within the European system suggests that the imbalance of power typical of the East Asian system was a reason for the infrequency of wars among East Asian states. However, the fact that the nineteenth century concentration of power in British hands was accompanied by an escalation of interstate competition both in the production of ever more destructive means of war and in the use of these means to gain access to extra-systemic resources, suggests that a greater imbalance of power cannot in itself explain the virtual absence of these two kinds of competition in the East Asian system. Some other ingredient had to be present in the European and absent in the East Asian “mix” to produce this divergent pattern of interstate competition. The most plausible candidate is the greater extroversion of the European developmental path in comparison with, and in relation to, the East Asian path.

Although trade within, between, and across political jurisdictions was essential to the operations of both systems, the economic and political weight of long-distance trade relative to short-distance trade was far greater in the European than in the East Asian system. International trade in general, East-West trade in particular, was a far more important source of wealth and power for European than for East Asian states, especially China. It was this fundamental asymmetry that had made the fortunes of Venice and induced the Iberian states, instigated and assisted by Venice’s Genoese rivals, to seek a direct link with the markets of the East. [14] It was this same asymmetry, as we shall see, that underlay the low returns, relative to costs, of Zheng He’s fifteenth-century expeditions in the Indian Ocean. Were it not for this asymmetry, Zheng He might very well have sailed “around Africa and ‘discover[ed]’ Portugal several decades before Henry the Navigator’s expeditions began earnestly to push south of Ceuta.” [15] Columbus’ accidental ‘discovery’ of the Americas, while seeking a shorter route to the wealth of Asia, changed the terms of the asymmetry by providing European states with new means to seek entry in Asian markets, as well as with a new source of wealth and power in the Atlantic. But even two centuries after the discovery, Charles Davenant still claimed that whoever controlled the Asian trade was in a position to “give law to all the commercial world.” [16]

This extroversion of the European power struggle was a major determinant of the peculiar combination of capitalism, militarism and territorialism that propelled the globalization of the European system. [17] The opposite dynamic of the East Asian system–in which a growing introversion of the power struggle generated a combination of political and economic forces that had no tendency towards “endless” territorial expansion–can be taken as counterfactual evidence in support of that contention. But just as the emergence of the extroverted European path could only be understood in light of the diffusion of the strategies of power pioneered by the Italian city-states, so the emergence of the introverted East Asian path can only be understood in light of the success of Ming and Qing policies in developing by far the largest market economy of their times.

Giovanni Arrighi (7 July 1937 - 18 June 2009) was Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, his books include The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times.

Notes

[1] See Ikeda (1996) for an overview of the contribution of these scholars. The Japanese school builds upon, and critically departs from, the earlier conceptualization of the China-centered system by Fairbank and his students (Fairbank 1968). On the relationship between the two conceptualizations, see Perdue (2003).
[2] Hamashita (1993: 75-6; 1994: 92; 1997: 114-124).
[3] Sugihara (1996: 38).
[4] Arrighi (2007: chapter 8).
[5] While between 1815 and 1914 there were wars among the European powers for a mere three and a half years (including the Crimean War), in each of the two centuries preceding 1815 European powers were at war with one another for an average of sixty to seventy years. Polanyi (1957: 5).
[6] See Arrighi (2007: chapters 5 and 8).
[7] Based on information contained in Gernet (1982); Freeman-Grenville (2002); “Ancient Battles and Wars of Siam and Thailand,” in Siamese and Thai History and Culture. (1999); “China, 1400-1900 A.D.” in Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 2004, and “Southeast Asia, 1400-1900 A.D.” in Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 2001. This, of course, was a five-hundred years’ peace only in comparison with the European hundred years’ peace, that is, excluding civil wars and China’s frontier wars to be discussed below.
[8] Sugihara (1996: 37-8); Kawakatsu (1994: 6-7).
[9] Perdue (2003: 60, 65).
[10] McNeill (1982: 143); Arrighi (2007: 266-72).
[11] Wong (1997: 148). This relationship is analogous to the main difference between European overseas empires and the Chinese tributary system which, as we shall see, for the most part involved a transfer of resources in the form of gifts and preferential trade to the peripheries.
[12] Polanyi (1957: 5-7).
[13] On the British transformation of the balance of power into an instrument of informal rule, see Arrighi and Silver (1999: 59-64).
[14] Arrighi (1994: chapter 2). The East-West asymmetry has a long history, which antedates the “extended” sixteenth century and the Ming era. See Lewis (1970: vii); Cipolla (1976: 206); Abu-Lughod (1989: 106-7). In this study, however, we are only concerned with the particular East-West asymmetry that shaped, and was itself transformed by, developments in Europe during the “extended” sixteenth century and in East Asia during the Ming-Qing era.
[15] Kennedy (1987:7). Alternatively, as McNeill put it, “it is easy to suppose that if the Chinese had chosen to continue sending exploratory voyages overseas, a Chinese admiral, riding the Japan current, might have sailed into San Francisco Bay several decades before Columbus blundered into the Caribbean islands.” McNeill (1998: 229). With ships that probably displaced 1,500 tons, compared to the 300 ton flagship of Vasco Da Gama, China’s seaborne capacity at this time had no peer. See McNeill (1982:44).
[16] Quoted in Wolf (1982: 125).
[17] Arrighi (2007: 234-49).

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