Monday, March 28, 2011

The Consolidation of Power in the American and Roman Empires: On the Rise and Fall of Empires

Posted by Find Insurance Online at 10:41 AM

The American federal government was for at least a century, and perhaps even longer, primarily involved in defending the new empire and regulating commerce between the republics (or states more generically). By the dawning of the twenty-first century, the U.S. Government had grown both in scope and in the number of employees on its payroll while the governments of the republics had been reduced to functioning as little more than local governments. In other words, Congress had come to act like a state legislature, while the states had accepted their status as mere localities. This fundamental shift with respect to American federalism, as well as the empire-“kingdom”-city arrangement, bears a striking resemblance to the Roman empire. By implication, this similarity might lead us to some conclusions regarding the future the United States within the larger story of the rise and fall of empires.

During its first two centuries, according to Price and Thonemann (2010, p. 262), “(t)he Roman empire was not, on the whole, governed by Romans. In any given year, the central government sent out a total of around 160 officials for a subject population of 50 million or more—fewer overseas officials than were sent out from Athens to administer its Aegean empire in the fifth century BC. The most important of these officials were the forty-odd provincial governors, appointed by the Senate or the emperor. . . The duties of a governor were not burdensome, being largely confined to provincial jurisdiction and local dispute-resolution. . . . most of the real administration of the empire was undertaken by the local communities themselves.” In other words, the Roman imperial government by in large kept the peace and allowed for commerce between its provinces, or states in modern language, and protected the empire from foreign invasion. Most of the domestic policy, and even implementation of imperial non-military policy (e.g., tax), was done by city officials rather than imperial civil servants. The arrangement in the early U.S. was not exactly the same, for the governors were chosen by the states and served as akin to heads of state akin to the province’s kings in the Roman context. Also, in the American case the state governments, rather than their cities, were the primary political organ within any given state. Even so, the balances of imperial involvement to that of the province or state/city seem to have been similar in the ancient and early-modern cases.

According to Price and Thonemann (2010, p. 262), “The Roman empire was a world of cities. More than three hundred cities are known in the province of Asia alone; across the whole empire, they certainly numbered in the thousands. The cities – or, more precisely, the local civic elites – were responsible for the assessment and collection of taxes, urban and rural police duties, road-building and maintenance and their own food- and water-supply. . . . Cities in the Roman empire, then, were not merely urban conglomerations; they were the indispensable cogs by which the whole imperial machinery turned. In the eastern half of the Roman empire – particularly in Greece, Asia Minor and the Levant – there was a long tradition of city life, and for the most part, Rome simply preserved the pre-existing urban network.” Similarly, the early U.S. Government largely concerned itself with preserving the system and defending it, while state governments (and their subordinate cities) were the indispensable cogs by which the United States functioned.

The comparison has the virtue of not conflating different political categories. Like the United States, the Roman empire was made up of different cultures, or nations, with the predominant political identification of the inhabitants being with the latter—though in both cases this too would change. According to Price and Thonemann (2010, p. 285), “the Roman empire was essentially a world of religious pluralism.” Similarly, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson wrote of the tremendous cultural differences existing between Massachusetts and Virginia. Even two hundred years later, cultural differences between, say, between Massachusetts and Texas for example, are still significant, rivaling such differences between two states of the E.U.
According to Price and Thonemann (2010, p. 267), “(t)he Roman empire of the late Republican period, like the Persian empire, was an incoherent mosaic of different cultures, unified by little more than the common experience of Roman rule.” The ensuring process of Romanization was self-initiated, as people associated Romanness with power. For example, “the new Roman town at Augustodunum was the result of the Gauls’ own enthusiasm for the trappings of civilized city life, rather than any top-down initiative by the central government” (2010, p. 269) “Put simply, the political dominance of Rome made Roman things fashionable. People aspired to be and look Roman, since Roman-ness was associated with power” (2010, pp. 269-70). Similarly, after the civil war between the Confederate States and the U.S. Government, people began to identify themselves first as Americans because of the power that that signified. The union had won the contest, after all. Also like the Roman empire, the extent to which this happened differed by region. “It is clear that the eastern provinces of the Roman empire did not become ‘Romanized’ to anything like the same extent as the western provinces. . . . ’Romanization’ in the west and ‘classicism’ in the east were only in very limited ways conscious articles of policy of the Roman government. Far more important, in both cases, were the needs and aspirations of the provincials themselves” (2010, p. 283).  The first hundred years of the United States was remarkably similar. So too, were the expansions in imperial governance as the threats facing the respective empires were seen to be more serious.
According to Price and Thonemann (2010, p. 304), in the early empire, the Roman government had “operated a somewhat laissez-faire system. Neither emperor nor governors went out looking for trouble. They wanted to maintain good order, but assumed that individual cities would provide the basic fabric of life. The problems facing the empire in the third century made the old system look weak” (2010, p. 305). Likewise, the problems facing the American economy in the 1930s made “the old system look weak.” The New Deal began a trajectory away from laissez-faire capitalism via regulation that involved an extraordinary expansion of the federal government.  In the Roman case, “Diocletian divided the provinces into smaller areas, more than doubling the total number of provinces form forty-eight to more than a hundred. For example, the old province of Thrace (north-east Greece and Bulgaria) was divided into four provinces, including ‘Europa’, which contained just twenty-two cities. . . . The provinces were then grouped into twelve large districts: for example, Galliae (covering central-northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands and part of Germany), Africa (central North Africa), or Oriens (all the way from the Tigris to the Red Sea)” (2010, p. 305). Interestingly, the Roman empire had had 48 provinces and the U.S. similarly had 50 as of the beginning of the twenty-first century. Also, the scale of Diocletian’s regions suggests that the scale of at least some of the original provinces matches that of some of the American republics, which are equivalent in scale to European countries (i.e., E.U. states). Whereas medieval kingdoms were much smaller than the early-modern kingdoms (and thus modern European nation-states), the provinces of the Roman empire prior to Diocletian’s work were on the same scale. For instance, “Egypt was a core province; Britannia was a subject territory province, as was Judaea” (2010, p. 289).  The combination of such provinces can thus be likened to the U.S. and E.U.—each being empire polities of like scale. In other words, comparing the U.S. to the Roman empire does not involve a scaling category mistake.
Price and Thonemann go on to describe Diocletian’s changes in terms of the imperial government—changes which I contend resemble those of the U.S. Government. “This creation of new provinces and of a new layer of Roman administration greatly increased the number of officials on the Roman payroll” (2010, p. 305). The assumption was that the Roman authorities would be able run things better than the cities had done.  Similarly in the American case, the operative assumption was that federal employees were more competent than state employees. This was definitely the case concerning civil rights enforcement; even state officials were not trusted by federal officials.
Based on such likenesses, it is only natural to ask whether the United States will fall under its own weight, if indeed the expansion of the imperial government of Rome played a significant role in the fall of that empire. The U.S. Government’s $14 trillion debt by 2011 may suggest that the weight of the center may indeed suffocate this early-modern and modern incarnation of empire as republics within an extended republic.  Were we to ignore the empire-level and scale of the United States altogether, we would miss such lessons (or warnings) that we could learn by comparing our polities to the Roman empire and its provinces. Both instances may be cases of the natural tendency of power to concentrate. When at the imperial level, such consolidation is at odds with the inherent diversity that pervades an empire of cultures. The expansion of the federal government may therefore not be so much due to the idiosyncratic preferences of succeeding generations of American voters, but, rather, the working out of a natural tendency that also ran through the Roman empire. Lest history be consigned to repeat itself, we might ask ourselves whether even learning from this lesson can make any difference, given the nature of power. Perhaps the best that we can hope for from the lesson learned is a delay or postponement of the inevitable, for no empire is exempt from the rise and fall of empires in the course of world history even as it unfolds today.

Click to add a Comment or Question (or View Posted Comments) on the American empire relative to the Roman empire on power and consolidation.

Source: Price, Simon, and Peter Thonemann, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History form Troy to Augustine (New York: Viking, 2010).

 

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