And merchants, far from being sceptics, were often the agents of religious fervour and proselytism on the shifting trade routes between civilisations. Most major religions, like early Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, migrated along the trade routes with the cargoes of merchants and the backpacks of missionaries.
One ancient source demonstrates how the agents of God emerged before the warrior kings and then imposed on them. The history of Israel as a nation begins with the priestly Moses, who led his people out of bondage. Thereafter, the 'chosen people' are led by priests and prophets who regularly bring them back after multiple apostacies to the true God, but exercise tight control over their conduct, especially towards the priests and their rights. This model of voluntary surplus extraction set the pattern for all sacerdotal societies.
In exchange for spiritual services and mediation with God, the priests and prophets lived handsomely, with the best cuts from the burnt offerings, gold embroidered clothes, and prime accommodation in and around the temples. Their first duty was to prove their authenticity by out-competing the priests of rival faiths. They could then turn their efforts to controlling the morals and rites of the tribes in order to propitiate their God.
In doing so, they increased their own control over the nation and reinforced their right to surplus extraction. They did not do so without struggle. The Israelites rebelled against them whenever they were absent, as Moses found in Mount Sinai when Aaron made the golden calf; but Moses and the Levites always managed to persuade them back into the fold.
Even more telling was their control of the warrior leaders. The prophets could not themselves fight and used warriors like Joshua and David in battle, who turned out to be models of belief and obedience. But the priests' supreme test came with the people's demand for a king to defend them against their neighbours.
The prophet Samuel's anointing Saul as king is the paradigm of this transition from priestly to royal surplus extraction. When the Israelites asked for a king to lead them against the Philistines, Samuel warned them that he would become a tyrant.
The people persisted, so Samuel called down a thunderstorm on the harvest and threatened them with starvation. He finally relented on condition that they and their king obeyed the Lord - that is, continued to obey God's will as ordered by Samuel and his sons, the priestly judges.
King Saul and his successors David and Solomon did exactly as Samuel foretold. They built a vast palace and a magnificent temple, brought hundreds of young men and maidens into their personal service, and even stole their wives and daughters, as in the case of David and Bathsheba.
They triumphed in battle and slaughtered their enemies, but never thoroughly enough for the priests. When God through Samuel ordered Saul to destroy the Amalekites, every man, woman, and child and all their flocks, and the king slew only the people, Samuel sent him back to slaughter the animals and to hew the captured King Agag into pieces. In other words, while the priests were willing to give up a share of their surplus extraction to mollify the people and defeat their enemies, they made sure it was on their own terms and they kept overall control of the king.
The upside of this rivalry is that when exploiters fall out, exploitees sometimes come into their own again. The limited freedom of intellectuals in medieval universities, the great source of dissident and innovative thinking in the modern West, owes much to the division between church and state which began with Samuel and Saul and continued into Christian Europe.
In the end, all elites face the temptation to turn extraction into exploitation. Once a system of extraction is in place, the elite are tempted to take more and more and to think that unlimited power, wealth and comfort are theirs by right.
Concentrations of wealth begin to appear far beyond the real needs of the elite and more than the society can reasonably afford. These concentrations may, for example, be royal palaces and aristocratic houses full of luxuries and servants, great estates privatised out of the common pool of land for private hunting and enjoyment, access to unlimited personal service, private transport, and bodyguards. The palaces of the Roman, Chinese or Russian emperors at Capri and Agrigento, the Forbidden City and Summer Palace, and the Hermitage and Tsarskoe-Selo, far removed from their public functions, are one symptom of excess.
Even in the twentieth century, the private rations, special shops, accommodation, dachas, social clubs, hunting estates and brothels of the Soviet nomenklatura, and the gated and guarded housing compounds of the American corporate rich, were evidence of excess extraction - not to mention the steel barriers and armed police guarding the WTO, IMF, World Bank and G8 leaders at their annual summits.
In the public sphere, great public buildings, monuments, temples and mausoleums are a sign of excess. The Parthenon marks the excesses of 'democratic' but imperialist Athens in its golden-age exploitation of the colonies of the Delian League. The Persian and Egyptian temples and palaces were a tempting invitation to Alexander's Macedonians and the later Romans, Mamluks, Arabs and Turks, which the subject populace did not too eagerly defend.
The palaces and mosques of the Mughal emperors, Muslim symbols of oppression over the Hindu population, marked the decline of their rule and their vulnerability to intruders. Even the enigmatic stone gods of Easter Island represent an extraction of labour from a servile population that ended, to judge from the archeological evidence, in revolt and the extermination of the ruling elite.
The building of St Peter's in Rome and its accompanying art works were, through the selling of indulgences to pay for them and the Papacy's lavish life style, the immediate cause of the Reformation. Even the puritan Oliver Cromwell succumbed to the temptations of easy riches and emulated Charles I in his courtly extravagance and the ostentation of his daughter's wedding. Latterly, the multi-million dollar extractions of the Marcoses in the Philippines, the Sukarno and Suharto families in Indonesia, Nkrumah in Ghana, Idi Amin in Uganda, Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya, Milosovic in Serbia, and Mugabe in Zimbabwe are examples of the inability of dictators to keep their hands out of the public till.
The main objection to predatory extraction is not merely injustice. It is the threat to societal survival which this excess entails.
Marx wrote about the contradictions of capitalism, resulting from the inability of the producers to buy their own products, and the consequent cycle of economic depression and decline which inevitably follows. In truth, the same contradictions apply to all historical societies where the elite takes more than a reasonable share of the available resources. If the elite takes too much, the general populace is unable to consume the products of its own industry.
In theory, the elite can, as Malthus argued, spend their gains on luxury goods and services and still support the economy, but in practice they never spend enough on the mass consumer goods that drive the economic cycle.
As Keynes suggested, they hold much of their wealth in liquid form in modern terms, in Swiss bank accounts , which stultifies production. The result is increasing depression and discontent and, ultimately, economic implosion. Even before implosion occurs, discontent can take moral and political forms which threaten the stability of the state.
Long before depression becomes a direct threat, morale sinks to perceptible lows, to show itself in the form of increased crime, alcoholism, drug dealing, foot-dragging and absenteeism at work, and low levels of productivity, and the defence of an alienated government is viewed with indifference or hostility.
In the late Western Roman empire the increased weight of slavery in the countryside and heavy taxation in the towns made the populace indifferent to the survival of the state, and defence was left to German mercenaries who eventually overran the government and usurped the emperor's power.
The problem is exacerbated when the elite are of a different ethnic group or religion from the main population. In the exploitation of China by Genghis Khan's Yuan dynasty the peasants rallied against the Mongols to Zhu Yuanzhang, the peasant warlord who threw them out and founded the Ming dynasty in The Muslim Mughals were always fearful of their Hindu subjects and could not rely on them to fight against European rivals, notably the British.
In reverse mode, the Indian rulers of East Kashmir are violently resented by their Muslim subjects. Even the Popes protected themselves against their co-religionists with a Swiss Protestant bodyguard. Although not technically alien, the Russian Tsars and pomeshchiki were so aloof from their subjects that they spoke French rather than Russian and lived in a Western rather than Slavonic culture. Having paradoxically extended their extraction rate when they abolished serfdom at the cost of heavy redemption dues, the landed aristocracy saw their legitimacy challenged by the peasants who thought them an alien burden and declared in the Duma that 'We are yours but the land is ours'.
Even without, or before, revolution or foreign invasion, states can decline of their own inanition. So, while we know little about how societies were first organised for surplus extraction, we know a great deal about how they survive and eventually decline.
The larger the society, the greater the opportunity to extract surplus from an immense territory and population. That is why great empires decline and fall - eventually - faster and further the more they exploit. Paul Kennedy has shown how superpowers decline through external causes, specifically 'imperial overstretch' when the military costs of expansion and defence exceed the fiscal capacity of the state.
This is undoubtedly an ancillary cause of economic and political decline, but it is really a by-product of the internal problem, the failure of surplus extraction to match the rulers' ambitions.
It reflects the comparative size of the resource base and the rising cost of military and economic power in an increasingly competitive world. No European power acting alone can compete on the scale needed for superpower status at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The cost of projecting power escalates exponentially with the cost of modern weaponry, and the resource base required to qualify as a superpower expands with it. Only two super-states survived the Second World War with a sufficient extraction base, and one of them has since collapsed.
But the decline of both superpowers, through excessive surplus extraction from their 'spheres of influence' if not at home, has lessons for the current state of the world and its sole remaining superpower, the United States.
The question now is, what lesson does this hold for the current hegemonic power? Is the United States any more immune to decline than previous ones? Or is 'the end of history', so confidently forecast by Francis Fukuyama, able to halt the direction of change and continue 'the American century' far into the new millennium? The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
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Ancient civilizations, such as the Greeks and Romans, waged war against their neighbors in an effort to gain access to resources, territory, power, and glory. These conflicts were often spearheaded by some of the fiercest leaders in history, like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Kahn.
Though each warrior had different motives for their actions, they were each effective leaders who held or contributed to the growth of vast empires. Explore this collection to learn how the contemporary world was shaped by the conquests of ancient civilizations. The Assyrian Empire was a collection of united city-states that existed from B. The Mauryan Empire was the first pan-Indian empire. It covered most of the Indian region and was founded around B. Before Alexander the Great or the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire existed as one of the most powerful and complex empires of the ancient world.
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Article Vocabulary. First Triumvirate. Mongol Empire. Silk Road. Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
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