redwooding

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

It got worse into the 1930s. Then it got much, much better from the 1940s into the 1980s. From the 1980s onward it's been getting much worse again.

With the 200s BC, we enter fully into an age of empires in Eurasia and North Africa. Moving west to east, the major players are Rome in Italy, Carthage in North Africa, Ptolemaic Egypt (one of Alexander’s successor states), the Seleucids in Western Asia (another Alexandrian successor state), the Mauryan Empire in India, and the Qin and the Han Empires in China. The scale of these players changes over the course of the century, so I’m going to include two maps as context, one from the start of the century and one from its end (maps are from https://www.worldhistorymaps.info/ancient/). I’ve outlined the major players in red and some medium powers in orange. 

300 BC

200 BC

You’ll see a few major changes between these maps. In midcentury we’ve got 1) the growth of the Mauryan Empire into further south areas of India and 2) the Seleucids losing Central Asia to the breakaway Greco-Bactrian and Parthian kingdoms. (Make a mental note of the Parthians, they’ll be important next week.) In the last few decades of the century we’ve got 3) the rise of Rome at the expense of Carthage and 4) the rise of imperial China under the Qin and then Han Dynasties. By the end of the century there’s  almost a continuous string of empires from the Strait of Gibraltar to the east coast of China.

The capital cities of the Mauryan Empire (Pataliputra) and Han Empire (Chang’an) are both estimated at around 400,000 people in the 200s BC, and Rome may have been in the same ballpark (I haven’t found any clear numbers on the size of the city of Rome during the Republic, but by the start of the Roman Empire two centuries later it was 1-2 million people and it grew fast during that time). Alexandria, the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt, could have been a similar size. Attempts to estimate populations in ancient history are very fuzzy, so take the numbers with a grain of salt, but these were unprecedentedly large cities. 

In relation to the Axial Age, an interesting trait of the Roman Republic and Mauryan and Han Empires empires is that all had moral definitions contrasting themselves with something else: empire wasn’t just a claim to raw power, it rested on moral claims. The Roman Republic contrasted itself morally with both the abuses of the older Roman monarchy (the tale of the rape of Lucretia as the inciting event for the overthrow of the monarchy and the creation of the Roman Republic) and, once the Punic Wars started, with its enemies the Carthaginians. The Han Empire contrasted an image of their virtuous rule with the tyranny of their predecessors the Qin; they began their rule with a general amnesty for all prisoners, later abolished the most brutal forms of capital punishment, lowered taxes on the common people, and followed Confucianism. 

Ashoka, in the Mauryan Empire, contrasted his later enlightened reign with his own prior actions as conqueror, creating inscriptions and pillars with quite unprecedented moral confessions from a ruler, expressing “remorse…deep distress and sorrow” for the many deaths from his brutal conquest of Kalinga. He was also surprisingly candid about his moral transformation being a gradual process: “I have been an upsaka [Buddhist lay follower] now for more than two and a half years. But for the first year I did not make much of an effort. However, for the past year I have been closely associated with the Buddhist order, and I made a strong effort.” Even if one doesn’t regard Ashoka’s inscriptions as fully sincere, the fact that he considered this a convincing form of royal propaganda represents a fundamental difference from earlier empires like Assyria that regarded power as a justification in itself.

This means that by the end of the century, in both China and India the “wise ruler” strain of philosophy (in Confucian and Buddhist-adjacent forms) had triumphed over the “brutal pragmatist” strain represented by the Legalists and Kautilya respectively.

Another transformation brought about in India by Ashoka was a change to what ritual meant. While in both Rome and China ritual animal sacrifices by the government continued – in Rome they were even ramped up at tenser moments in the wars with Carthage – in India Ashoka banned them under the principle of ahimsa (not harming other beings). This fundamentally altered the practice of Hinduism, where the Brahmins’ role in the sacrifices had been a core element. At the same time, Ashoka sponsored Buddhist religious buildings (stupas, which memorialized the Buddha’s life and contained relics) and made religious pilgrimages. Thus, while some Axial strains had called rituals out as meaningless in the absence of ethical behaviour (including Judaism, Buddhism, and Mohism, but notably not Confucianism), that didn’t mean the end of all rituals, nor of offerings (people offered flowers and perfumes to the Buddha), but their change into something new and more personally devotional, and seen as aiding moral development. Ritual would continue through cycles of being dismissed and reinvented through the rest of religious history.

Ashoka’s ban on animal sacrifices and support for Buddhist devotional sites didn’t mean that the principles he promoted were exclusively Buddhist. The behaviours his inscriptions advocated – compassion, generosity towards renunciates and brahmins, honesty, respect for elders – were ones that Buddhist, Hindus, Jains, and many other religions of the time would have agreed on. He urged respect between followers of competing teachers and religions and avoiding sharp arguments. He provided support for religious communities of many backgrounds; the first monastic communities originated in 400s-200s BC South Asia.

It is quite fascinating to me that we have an answer to the hypothetical question of “what if Qin Shi Huang had a crisis of conscience?” and it’s someone who was a near-contemporary of Qin Shi Huang. And with that we’ll turn to China.

For all its fame and all its impact on China, it’s striking just how short the Qin Dynasty was: 15 years, from 221 BC when it finished conquering its rivals to 206 BC. The Qin Dynasty lasted less time than the MCU has. Qin Shi Huang himself only lived until 210 BC. But in that time, he did a lot. That included major building projects (expansions of canals and roads; flood control and irrigation; connecting walls built by earlier states to make the first iteration of the Great Wall; and his famous tomb), which were generally constructed by mandatory (corvée) labour from the peasantry, and paid for by high taxes, also mostly on the peasantry. It also included standardization of weights, measures, the writing system, and coinage (this is when China's classic round-coin-with-square hole model came in), and a standard gauge for vehicle wheels (meaning that the tracks worn in roads by vehicles would be the same distance apart wherever you went). And it involved large-scale forced relocation as a colonization strategy in newly-conquered areas – to Inner Mongolia in the northwest, and to the east and southeast. 

Most notoriously among China’s Confucians and scholars, it involved extreme intellectual control. The Legalist Book of the Lord Shang was very blunt on the purpose of this: “If the people do not prize learning, they will be stupid; if they are stupid, they will have nothing to do with extraneous matters; if they have nothing to do with extraneous matters they will prize agriculture and not neglect their duties; if the people do not disdain agriculture, the country will be peaceful and safe.” Criticism of the Qin, or even discussion of history or philosophy, was punished by death. And Qin Shi Huang had every single book of literature, philosophy, or history burned except those gathered in the imperial library, to give the regime an absolute monopoly on knowledge. As a result, when the imperial library itself was burned by rebels in the war to overthrow the Qin, the last copies of massive numbers of texts were lost. The fact that we know as much as we do about pre-Qin China is a miracle of scholarship, thanks to Han Dynasty scholars who re-wrote as much as they could from scratch.

The combination alienating the peasantry by forced labour, heavy taxes, and forced relocations; alienating the scholarly classes who made up much of the civil service by extreme censorship; and alienating the nobles with many economic changes, led to the Qin’s rapid demise and the rise of the Han (whose first emperor rose to the position from being a small-time local sheriff, which I would love to get into but this is too long already).

Moving on to Rome!

I’m going to be brief on the First Punic War (264-241 BC) and Second Punic War (218-201 BC). The most important takeaway is that Rome went from being a small state in central Italy to having colonies in Spain and being the dominant naval power of the central and western Mediterranean. In the First Punic War Rome went from having no navy to defeating the Carthaginians – the main naval power of the time – at sea. (This appears to have been achieved in part by 1) capturing a Carthaginian ship, reverse-engineering it, and building hundreds of ship on that model, and 2) developing ship-to-ship bridges that locked their ships to enemy ships and enabled the Romans to carry out essentially an infantry battle at sea.) The Second Punic War was the one with Hannibal bringing war elephants over the Alps; in fact he brought them all the way from Spain, and the war was mainly over control of Spain. Rome won, picking up Carthage’s Spanish colonies and reducing Carthage to virtual powerlessness. 

The rest of the world was also changing rapidly This ranged from migration and settlement of new areas (the Austronesians reached Micronesia sometime between 500 and 0 BC; the Arawak people of South America reached the Caribbean in the 200s BC), to new trade connections, to state formation in new areas. On the Niger River in West Africa, the town of Jenne was established as an important site for trade, at the meeting of trade routes carrying copper (from the Aïr mountains to the east), gold (from the southwest), rice and fish (from where the Niger River spreads into a large inland delta) and grains like sorghum and millet (from the drier Sahel area). It was a junction where trade goods could be transferred between land-based trade routes and river-based ones.

Meroë to the south of Egypt was another major site for trade. It was the successor to the Napata kingdom that had once ruled Egypt, but it had now moved its capital further south (still in the Sudan area north of the meeting of the Blue and White Nile). It had large-scale iron manufacturing, attested by mounds of iron slag. Its trade products included domestically-produced iron and cotton as well as luxuries like gold and ivory obtained from further south in Africa. It transported all these eastward overland to the Red Sea (rapids on the Sudanian Nile made the river route less navigable), where they linked up with the naval trade routes of Ptolemaic Egypt. Meroë also had a substantial agricultural base, and built dams for irrigation and water supply. It had its own alphabetic script, which has not yet been deciphered, and built small pyramids for the burial of its rulers.

Moving east, we see the first geographical spread of Axial religions: in response to ambassadors sent by Ashoka, Buddhism spread to southern India and Sri Lanka. Ashoka’s ambassadors illustrate just how interconnected the world was becoming: he also sent ones to Greek states and to Ptolemaic Egypt. So by this time there would have been Indians in Greece aware of Greek philosophy, and Greeks aware of Indian philosophy.

Based on recent research, Indian Ocean trade appears to have extended eastwards between India and Southeast Asia. Khao Sam Kaeo was an urban centre and trading site dating to this period. It was located on the Isthmus of Kra – the narrowest part of Thailand’s southern peninsula and a key location for overland (or river) transport of goods to connect with sea routes to the rest of Southeast Asia and China. 

Lastly, this was a time of state formation in the Mayan regions of southern Mesoamerica, with some of the earliest ones being centred on the cities of Nakbé and El Mirador. Richard Hansen, the discoverer of El Mirador, calls it the capital of the Kan Kingdom; but it it still an open question of how much of the surrounding area it ruled, and how much may have been ruled by competing Mayan states. Nakbé and El Mirador were also the sites of the earliest monumental Mayan pyramid temples, but building really got going in the next century, so we’ll cover that later. Surrounding these cities, Mayan agriculture involved a mix of wetlands and raised fields. Additionally, the earliest Mayan writing, inscribed in the site of San Bartolo, dates from this period; most of it had not been translated, but one part looks like the Mayan word for “king”, and is located near a large mural (from the a century later) that appears to show a coronation. So the Mayans may have had kings by this point.

The other is at the end of the novel, when Darcy has proved that he can, in fact, act with a sense of noblesse oblige: when Elizabeth and the Gardiners come to Pemberley, he treats them very well instead of haughtily, and when he takes care of the Lydia business. He is in fact quite noble about this, taking no public credit. Very late, he admits to Elizabeth how he was taught to think meanly of the world - of anyone outside his circle - and he acknowledges how wrong that was.

That is, he got better.

It's old-fashioned. It's modern. It's butch. It's femme. It's snazzy. It's practical.

Wikipedia talks about the bloomers and the leg-o-mutton sleeves, but I'm also noticing a lot of these outfits have absolute supervillain lapels, which I also like a lot.

I didn't know until now that it was real historical fashion!

As with last week, I’m going to start with the history of ideas in this age before moving to the history of events, because this is an era with a vast number of ideas that had enduring significance. Some of them had originated in the previous century, but this is when a full picture of parallel developments across China, India, and Greece forms.

It’s worth noting that when it comes to the major Axial figures of the 400s BC – Socrates, Buddha, Confucius – we have no writing from their own hands about their ideas. Their philosophies and beliefs were handed down by their followers, disciples or students. These included two greatly important figures from the 300s BC: Plato, for Socrates, and Mencius, for Confucius, both of whom added their own ideas to their teachers’.

By the 300s BC, I can see three broad currents in the theological-philosophical-political sphere, which I am going to call Hermit, Wise Ruler, and Brutal Pragmatist. (A fourth element, orthogonal to these, is academia beyond these spheres; in the 300s BC this includes the groundbreaking Astadhyayi text on grammar and linguistics by Panini in India, as well as Aristotle’s writings on, well, everything.) The first two currents got their start earlier, with Buddhism and Jainism and some Upanishads in the Hermit stream and Confucianism in the Wise Philosopher stream; by the 300s each of them was represented in at least two of our three key Axial regions. 

The Hermit philosophies advocated a renunciation of power and possessions. In India this went with a focus on spiritual enlightenment and ethical behaviour; Indian hermits, or ‘renouncers’, occurred among Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus, as well as other lesser-known belief systems. One anecdote (recorded centuries after the fact) has Alexander in India meeting renouncers who have no regard for his conquests or power and dismiss them as wasteful and pointless. Alexander recognizes the total freedom of a man who neither wants nor fears anything within the world. A similar story is told about the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, who when told by Alexander the Great to ask for anything he wanted, said, “Move; you’re blocking my sunlight.” This illustrates the similarities between these ‘renouncing’ religious-philosophical ideas across regions.

Early Daoism in China was somewhat different from Indian renunciation in lacking concern with enlightenment or ethics – if I can be excused for being flippant, some of the writings on it come across as more of an “if it sucks, hit the bricks!” philosophy. One early text essentially said: go to the woods, fish for food, live as an “untroubled idler”. A recurring term is wuwei (“doing nothing”). It’s about deliberately checking out of politics, property, power, and responsibility in order to be untroubled by them. Actively seeking to act virtuously was seen as a step down from ideal, natural behaviour. 

The Wise Ruler philosophies are most famously expressed in Confucianism and in Plato’s Republic with its idea of philosopher-kings. In both cases, a king who acts and rules according to good philosophical principles will be a good king; in Confucianism, the goal is not for the philosophers themselves to become kings, but to find a king who will listen to them as advisors. Instead of the renunciation of power, this is about the responsible and ethical wielding of power. I’m not aware of an Indian philosophical school in this vein in the Axial period, but ironically, in Ashoka (200s BC) India probably had the closest thing to an ancient king who fit these philosophical ideals (at least if we take his inscriptions as representative of how he ruled in the later part of his reign).

Dropping the “ethical” and focusing just on “wielding of power” gives us the last of the three groups, the Brutal Pragmatist strain of political philosophy. These become expressed in a more systematic matter after the other axial currents, and probably in response to them. Brutal pragmatism as a means of rule obviously far predates the axial age: what is different now is that it has been challenged and needs to justify itself in philosophical language, in competition with the other currents. In some ways this is similar to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan far later in history, which provided a secular rationale for absolutism in contrast to both liberal political theory and the older idea of divine right of kings. 

In China this brutal pragmatism was expressed by the Legalist school, who believed that people were basically bad and the only way to keep them in line was by inducing fear through draconian punishments. The most (in)famous Chinese Legalist philosopher in this period was Shang Yang, advisor to the ruler of Qin. 

In India the brutal pragmatist current was represented by Kautilya, author of the Arthashastra (the title could be expressed as ‘economics’ or ‘statecraft’ or, heck, ‘the seven habits of highly effective rulers’) and advisor to Chandragupta Maurya, the first of the Mauryan emperors. (There’s debate around this, and the Arthashastra may have been written later, around the first centuries BC and AD, or contain elements from multiple time periods.) The Arthashastra provided a comprehensive examination of domestic and foreign policy, including management of ministries of finance, natural resources, transportation, justice, and others, and officials overseeing industries including liquor, gambling, and sex work. Its foreign policy was firmly realist, taking for granted that every nation sought to expand its territory through conquest and advising on advantageous alliance networks in a setting containing many small states. It emphasized force and punishment as a means of keeping control and stability, for only with stability could there be prosperity. Some of its policy recommendations are strikingly amoral in comparison to the setting of the day: for example, it says the wandering lifestyle of some renouncers makes them useful as international spies. It recognized religion as a force that could be used for practical ends, but limited its religious discussion to those topics, saying, “One can think rationally about action in the human realm; the divine realm is outside rational comprehension.” This is very different from a pre-Axial state, where keeping the gods happy through proper sacrificial rituals was a central purpose of the ruler. (It’s worth noting that there’s debate about when the Arthashastra was written, with some scholars putting it a few centuries later. But even if this is the case, it refers to many earlier texts that have not now been preserved, indicating a longer tradition of Indian political philosophy.)

Greek philosophy doesn’t seem to have had a brutal pragmatist strain – unless we count the sophists, who are accused of exhibiting a similar amorality – but, in an opposite example to Ashoka, they did have a ruler whose implementation of conquest by force was unparalleled in its day: Alexander of Macedon. A great irony is that followers of the ‘wise philosopher’ streams ended up more than once as teachers and advisors to brutal pragmatists: Aristotle was a teacher of Alexander, and two students of the Confucian Xun Zi were prominent officials in the conquering state of Qin.

This brings us to the history of events. The 300s BC saw the rise of the empire of Alexander in Greece and the Mauryan Empire in India, as well as the increasing predominance of the state of Qin within China and the Roman Republic within central Italy. 

But for context we need to step back in time a bit before the origins of those empires. The Persian Empire spent the early part of the 300s BC actually getting stronger. In 387 BC the Spartans were having military difficulties with other Greek states following Sparta’s defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans reacted by making a deal with the Persians that gave Persia control of all Anatolia and the northeast coast of Greece and made Persia the ‘guarantor of peace’ in disputes between Greek states. Basically, it gave Persia hegemony over Greece. Ironic, given that Sparta’s historical fame is heavily associated with fighting Persia.

Phillip II of Macedon (r. 359-336 BC) was, after this, the strongest Greek ruler, and in 337 BC the Greek states allied against Persia under his leadership. But in 336 BC he was assassinated. His 20-year-old son Alexander took over for him and the rest was history: within 6 years Alex had conquered Persia and ruled a continuous stretch of territory from Macedonia in the west to Egypt in the south to the borders of India in the east. Notably, though, it didn’t last: after his death in 323 BC, his successors immediately started fighting with each other and continued to do so until the end of the century, breaking the empire into multiple competing parts. The equally famous Qin Empire of China, which we’ll see next week, would likewise struggle to outlive its notorious founder and last less than 20 years. In contrast, the Mauryan Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya, lasted over 100 years, and the Han Empire and Roman Empire were even more long-lived. In each case, a short-lived dominant state or empire gave way to (or laid the foundation for) a much more lasting one. (To some degree this is a similar pattern to Assyria and Persia – an earlier empire ruling only by force, and a longer-lived one establishing a more stable ideology – even though Iron Age Assyria was longer-lived than other empires of its type.)

The Indian predecessor to the Mauryans is less well-known than Alexander the Great or Qin Shi Huang. It was the Nanda Empire, founded by Mahapadma Nanda around 350 BC. He was ruler of the state of Magadha, and under him Magadha gained control of the whole Ganges-Yamuna region – basically, the bulk of northern India. This would have been the empire that Alexander faced when he reached India. The Nanda dynasty were shortly after that (around 324-320 BC) overthrown by Chandragupta Maurya, who established the Mauryan Empire.

We’ve now reached an era of inter-imperial diplomacy: not just successive empires overthrowing each other (like Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians) but multiple ones interacting. Seleucus I Nicator, an Alexandrine general who had taken over the central Asian and Iranian parts of Alexander’s empire, attempted to invade India but was quickly stopped by Chandragupta Maurya. He ceded what is now Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan to Chandragupta Maurya, who gifted him 500 war elephants in return. These war elephants then played a major role in Seleucus’ victory over another Alexandrine general, Antigonus, who had claimed the Levant, Syria, and much of Anatolia. The Seleucids and Mauryans additionally made a marriage alliance, and there was a Seleucid ambassador stationed in the Mauryan capital of Pataliputra.

At the same time Qin in China was expanding its control. Qin was based around its capital of Xi’an in western China. Over the 300s BC, it first expanded south into Sichuan, gaining rich agricultural land, and then captured much of the rest of western China from its rivals. It was the state where Legalist philosophy was most prominent, with adherents including the Qin prime minister, Shang Yang. He created a centralised state entirely oriented towards military mobilization and conquest. Government became more systematic: people and land were carefully counted and measured in order to exact heavy taxation and forced labour from the peasantry. Weights and measures were standardized. People were classified into groups of adjacent households, and if anyone in the group stepped out of line, the whole group was harshly punished.

Like Qin, Rome was not yet a great power but was expanding its territory through conquest, and during this century it increased its prominence in central Italy substantially. Its system of expansion was one it would continue in its later conquests through Italy. Conquered populations were enslaved and their lands annexed. Some of these lands were distributed to Roman soldiers, others to aristocratic landowners. The fact that both of those groups benefitted from conquests by obtaining land and slaves diffused social conflicts between them. Rome’s social model and social stability basically required continual conquest. Even as a midsize, politically republican state, it was already operating like an empire: drawing resources from conquered areas to benefit the core territory. New infrastructure projects supported conquest and growth. The late 300s BC saw the building of the Appian Way, a stone-paved road to enable rapid movement of armies from Rome to wars in the south, as well as the first aqueduct bringing water to Rome from outlying areas.

On the one hand, as @firawren says, it reinforces that “love isn’t enough,” which is obviously a part of the message in favor of sense.

Captain Wentworth thinks there is nothing so proper as going down on Anne. Henry Tilney? You cannot doubt. Charles Bingley? Jane would be completely embarrassed but he'll talk her into it. Elizabeth needs to bring Darcy around but we know she can do it. Edward would go on his knees for Elinor. Colonel Brandon needs to protect his knees but Marianne doesn't even make a single old age joke about it. Emma can ask for what she wants but Fanny Price...

Fanny Price takes what she is given and expresses endless gratitude. And while Edmund is perceptive, he was the only one to help when she couldn't write home to her brother, he bought her the chain when she needed something for her cross... he also has this quietly selfish quality to him (the Portsmouth letter that doesn't ask anything about her and "Fanny think of me!") and a penchant for expecting Fanny to be his mirror and go along with all his expectations ("asking" for advice about joining the play and their conversation about Henry's proposal) which leaves me absolutely certain that he will just do whatever satisfies himself in bed and never think about giving Fanny anything more. And she'll be content, just like she was with his half-written little note and the endless useless gifts from Tom, and never understand that she could have so much more. Mary Crawford could have gotten head out of Edmund, but never Fanny Price.

And yes, I know I know, it was the Regency times, women are not basing their happiness on their expectation for orgasms but I can still want the very best things for them can't I?