Abstract
Two economy-worlds have dominated Eurasia for centuries, the Roman and Chinese ones. Rome rose as a big dominant city before manifesting any imperialist purposes. The Mediterranean Sea was the heart of the Roman Empire, while its Chinese counterpart was much more continental. Both empires were repeatedly invaded, and, in both cases, some invaders succeeded to take control of parts of the empires, if not their entirety. The Great Corridor has been the spine of the Roman Empire, while the Chinese one has been successively dominated by the Asian, the Great and the Mongolo-American corridors. The Roman Empire never recovered from its collapse, while the Chinese one always was reborn after its disruption. This chapter stresses such similarities and differences between the two major economy-worlds.
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Notes
- 1.
Needham (1971, p. 29).
- 2.
Braudel (1966, p. 130).
- 3.
The Romans distinguished three classes of imperial towns: the coloniae with full Roman status and privileges, the municipae with only partial Roman citizenship, and the civitates, which were market and administrative centers for tribal districts. See Morris (1994, p. 58).
- 4.
The philosopher Seneca wrote: “All barriers have been knocked over. On virgin lands, cities have been built. The world is criss-crossed by roads. Everything is changing. Nothing is left of the old order.” Quoted by Laurent (2005, p. 20).
- 5.
Paris (1923, p. 56).
- 6.
- 7.
Jones (1964) op.cit.
- 8.
See King (1990).
- 9.
The city of Rome was served by a system of aqueducts and reservoirs, which eventually attained a total length of some 500 km. See Lanciani (1897).
- 10.
Lugdunum was the only city in Gaul to be honored with full Roman citizenship. See Morris, op. cit., 80.
- 11.
From about 150 BC, Byzantium became a free, tribute-paying city on the fringe of the Roman Empire. In AD 73, Emperor Vespasian formally incorporated the city into the empire. In 196, Septimus Severus renamed it Antoninia. In AD 324, Constantine made it Constantinople, which was renamed Istanbul in 1923.
- 12.
At least three of them could readily accommodate a modern football stadium.
- 13.
Morris, op. cit., 16 and 63.
- 14.
Julius Caesar required the use of tiles as an incombustible roof material, and Augustus created a corps of fire-fighting night watchmen, the vigiles. Morris, op. cit., 64.
- 15.
Chaliand (2005).
- 16.
Fernand Braudel, op. cit., 137.
- 17.
Paris, op. cit., 59.
- 18.
The Roman legions withdrew from Britain as soon as AD 407.
- 19.
Paul Bairoch (op. cit., 101-4) estimates that, under the Roman Empire, slaves represented about 20% of the total workforce of the Italian Peninsula. As for Rome, mass unemployment and underemployment, taken together, must certainly have exceeded 30%, if not 40%, of the population of working age (ibid., 82-4). Free Roman citizens enjoyed an incredible number of holidays: about 200 in the third century. Morris, op. cit., 68.
- 20.
Agriculture and manufacture were carried on by slaves who were reluctant and careless labor, wasteful of material.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
Goldsmith (1984).
- 24.
In some parts of Western Europe, as in England, urban life effectively disappeared after the fall of Rome.
- 25.
Maddison, op. cit., 18.
- 26.
Hartwell (1966).
- 27.
- 28.
Skinner (1977, pp. 211–229.
- 29.
Liu Ts’ui-Jung, “Demographic Aspects of Urbanization in the Lower Yantzi Region of China, c. 1500-1900,” in Urbanization in History: A Process of Dynamic Interactions, A.M. van der Woude, Akira Hayami, and Jan de Vries (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 350.
- 30.
Ibid, 330.
- 31.
Needham, op. cit.
- 32.
Bairoch, op. cit., 170.
- 33.
Maddison, op. cit., 14.
- 34.
Lugan (2001, p. 101).
- 35.
Levathes (1994).
- 36.
Gernet (1982), Needham, op. cit.
- 37.
Balazs (1968).
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Tellier, LN. (2019). The Two First Economy-Worlds: The Roman and Chinese Empires. In: Urban World History. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24842-0_4
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