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Ternary Societies and Colonialism: Eurasian Trajectories

In previous chapters we studied first slave societies and then postslave colonial societies, looking in particular at the cases of Africa and India. Before beginning our study of the crisis of proprietarian and colonial societies in the twentieth century, which we will do in Part Three, we must first complete our analysis of colonialism and its consequences for the transformation of non-European inequality regimes. In this chapter we will be looking specifically at the cases of China, Japan, and Iran and, more generally, at the way in which the encounter between European powers and the principal Asian state structures affected the political-ideological and institutional trajectories of these various inequality regimes.

We will begin by examining the central role played by rivalries among European states in the development of unprecedented levels of fiscal and military capacity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, far beyond the capacities of the Chinese and Ottoman empires in the same period. This European state power, spurred by intense competition among states and sociopolitical communities of comparable size in Europe (especially France, the United Kingdom, and Germany), was largely responsible for the West’s military, colonial, and economic domination, which for a long time was the characteristic feature of the modern world. We will then analyze the various ideological and political constructs that supplanted trifunctional society in Asia in the wake of the encounter with European colonialism. In addition to the Indian case, which we have already discussed, we will be looking at Japan, China, and Iran. Once again, we will find that many trajectories were possible, and this leads us to minimize the role of cultural or civilizational determinism and to emphasize instead the importance of sociopolitical developments and the logic of events in the transformation of inequality regimes.

Colonialism, Military Domination, and Western Prosperity

We have already touched at several points on the central role of slavery, colonialism, and the most brutal forms of coercion and military domination in the rise of European power between 1500 and 1960. It is hard to deny that pure force played a key role in the triangular trade that brought slaves from Africa to French and British slave colonies, the southern United States, and Brazil. The fact that the raw material extracted from slave plantations yielded considerable profits to the colonial powers and that cotton in particular played a central role in the takeoff of the textile industry is also well established. We have also seen that the abolition of slavery led to generous compensation for the slaveowners (in the Haitian case resulting in a heavy debt to France that was not repaid until 1950, and in the American case resulting in the denial of civil rights to the descendants of slaves until the 1960s—or in South Africa until the 1990s). Finally, we saw how postslave colonialism relied on various forms of legal and status inequality, including forced labor, which persisted in France’s colonies until 1946.1

We turn now to the question of how European military domination, which gradually emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and led to European hegemony in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, depended on the European states’ development of an unprecedented level of fiscal and administrative capacity. Although the sources that would enable us to measure the tax revenues of all these countries prior to the nineteenth century are limited, certain facts are well established. In particular, recent research has shown that it is possible to collect reasonably homogeneous data on tax receipts for the major European countries and the Ottoman Empire from the early sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.² The main difficulty is to compare the numbers in a meaningful way. Although the populations of the countries in question are relatively well understood, at least to a first approximation, the same cannot be said of their levels of economic activity, about which our information is woefully incomplete. It is also important to remember that many obligatory (or quasi-obligatory) payments at that time were made not to the state but to other actors, such as religious organizations, pious foundations, and local seigneuries or military orders, not only in Europe but also in the Ottoman Empire, Persia, India, and China; comparison along these lines might also be interesting. In what follows, however, attention will be focused solely on monies collected by the central government in the strict sense of the word.

One way to proceed would be to estimate the gold or silver equivalent of the sums collected by states in various currencies. Since all currencies at the time had a metallic base, this would give us a good idea of each state’s capacity to pay for its policies by remunerating its soldiers, purchasing commodities, or financing the construction of roads and ships. What we find is a prodigious increase in the sums collected by European states between the early sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. In the period 1500–1550, the tax receipts of the major European powers such as France and Spain amounted to 100–150 tons of silver per year, roughly the same as the Ottoman Empire. At that time England was taking in barely fifty tons a year, partly owing to its smaller population.³ In the centuries that followed these sums would grow spectacularly, mainly due to the intensifying rivalry between England and France: both countries were taking in 600–900 tons of silver in 1700, 800–1,100 tons in the 1750s, and 1,600–1,900 tons in the 1780s, leaving all other European powers far behind. Importantly, Ottoman tax receipts remained virtually unchanged from 1500 to 1780: barely 150–200 tons. After 1750, it was not only France and England that had a far greater tax capacity than the Ottoman Empire; so did Austria, Prussia, Spain, and Holland (Fig. 9.1).

These changes can be explained in part by population changes (recall that in the eighteenth century France was by far the most populous country in Europe) and changes in output (England, for instance, made up for its smaller population by producing more per capita). But the main reason for the increase in tax receipts was intensified fiscal pressure from European governments while Ottoman appetites remained stable. A good way to measure the intensity of taxation is to look at tax receipts per capita and compare the results with daily wages in urban construction. Urban construction wages are relatively well known and easy to compare across countries over a long period both in Europe and the Ottoman Empire and to some extent in China. The available data are imperfect, but the orders of magnitude are quite striking. We find, for example, that per capita tax receipts amounted to two to four days of unskilled urban labor in the period 1500–1600 in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the Chinese empire. Tax pressure then intensified in Europe in the period 1650–1700. It rose to ten to fifteen days of wages in the period 1750–1780 and to nearly twenty days in 1850, following very similar trajectories in the major states, including France, England, and Prussia, where state and nation building (though begun much earlier) picked up speed in the eighteenth century. The growth of fiscal pressure in Europe was extremely rapid: although there was no clear difference between Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and China in 1650, the gap begins to widen around 1700 and becomes significant in the period 1750–1780 (Fig. 9.2).

FIG. 9.1.  State fiscal capacity, 1500–1780 (tons of silver)

Interpretation: In 1500–1550, tax receipts of the principal European states as well as the Ottoman Empire were equivalent to 100–200 tons of silver per years. In the 1780s, the tax receipts of England and France were between 1600 and 2000 tons of silver per year, while those of the Ottoman Empire remained below 200 tons. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.

Why did European states increase their fiscal pressure in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and why did the Ottomans and Chinese not follow suit? To be clear, note that this level of fiscal pressure is still very low compared with modern times. As we will see in subsequent chapters, taxes and other obligatory payments in Europe and the United States did not exceed 10 percent of national income throughout the nineteenth century and until World War I before jumping upward between 1910 and 1980 and then stabilizing at between 30 and 50 percent of national income after 1980 (see Fig. 10.14). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fiscal pressure was relatively low (never above 10 percent of national income) compared with modern times.

FIG. 9.2.  State fiscal capacity, 1500–1850 (days of wages)

Interpretation: In 1500–1600, per capita tax receipts in Europe were equivalent to two to four days of unskilled urban labor; in 1750–1850 this rose to ten to twenty days of wages. Receipts remained around two to five days of wages in the Ottoman and Chinese Empires. With national income per capita of around 250 days of urban wages, this meant that receipts stagnated at 1–2 percent of national income in the Chinese and Ottoman Empires but rose from 1–2 to 6–8 percent in Europe. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.

It is also interesting to note that the earliest estimates of national income (that is, the total income in cash and kind earned by the residents of a given country) appeared in the United Kingdom and France around 1700, thanks to authors such as William Petty; Gregory King; Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert; and Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban.4 The purpose of their work was to estimate the state’s fiscal potential and consider possible reforms of the tax system at a time when everyone felt that the central state was increasing its fiscal pressure and needed to take a more rational, quantitative approach to its finances. Estimates of national income were based on calculations of surface area and agricultural output as well as on commercial and wage data (including wages in the construction sector), and they provide useful orders of magnitude. The national income and gross domestic product series based on seventeenth-and eighteenth-century data enable us to see overall levels and progressions, but the decade-by-decade changes are too uncertain to use here, which is why I prefer to express the evolution of tax receipts in terms of tons of silver and days of unskilled urban labor (units of measurement better adapted to statistical work on these periods). To clarify our thinking, however, we can say the following: the increase in per capita tax receipts that we see in France, the United Kingdom, and Prussia, from two to four days’ wages in 1500–1550 to fifteen to twenty days’ wages in 1780–1820, corresponds to an increase in total tax receipts from barely 1–2 percent of national income in the early sixteenth century to about 6–8 percent of national income in the late eighteenth century (Fig. 9.2).⁵

When the State Was Too Small to Be the Night Watchman

As rough as these approximations may be, the orders of magnitude are worth keeping in mind because they correspond to very different state capacities. A state that claims only 1 percent of national income has very little power and very little capacity to mobilize society. Broadly speaking, it can put 1 percent of the population to work on tasks it deems useful.6 By contrast, a state that claims around 10 percent of national income as taxes can put about 10 percent of the population to work (or finance transfers or purchases of goods and equipment of a similar amount), which is a good deal more. Concretely, with tax receipts of 8–10 percent of national income, which is what European states were collecting in the nineteenth century, it is certainly not possible to pay for an elaborate educational, health, and welfare system (with free elementary and high schools, universal health insurance, retirement pensions, social transfer payments, and so on), which as we will see required much higher levels of fiscal pressure in the twentieth century (typically 30–50 percent of national income). By contrast, such sums are more than sufficient to allow the centralized state to pay for “night watchman” functions such as police forces and courts capable of maintaining order and protecting property at home along with equipping a military capable of projecting force abroad. In practice, when the fiscal pressure rose to around 8–10 percent of national income as in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or even 6–8 percent as in the late eighteenth century, military expenses alone generally absorbed half of all tax revenues and in some cases more than two-thirds.⁷

By contrast, a state with barely 1–2 percent of national income in tax receipts is condemned to be a weak state, incapable of maintaining order and carrying out even the minimal functions of the night watchman state. By this measure, most states around the world were weak until relatively recent times; this is true of European states until the sixteenth century and of the Ottoman and Chinese states until the nineteenth century. More precisely, the latter were weakly centralized state structures, incapable of autonomously guaranteeing the security of people and property and of maintaining public order and enforcing respect for the rights of property throughout the territory supposedly under their control. In practice, to carry out these regalian tasks, these states relied on various local entities and elites—seigneurial, military, clerical, and intellectual elites within the framework of trifunctional society in one of its many variants. Once European states developed a more significant fiscal and administrative capacity, new dynamics were set in motion.

Within the countries in question, the development of the centralized state coincided with the transformation of ternary societies into ownership societies, accompanied by the rise of proprietarian ideology and based on strict separation of regalian powers (henceforth the monopoly of the state) from property rights (supposedly open to all). Abroad, the capacity of European states to project force beyond their borders led to the formation first of slave and then of colonial empires and to the development of the various political-ideological constructs around which these were structured. In both cases, the processes by which fiscal and administrative capacities were constructed were inseparable from political-ideological developments. State capacities always developed with an eye to structuring domestic and international society (in the rivalry with Islam, for example); the process, unstable by nature, always involved social and political conflict.

To summarize, the development of the modern state involved two great leaps forward. The first unfolded between 1500 and 1800 in the leading states of Europe, which were able to increase their tax revenues from barely 1–2 percent of national income to about 6–8 percent. This process was accompanied by the development of ownership societies at home and colonial empires abroad. The second leap forward came in the period 1910–1980, when the rich countries as a group went from tax revenues of 8–10 percent of national income on the eve of World War I to revenues of 30–50 percent of national income in the 1980s. This transformation was accompanied by a broad process of economic development and historic improvement in living conditions and gave rise to various forms of social-democratic society. Within this general pattern different trajectories were possible. It proved difficult to extend the second leap forward to poorer countries in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as we will see later.

Back to the initial question: Why did the first leap forward, the development of an unprecedented fiscal capacity, take place in the leading European states in the period 1500–1800 and not in, say, the Ottoman Empire or Asia? There is no single answer to this question and no deterministic explanation. Nevertheless, one factor seems to have been particularly important: specifically, the political fragmentation of Europe into several states of comparable size, which led to intense military rivalries. From this another question naturally follows: What was the reason for Europe’s political fragmentation compared with the relative unity of China or even (to a lesser degree) India? It is possible that geographical and physical barriers played a role in Europe, especially in Western Europe (where France is separated from its most important neighbors by mountains, seas, or rivers). Clearly, however, different states might have emerged on different parts of European soil or in other parts of the world had socioeconomic and political-ideological developments taken a different course.

Nevertheless, if we take as given the state borders that existed in 1500, and if we then examine the sequence of events that led to the near tenfold increase of European state fiscal capacity between 1500 and 1800 (Figs. 9.1–9.2), we find that each major increase in tax revenues corresponded to a need to recruit new soldiers and field more armies in view of the quasi-permanent state of war that existed in Europe at the time. Depending on the nature of the political regime and the socioeconomic structure of each country, these recruitment needs led to the development of extensive fiscal and administrative capacities.⁸ Historians have focused mainly on the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the first European conflict of truly global scope since it involved the colonies in America, the West Indies, and India and laid the groundwork for revolutions in the United States, Latin America, and France. But in addition to these major conflicts, there was also a host of shorter, more localized wars. If we include all military conflicts across the continent in each period, we find that European countries were at war 95 percent of the time in the sixteenth century, 94 percent in the seventeenth century, and still 78 percent in the eighteenth century (compared with 40 percent in the nineteenth century and 54 percent in the twentieth century).⁹ The period 1500–1800 was one of incessant rivalry among Europe’s military powers, and this is what fueled the development of unprecedented fiscal capacity as well as numerous technological innovations, particularly in the areas of artillery and warships.¹⁰

By contrast, the Ottoman and Chinese states, which had fiscal capacities close to those of European states in the period 1500–1550 (Figs. 9.1–9.2), did not face the same incentives. Between 1500 and 1800 they ruled large empires in a relatively decentralized fashion and felt no need to increase their military capacity or fiscal centralization. Heightened competition among the medium-sized European states that were organizing themselves in this same period does indeed appear to have been the central factor in the development of specific state structures—structures that were more highly centralized and fiscally developed than the states emerging in the Ottoman, Chinese, and Mughal empires. In the beginning, European states developed their fiscal and military capacity primarily because of internal conflict in Europe, but ultimately this competition endowed these states with much greater power to strike states in other parts of the world. In 1550, the Ottoman infantry and navy comprised roughly 140,000 men, equal to the French and English forces combined (respectively, 80,000 men and 70,000 men). This equilibrium would be disrupted over the next two centuries, which were marked by endless wars in Europe. By 1780, Ottoman forces remained virtually unchanged (150,000 men), while the French and English armies and navies now numbered 450,000 (280,000 soldiers and sailors for France, 170,000 for England); in warships and firepower they also enjoyed marked superiority over potential enemies. To these numbers one must add 250,000 men for Austria and 180,000 for Prussia (states that had had no military to speak of in 1550).¹¹ In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman and Chinese empires were clearly dominated militarily by the states of Europe.¹²

Interstate Competition and Joint Innovation: The Invention of Europe

Is Western economic prosperity due entirely to the military domination and colonial power that European states exercised over the rest of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Clearly, it is very difficult to give a single answer to such a complex question, especially since military domination also fostered technological and financial innovations that proved useful in themselves. In the abstract, one can imagine historical and technological trajectories that would have enabled the countries of Europe to enjoy the same prosperity and the same Industrial Revolution without colonization: for instance, if planet Earth had been one vast European island-continent allowing no possibility of foreign conquest, no “great discovery” of other parts of the world, and no extraction of any kind. To conceive such a scenario would require a certain imagination, however, as well as a willingness to speculate boldly on the pace of technological innovation.

Kenneth Pomeranz has shown in his book on “the great divergence” how much the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—first in Britain and then in the rest of Europe—depended on large-scale extraction of raw material (especially cotton) and energy (especially in the form of wood) from the rest of the world—extraction achieved through coercive colonial occupation.13 In Pomeranz’s view, the more advanced parts of China and Japan had attained a level of development in the period 1750–1800 more or less comparable to corresponding regions of Western Europe. Specifically, one finds similar forms of economic development based in part on demographic growth and intensive agriculture (made possible by improved agricultural techniques as well as a considerable increase in cultivated acres thanks to land clearing and deforestation); one also finds comparable process of proto-industrialization, particularly in the textile industry. Subsequently, Pomeranz argues, two key factors caused European and Asian trajectories to diverge. First, European deforestation, coupled with the presence of readily available coal deposits, especially in England, led Europe to switch quite rapidly to sources of energy other than wood and to develop corresponding technologies. More than that, the fiscal and military capacity of European states, largely a product of their past rivalries and reinforced by technological and financial innovations stemming from interstate competition, enabled them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to organize the international division of labor and supply chains in particularly profitable ways.

Regarding deforestation, Pomeranz insists that by the end of the eighteenth century Europe came close to confronting a very significant “ecological” constraint. Forests in the United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Prussia, Italy, and Spain had been shrinking rapidly for several centuries: whereas they had once covered 30–40 percent of the land area around 1500, by 1800 they had decreased to little more than 10 percent (16 percent in France, 4 percent in Denmark). At first, imported wood from still-forested areas in eastern and northern Europe partially made up for the loss, but these new supplies quickly proved to be insufficient. China also experienced deforestation between 1500 and 1800 but to a lesser degree than in Europe, in part because the more advanced regions were better integrated politically and commercially with the wooded inland regions.

In the European case, the “discovery” of America, the triangular trade with Africa, and commerce with Asia made it possible to overcome this ecological constraint. The exploitation of land in North America, the West Indies, and South America using slave labor imported from Africa produced the raw materials (wood, cotton, and sugar) that not only earned handsome profits for the colonizers but also fed the textile factories that began to develop rapidly in the period 1750–1800. Military control of long-distance shipping routes allowed for the development of large-scale complementarities. The profits earned by exporting British textiles and other manufactured goods to North America compensated the owners of the plantations that produced wood and cotton, who could then feed their slaves with a portion of their profits. Note that a third of the textiles used to clothe slaves in the eighteenth century came from India, while imports from Asia (textiles, silk, tea, porcelain, and so on) were paid for in large part with silver mined in America from the sixteenth century on. By 1830, British imports of cotton, wood, and sugar required the exploitation of more than 10 million hectares of cultivable land, according to Pomeranz’s calculations, or 1.5–2 times all the cultivable land available in the United Kingdom.¹⁴ If the colonies had not made it possible to circumvent the ecological constraint, Europe would have needed to find other sources of supply. One is of course free to imagine scenarios of historical and technological development that would have enabled an autarkic Europe to achieve a similar level of industrial prosperity, but it would take considerable imagination to envision fertile cotton plantations in Lancashire and soaring oaks springing from the soil outside Manchester. In any case, this would be the history of another world, having little to do with the one we live in.

It seems wiser to take as given the fact that the Industrial Revolution emerged from Europe’s intimate ties to America, Africa, and Asia and to think about alternative ways in which these relationships might have been organized. What happened, as we have seen, was that international relations were shaped by European military and colonial domination, which made possible the forced transfer of slave labor from Africa to America and the West Indies, the forcible opening of Indian and Chinese ports, and so on. But those relations did not have to be as they were; they might have been organized in countless other ways, allowing for fair trade, free migration of labor, and decent wages, had the political and ideological balance of power been other than it was. By the same token, it is possible to imagine many ways of structuring global economic relations in the twenty-first century under many different sets of rules.

Accordingly, it is striking to note how little Europe’s successful military strategies and institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resembled the virtuous institutions that Adam Smith recommended in The Wealth of Nations (1776). In that foundational text of economic liberalism, Smith advised governments to adhere to low taxes and balanced budgets (with little or no public debt), absolute respect for property rights, and markets for labor and goods as integrated and competitive as possible. In all these respects, Pomeranz argues, Chinese institutions in the eighteenth century were far more Smithian than the United Kingdom’s. In particular, China’s markets were much more integrated. The grain market operated over a much broader geographic area, and labor mobility was significantly greater. One reason for this was the continuing influence of feudal institutions in Europe, at least until the French Revolution. Serfdom persisted in Eastern Europe until the nineteenth century (whereas it had almost totally disappeared from China by the early sixteenth century). Furthermore, there were more restrictions on labor mobility in Western Europe in the eighteenth century, especially in the United Kingdom and France, owing to Poor Laws and the great latitude granted to local elites and seigneurial courts to impose coercive regulations on the laboring classes. Europe also suffered from the prevalence of ecclesiastical property, much of which could not be sold.

Last but not least, taxes were much lower in China: barely 1–2 percent of national income compared with 6–8 percent in Europe in the late eighteenth century. The Qing dynasty enforced strict budget orthodoxy: taxes paid for all expenses, and there was no deficit. By contrast, European states, starting with France and the United Kingdom, accumulated significant public debt despite their higher taxes, especially in wartime, because tax revenues were never enough to cover the exceptional expenses of war together with interest payments on the accumulated debt.

On the eve of the French Revolution, both France and the United Kingdom had amassed public debts close to a year’s national income. By the end of the American Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), British public debt had soared to more than 200 percent of national income; the debt was so high that one-third of the taxes paid by British taxpayers between 1815 and 1914 (mainly by people of middle and low income) was devoted to repayment of the debt and interest (profiting the wealthy who had lent the government money to pay for the wars). We will come back to all this later when we look at the problems posed by public debt and its reimbursement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At this stage, note simply that these colossal debts do not seem to have impeded European development. Like Europe’s higher tax rates, its debts helped to build state and military capacity that proved decisive for increasing European power. To be sure, taxes and debts might have been used to pay for things more useful than armies in the long run (such as schools, hospitals, roads, and clean water). It also might have been preferable to tax the wealthy rather than allow them to become still wealthier by buying government bonds. In view of the era’s violent interstate competition, and with political power in the hands of the wealthy, the choice was made to spend money on the military and to finance it with public debt, and this helped to secure European domination over the rest of the world.

On Smithian Chinese and European Opium Traffickers

In the abstract, Smith’s tranquil, virtuous institutions might have made sense if all countries had adopted them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (although he underestimated the usefulness of taxes for financing productive investment and neglected the importance of educational and social equality for economic development). But in a world in which some countries develop superior military capacity, the most virtuous are not always the ones who come out on top. The history of European-Chinese relations is a case in point. By the eighteenth century Europe had exhausted the supply of American silver with which it had paid for its trade with China and India, and Europeans feared they might have nothing to sell in exchange for imported silk, textiles, porcelain, spices, and tea from the two Asian giants. The British accordingly attempted to intensify their growing of opium in India to export to Chinese resellers and consumers who had developed a taste for it. The opium trade grew substantially over the course of the eighteenth century, and in 1773 the East India Company established its monopoly over the production and export of the drug from Bengal.

The Qing emperor, seeing the enormous increase in opium imports and under pressure from his bureaucracy and enlightened public opinion to stop it, tried to enforce a ban on the recreational use of opium in 1729. Subsequent emperors took a more proactive approach for obvious public health reasons. In 1839 the emperor ordered his envoy in Canton not only to end the traffic but also to burn existing opium stores without delay. In late 1839 and early 1840, the British press launched a vigorous anti-China campaign, which was paid for by opium dealers; articles denounced China’s unacceptable violation of British property rights and attack on the principle of free trade. Unfortunately, the Qing emperor had seriously underestimated the UK’s progress in increasing its fiscal and military capacity: in the First Opium War (1839–1842) Chinese forces were quickly routed. The British sent a fleet to shell Canton and Shanghai and forced the Chinese in 1842 to sign the first “unequal treaty” (as Sun Yat-sen would call it in 1924). The Chinese indemnified the British for the destroyed opium and war costs while granting British merchants legal and fiscal privileges and ceding the island of Hong Kong.

The Qing government nevertheless refused to legalize the opium trade. England’s trade deficit continued to grow until the Second Opium War (1856–1860), and the sack of the summer palace in Beijing by French and British troops in 1860 finally forced the emperor to give in. Opium was legalized, and the Chinese were obliged to grant the Europeans a series of trading posts and territorial concessions and forced to pay a large war indemnity. In the name of religious freedom it was also agreed that Christian missionaries would be allowed to roam freely in China (while no thought was given to granting similar privileges to Buddhist, Muslim, or Hindu missionaries in Europe). The irony of history is this: owing to the military tribute that the French and British imposed on China, the Chinese government was obliged to abandon its Smithian budget orthodoxy and for the first time experiment with a large public debt. The debt snowballed, and the Qing were forced to raise taxes to repay the Europeans and eventually to cede more and more of their fiscal sovereignty, following a classic colonial scenario of coercion through debt, which we have already encountered elsewhere (in Morocco, for example).15

Another important point about the very heavy public debts that European states took on to finance their internecine wars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: these played an important role in the development of financial markets. This is true in particular of British debt issued during the Napoleonic wars, which to this day represents one of the highest levels of national debt ever attained (more than two years of national income or GDP, which was a lot, especially in view of the country’s share of the global economy in 1815–1820). To sell this debt to wealthy and thrifty British subjects, the country had to develop a solid banking system and networks of financial intermediation. I have already alluded to the role of colonial expansion in creating the first global-scale joint-stock companies—the British East India Company and Dutch East India Company, companies that commanded veritable private armies and exercised regalian powers over vast territories.¹⁶ The many costly uncertainties associated with maritime trade also encouraged the development of insurance and freight companies, which would have a decisive impact later on.

Public debt linked to European warfare also drove the process of securitization and other financial innovations. Some experiments in this area ended in resounding failure, starting with the famous bankruptcy of John Law in 1718–1720, which stemmed from competition between France and Britain to redeem their debts by offering the bearers of government bonds stock in colonial companies, some of whose assets were rather dubious (like those of the Mississippi company that triggered the collapse of Law’s “Mississippi bubble”). At the time, most joint-stock companies derived their revenues from colonial commercial or fiscal monopolies; they were more a sophisticated, militarized form of highway robbery than a productive entrepreneurial venture.¹⁷ In any case, by developing financial and commercial technologies on a global scale, Europeans created infrastructure and comparative advantages that would prove decisive in the age of globalized industrial and financial capitalism (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).

Protectionism and Mercantilism: The Origins of the “Great Divergence”

Recent research has largely confirmed Pomeranz’s conclusions concerning the origins of the “great divergence” and the central role of military and colonial domination and the financial and technological innovations that went with it.18 In particular, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong insist that while Europe’s political fragmentation has had largely negative effects over the very long run (illustrated by Europe’s self-destruction in 1914–1945 as well as difficulties forming a European union after World War II or, more recently, facing up the financial crisis of 2008), it nevertheless allowed European states to gain the upper hand over China and the rest of the world from 1750 to 1900, thanks in large part to innovations stemming from military rivalries.¹⁹

Sven Beckert’s work has also shown the crucial importance of slave extraction and cotton production in the seizure of control of the global textile industry by the British and other Europeans in the period 1750–1850. In particular, Beckert points out that half of the African slaves shipped across the Atlantic between 1492 and 1882 sailed in the period 1780–1860 (especially between 1780 and 1820). This late phase of accelerated growth in the slave trade and cotton plantations played a key role in the rise of the British textile industry.²⁰ Finally, the Smithian idea that the British and European advance was due to peaceful and virtuous parliamentary and proprietarian institutions has few champions nowadays.²¹ Some researchers have collected detailed data on wages and output that should allow us to compare Europe, China, and Japan before and during “the great divergence.” Despite the deficiencies of the sources, the available data confirm the thesis of a late divergence between Europe and Asia, which begins to take shape only in the eighteenth century, with minor differences among authors.²²

Prasannan Parthasarathi emphasizes the key role played by anti-India protectionist policies in the emergence of the British textile industry.²³ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, manufactured export products (such as textiles of all sorts, silk, and porcelain) came mainly from China and India, and they were largely paid for with silver and gold originating in Europe and America (as well as Japan).²⁴ Indian textiles, especially print fabrics and blue calico, were all the rage in Europe and throughout the world. In the early eighteenth century, 80 percent of the textiles that English traders exchanged for slaves in West Africa were manufactured in India, and by the end of the century that figure still remained as high as 60 percent. Freight records show that Indian textiles in the 1770s alone accounted for a third of the cargo loaded in Rouen onto ships bound for Africa to barter for slaves. Ottoman records indicate that Indian textile exports to the Middle East were still greater than those bound for West Africa, which did not seem to pose any major problem for the Turkish authorities, who were more sensitive to the interests of local consumers.

European merchants soon realized that they stood to profit by stirring up hostility against Indian imports to advance their own transcontinental projects. In 1685 the British Parliament introduced customs duties of 20 percent on textile imports, and this rose to 30 percent in 1690 before imports of printed and dyed fabrics were simply banned in 1700. From that date on, only virgin fabrics were imported from India, which allowed British manufacturers to improve their techniques for producing colored fabrics and prints. Similar measures were approved in France while British import restrictions, including a 100 percent tariff on all Indian textiles in 1787, continued to be tightened throughout the eighteenth century. Pressure from Liverpool slave traders, who urgently needed quality textiles to expand their business on the African coast without depleting their metallic currency reserves, played a decisive role, especially between 1765 and 1785, a period during which the quality of English production improved rapidly. Only after acquiring a clear comparative advantage in textiles, most notably through the use of coal, did the United Kingdom begin in the mid-nineteenth century to adopt a more full-throated free trade rhetoric (though not without ambiguities, as in the case of opium exports to China).

The British also relied on protectionist measures in the shipbuilding industry, which was flourishing in India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1815 they levied a special tax of 15 percent on all goods imported on India-built ships; a subsequent measure provided that only English ships could import merchandise from east of the Cape of Good Hope to the United Kingdom. While it is difficult to suggest an overall estimate, it clear that, taken together, these protectionist and mercantilist measures, imposed on the rest of the world at gunpoint, played a significant role in achieving British and European industrial domination. According to available estimates, the Chinese and Indian share of global manufacturing output, which was still 53 percent in 1800, had fallen to 5 percent by 1900.²⁵ Again, it would be absurd to view this as the only possible trajectory leading to the Industrial Revolution and modern prosperity. For instance, one can imagine other historical trajectories that would have allowed European and Asian producers to grow at the same rate (or, together, at an even higher rate) without anti-India and anti-Chinese protectionism, without colonial and military domination, and with more balanced and egalitarian trade and interactions among different regions of the globe. This would certainly be a very different world from the one we live in. But the role of historical research is precisely to demonstrate the existence of alternatives and switch points and to show how choices are conditioned by the political and ideological balance of power among contending groups.

Japan: Accelerated Modernization of a Ternary Society

We turn next to the way in which the encounter with European colonial powers affected the transformation of the ternary inequality regimes prevalent in different parts of Asia before the arrival of Europeans. In Chapter 8 we saw how inequalities in precolonial India were structured by trifunctional ideology, with a kind of rough balance between military warrior elites (Kshatriyas) and clerical and intellectual elites (Brahmins) in a variety of evolving and unstable configurations whose development depended on the emergence of new warrior elites, on competition between Hindu and Muslim kingdoms, and on the shifting identities and allegiances of the jatis. We also saw how the British administration, by rigidifying castes through its colonial policies and censuses, contributed to the emergence of a unique inequality regime in India based on a novel mix of ancient status inequalities and modern inequalities of wealth and education.

The Japanese case is different from the Indian in many ways, but there are also numerous similarities. Japan in the Edo era (1600–1868) was a strongly hierarchical society with many social disparities and status rigidities of the trifunctional type, similar in some respects to those seen in Ancien Régime Europe and precolonial India. Society was dominated on the one hand by a warrior nobility, with daimyos (great feudal lords) at the top under the authority of the shogun (military leader), and on the other hand, by a class of Shinto priests and Buddhist monks (with degrees of symbiosis and rivalry between the two religions which varied over time). The distinctive feature of the Japanese regime in the Edo period was that the warrior class had assumed marked superiority over the others. After restoring order in 1600–1604 following decades of feudal warfare, the hereditary shoguns of the Tokugawa dynasty gradually ceased to be mere military captains and became the real political leaders of the country at the head of an administrative and judicial system centered in the capital Edo (Tokyo) while the emperor in Kyoto was reduce to the symbolic functions of a spiritual leader.

The legitimacy of the shogun and of the warrior class was seriously shaken, however, by the arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1853 of a fleet of heavily armed warships under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States. When Perry returned in 1854 with an armada twice the size of the first, reinforced by the ships of several European allies (Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Russia), the shogunate had no choice but to grant the commercial, fiscal, and jurisdictional privileges demanded by the coalition. This unmistakable humiliation initiated a phase of intense political and ideological reflection in Japan, resulting in the beginning of a new era, the Meiji, in 1868. The last Tokugawa shogun was deposed and the authority of the emperor was restored at the behest of a segment of the Japanese nobility and elite eager to modernize the country and compete with the Western powers. Japan thus offers an unusual example of accelerated sociopolitical modernization, which began with an imperial restoration (largely symbolic, to be sure).²⁶

The reforms undertaken from 1868 on rested on several pillars. Old status distinctions were eliminated. The warrior nobility lost its legal and fiscal privileges. This reform affected not only the high aristocracy of daimyos (a very small group comparable in size to British lords) but also other warriors endowed with fiefs (revenues derived from village production); both groups received partial financial compensation. The constitution of 1889, inspired by the British and Prussians, provided for a house of peers (which allowed a select portion of the old nobility to retain a political role) and a house of representatives, initially elected on a property-qualified basis by barely 5 percent of adult males, before male suffrage was extended in 1910 and again in 1919, ultimately becoming universal in 1925. Women were given the right to vote in 1947, at which time the house of peers was abolished.²⁷

According to the censuses by class carried out under the Tokugawa from 1720 on, the class of daimyos and warriors with fiefs represented 5–6 percent of the population, with considerable variation by region and principality (from 2–3 percent to 10–12 percent). The size of this group seems to have decreased in the Edo era, since the warrior class represented only 3–4 percent of the population in the census of 1868, at the beginning of the Meiji era, shortly before fiefs and the warrior class (except for peers) were abolished. Shinto priests and Buddhist monks accounted for 1–1.5 percent of the population. If we compare this with Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, we find that the warrior class was larger in Japan than in France or the United Kingdom while the religious class was slightly smaller (Fig. 9.3).²⁸ As we have seen, other European countries, as well as certain subregions of India, had warrior and noble classes of a size close to or greater than that observed in Japan.²⁹ All things considered, these orders of magnitude are not very different and attest to a certain similarity among trifunctional societies, at least in terms of formal structure.

Beyond the abolition of fiscal privileges and forced labor, the reforms of the early Meiji era eliminated the many status inequalities that had existed among various categories of urban and rural workers under the previous regime. In particular, the new government officially ended discrimination against the burakumin (“hamlet people”), the lowest category of workers under the Tokugawa, whose pariah status was in some ways similar to that of untouchables and aborigines in India. It is generally believed that the burakumin accounted for less than 5 percent of the population in the Edo era, but they were not usually counted in censuses; the category was officially abolished in the Meiji era.³⁰

FIG. 9.3.  The evolution of ternary societies: Europe-Japan 1530–1870

Interpretation: In the United Kingdom and France, the two dominant classes in trifunctional society (clergy and nobility) decreased in size between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In Japan, the proportion of the warrior nobility (daimyo) and warriors endowed with fiefs was significantly higher than that of Shinto priests and monks, but it decreased sharply between 1720 and 1870, according to Japanese census data from the Edo and early Meiji eras. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.

In addition, the Meiji regime developed a series of policies intended to promote accelerated industrialization and catch up with the Western powers. The central government’s fiscal and administrative capacity was rapidly increased (with prefects and regions taking the place of daimyos and fiefs), and significant taxes were levied to finance investments in the social and economic development of the country, especially in the areas of transportation infrastructure (roads, railroads, shipping) and health and education.31

Investment in education was truly spectacular. The intent was not only to train a new elite capable of rivaling Western engineers and scientists but also to bring literacy and education to the masses. With the elites, the motive was clear: to avoid Western domination. Japanese students who sailed from Kagoshima in 1872 to study in Western universities told their stories with no sugarcoating. While stopped at an Indian port on their way to Europe, they watched young Indian children reduced to diving into the ocean after small coins for the amusement of British settlers on the shore. From this they concluded that they had better study like mad in order to make sure that Japan would not experience the same fate.³² Mass literacy and technical training were also seen as indispensable prerequisites for successful industrialization.

On the Social Integration of Burakumin, Untouchables, and Roma

The point here is not to idealize Meiji policies of social and educational integration. Japan remained an inegalitarian hierarchical society. Groups like the burakumin continued to struggle against real (albeit illegal) discrimination even after World War II, and traces of this oppressive legacy persist to this day (though to a much lesser extent than in the case of the lower castes in India). What is more, Japanese social integration went hand in hand with rising nationalism and militarism, which led to Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.

For some Japanese nationalists, the long conflict with the West from 1854 to 1945 should be seen as the “Great War of East Asia” (as it is called in the military museum of the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo), a war in which Japan, despite crushing defeats, led the way to the decolonization of Asia and the world. Proponents of this view emphasize Japanese support for independence movements in India, Indochina, and Indonesia during World War II and, more generally, the fact that Europe and the United States had never truly accepted the idea of an independent Asian power and would never have agreed to the end of colonial domination had it not been for the willingness of some Asians to fight. Despite brilliant military victories in China in 1895, Russia in 1905, and Korea in 1910—irrefutable proof of the success of Meiji-era reforms—Japan felt that it could never gain the full respect of the West or be admitted to the club of industrial and colonial powers.33 In the eyes of Japanese nationalists, the ultimate humiliation was the West’s refusal to incorporate the principle of racial equality into the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, despite repeated Japanese demands.³⁴ Even worse was the Washington Naval Conference (1921), which stipulated that the naval tonnage of the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan should remain frozen in the ratio 5–5–3. This rule condemned Japan to eternal naval inferiority in Asian waters no matter what industrial or demographic progress it made. The Japanese empire rejected the agreement in 1934, paving the way to war.

In 1940–1941, two increasingly antagonistic worldviews confronted each other: Japan demanded a full Western withdrawal from East Asia while the United States demanded a withdrawal of all colonial powers (including Japan) from China and deferred the broader issue of decolonization until later. When Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on Japan, threatening to immobilize its army and navy in short order, Japanese generals felt that they had no choice but to attack Pearl Harbor. This Japanese nationalist view is interesting and in some respects comprehensible, but it omits one essential point: the people of Korea, China, and other Asian countries occupied by Japan do not remember the Japanese as liberators but as yet another colonial power exhibiting the same brutality as the Europeans (or in some cases worse, although this needs to be judged case by case, given the very high bar). The colonial ideology that seeks to liberate and civilize nations in spite of themselves generally leads to disaster, no matter what the color of the colonizer’s skin.³⁵

If we leave aside the always bitter conflicts among colonial powers and ideologies and the memories of the colonized populations, it remains true that the policies of social and educational integration and economic development that Japan adopted in the Meiji era (1868–1912) and that demilitarized Japan continued to pursue after 1945 represent an experiment with the particularly rapid sociopolitical transformation of a premodern inequality regime. The success of Japan’s proprietarian and industrial transition shows that the mechanisms at work have nothing whatsoever to do with Christian culture or European civilization.

Last but not least, the Japanese experience shows that proactive policies, especially regarding public infrastructure and investment in education, can overcome very strong and longstanding status inequalities in a matter of decades—inequalities that in other contexts are seen as rigid and unalterable. Although past discrimination against pariah classes has left traces, Japan nevertheless became over the course of the twentieth century a country whose standard of living is among the highest in the world and whose income inequality falls between European and US levels.³⁶ Japanese government policies intended to achieve socioeconomic and educational development and social integration between 1870 and 1940 were not perfect, but they were a good deal more effective than, for example, British colonial policy in India, which showed little concern with reducing social inequality or improving the literacy and skills of the lower castes. In Part Three of this book we will see that the reduction of social inequality in Japan was further assisted by an ambitious program of agrarian reform in the period 1945–1950 as well as by highly progressive taxation of top incomes and large estates (a policy that began in the Meiji period and continued in the interwar years but was reinforced after the defeat).

In the European context, the Roma are probably the group most directly comparable with the burakumin in Japan and the lower castes in India in terms of social discrimination. The Council of Europe uses the term “Roma” to describe any number of nomadic or sedentarized populations known by various other names (including Tziganes, Romani, Romanichels, Manouchians, Travelers, and Gypsies), most of which have lived in Europe for at least a millennium and can trace their origins back to India and the Middle East, despite a great deal of racial mixing over the years.³⁷ By this definition, the Roma numbered between 10 and 12 million in the 2010s, or roughly 2 percent of the total population of Europe. This is a smaller proportion than the Japanese burakumin (2–5 percent) or the lower castes of India (10–20 percent) but still significant. One finds Roma in nearly every European country, especially Hungary and Romania, where Roma slavery and serfdom were abolished in 1856, after which the newly emancipated populations fled their old masters and scattered across the continent.³⁸

Compared with the fate of the burakumin, untouchables, and aborigines, integration of the Roma was very slow. This can be explained in large part by the absence of adequate integration policies and above all by the fact that European countries have tried to shift responsibility for these groups to others. These excluded groups continue to be the object of prejudices regarding their allegedly alien way of life and supposed refusal to integrate when in fact they are subject to significant discrimination and little effort has been made to integrate them.³⁹ The case of the Roma is particularly interesting in that it can help Europeans, who are often prompt to give lessons to the rest of the world, to gain a better understanding of the difficulties that countries like Japan and India have faced in trying to integrate the burakumin or the lower castes—social groups that have faced prejudices similar to those confronting the Roma. Nevertheless, these countries have succeeded in overcoming prejudice through long-term policies of social and educational integration.

Trifunctional Society and the Construction of the Chinese State

Let us turn now to the way in which colonialism affected the transformation of the Chinese inequality regime. Throughout its history, until the revolution of 1911 that gave rise to the Republic of China, China was organized in terms of an ideological configuration that can be characterized as trifunctional, analogous to the trifunctional regimes found in Europe and India until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. However, one important difference has to do with the nature of Confucianism, which is closer to a civic philosophy than to a religion in the sense of Christian, Jewish, or Muslim monotheism or Hinduism. Kongfonzi (Latinized as Confucius) was a peerless scholar and teacher who lived in the sixth and early fifth centuries BCE. Born into a princely family buffeted by the constant conflict among the Chinese kingdoms, Confucius, according to tradition, crisscrossed China to deliver his lessons and demonstrate that peace and social harmony could be achieved only through education, moderation, and a search for rational and pragmatic solutions (which in practice were usually fairly conservative in terms of morals and included respect for elders, property, and property owners). As in all trifunctional societies, the moderation of scholars and men of letters was to play a central role in the political order, balancing the unruliness of the warriors.

Confucianism—ruxue in Chinese (“the teaching of the literati”)—thus became official state doctrine in the second century BCE and remained so until 1911, even as it underwent a series of transformations and exchanged symbioses with Buddhism and Taoism. From time immemorial Confucian literati were seen as scholars and administrators who placed their vast stores of knowledge and competence, their understanding of Chinese literature and history, and their very strict domestic and civil morality at the service of the community, public order, and the state—rather than being seen as a religious organization distinct from the state. This was a fundamental difference between the Confucian and Christian versions of trifunctionality, and it offers one of the most natural explanations for the unity of the Chinese state in contrast to the political fragmentation of Europe (notwithstanding the Catholic Church’s many attempts to bring the Christian kingdoms closer together).40

Some may also be tempted to compare Confucianism, which in the history of the Chinese empire functioned as a “religion of state unity,” with modern Chinese communism, which in a different sense is also a form of state religion. They would argue, in other words, that the Confucian administrators and literati who served the Han, Song, Ming, and Qing emperors have simply evolved into officials and high priests of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), serving the president of the People’s Republic. Such comparisons are sometimes used to suggest that the Communist regime’s efforts to achieve national unity and social harmony are merely a continuation of China’s Confucian past. It was in this spirit that CCP leaders restored Confucius to a place of honor in the early 2010s—a rather remarkable turnabout, since the economic and social conservatism of Confucianism was much criticized during the Cultural Revolution and the campaign against “the four olds” (old things, old ideas, old culture, and old habits), landlords, and mandarins. Abroad but sometimes in China as well, the same historical parallel is often used in a negative sense to suggest that the Chinese government has always been authoritarian with immutable masses under the thumb of a millennial despotism that is a reflection of China’s culture and soul: emperors and their mandarins have simply given way to Communist leaders and apparatchiks. Such comparisons are fraught with difficulties. They assume a continuity and determinism for which there is no evidence and prevent us from thinking about the complexity and diversity of China’s past—and, indeed, the complexity and diversity of all sociopolitical trajectories.

The first problem raised by these comparisons is that the imperial Chinese state utterly lacked the means to be despotic. It was a structurally weak state with extremely limited fiscal revenues and little to no capacity for economic or social intervention or oversight compared with today’s Chinese government. Available studies suggest that tax receipts under the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties never exceeded 2–3 percent of national income.⁴¹ If we express per capita tax receipts in terms of days of wages, we find that the resources available to the Qing governments amounted to no more than a quarter to a third of the resources of European states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Fig. 9.2).

The recruitment of imperial and provincial functionaries (whom the Europeans called “mandarins”) followed very strict procedures, including the famous examinations, which were given throughout the empire for thirteen centuries, from 605 to 1905. The examination system made a great impression on Western visitors to China and inspired similar efforts in France and Prussia. But the total number of Chinese functionaries was always quite small: in the middle of the nineteenth century there were barely 40,000 imperial and provincial officials, or 0.01 percent of the population (of around 400 million), and generally 0.01–0.02 percent of the population across the ages.⁴² In practice, most of the resources of the Qing state were devoted to the warrior class and the army (as is always the case in states of such limited means), and what was left for civil administration, public health, and education was negligible. As we have seen, the Qing state in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries lacked the means to ban the use of opium within its borders. In practice, the Chinese administration operated in an extremely decentralized way, and imperial and provincial officials had no choice but to rely on the power of local warrior, scholar, and landowner elites over which they exerted very limited control, as was also the case in Europe and other parts of the world before the rise of the modern centralized state.⁴³

Another point bears emphasizing: as in other trifunctional societies, the Chinese inequality regime relied on a complex and evolving relationship of compromise and competition between literary and warrior elites; the former did not dominate the latter. This is particularly clear in the era of the Qing dynasty, which began when Manchu warriors conquered China and seized control of Beijing in 1644. The Manchu warrior class arose in early seventeenth-century Manchuria and was organized under the “Eight Banners” system. Warriors were given rights to land and administrative, fiscal, and legal privileges denied to the rest of the population. The Manchus brought their military organization with them to Beijing and gradually integrated new Han Chinese elements into the Manchu warrior elite.

Recent research has shown that the warrior nobility of the Eight Banners (bannermen) included some 5 million people in 1720, or nearly 4 percent of the Chinese population of approximately 130 million. It is possible that this group grew from roughly 1–2 percent of the population at the time of the Manchu conquest in the mid-seventeenth century to 3–4 percent in the eighteenth century as the new regime was consolidated before declining in the nineteenth century. The sources are fragile, however, and there are many problems with such estimates—similar to those we encountered in estimating the size of the nobility in France and elsewhere in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—so that it is impossible to be precise in the absence of any systematic census data prior to the twentieth century (an absence indicative, by the way, of the weakness of the central imperial government).⁴⁴ The figures we have (which show bannermen accounting for 3–4 percent of the population in the eighteenth century) are relatively high compared with the size of the French and British nobility in the same period (Fig. 9.3) but are of the same order as Japan and India⁴⁵ and lower than the numbers for European countries where the military orders were large and territorial expansion was in progress, such as Spain, Hungary, and Poland.⁴⁶

At the beginning of the Qing era, the bannermen were primarily stationed in garrisons near large cities. They lived on land rights and income skimmed from local production or paid by the imperial government. In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the Qing government decided that the warrior nobility was too large and was costing too much to maintain. As in all trifunctional societies, reform was a delicate matter as any radical move against the warrior nobility risked endangering the regime. In 1742 the Qing emperor tried to relocate some of the bannermen to Manchuria. In 1824 this policy took a new turn: with an eye to both cutting the budget and colonizing and exploiting northern China, the imperial government distributed land in northern China to some bannermen and at the same time encouraged non-nobles to move north and work for the new landowners. This was a difficult undertaking, and its scope remained limited on the one hand because most bannermen had no intention of allowing themselves to be shipped north so easily and on the other hand because the immigrant commoners were often better equipped to exploit the land than the nobles, giving rise to frequent tensions. In the early twentieth century, however, one finds interesting proprietarian micro-societies developing in northern Manchuria, where landownership was highly concentrated in the hands of the old warrior nobility.⁴⁷

Chinese Imperial Examinations: Literati, Landowners, and Warriors

The Qing state was obliged to maintain a certain equilibrium between the warrior class and other Chinese social groups. In practice, however, it attended mainly to the balance among elites. This was true in particular of the organization of the imperial examination system, which was subject to constant reform over its lengthy history as the balance of power shifted among competing groups. The compromises that were struck are interesting because they reflect the search for a balance between the legitimacy of knowledge on the one hand and the legitimacies of wealth and military might on the other. In practice, officials were recruited in several stages. The first step was to pass the examinations that were given two years out of every three in the various prefectures of the empire; those who passed received a certificate (shengyuan). This certificate did not lead directly to a public job but allowed the holder to sit for various other exams for the selection of provincial and imperial officials.

Holding the shengyuan also granted legal, political, and economic privileges (such as the right to testify in court or participate in local government) as well as considerable social prestige, even for those who never became officials. According to available research, based on exam archives and student lists, in the nineteenth century approximately 4 percent of adult males possessed a classical education (in the sense of having an advanced mastery of Chinese writing and traditional knowledge and having sat at least one examination for the shengyuan). Of this number, roughly 0.5 percent of adult males actually passed the exam and obtained the precious certificate. However, a second group of people had the right to sit directly for examinations leading to official jobs: those who had bought a certificate (jiansheng). The size of this group increased in the nineteenth century: it represented 0.3 percent of adult males in the 1820s and nearly 0.5 percent in the 1870s, almost as many as those who had obtained the shengyuan.48

Recent research on the Jiangnan provincial archives has shown that this mechanism significantly increased social reproduction in the selection of officials: it allowed the sons of landowners and other wealthy individuals to have a chance of being recruited without passing the difficult shengyuan examination while at the same time yielding much-needed revenue for the state (which was the justification given for this practice). The archives show that social reproduction was also very high in the classical procedure: the vast majority of candidates who successfully passed the exam and were recruited as imperial or provincial officials had a father, grandfather, or other ancestor who had occupied a similar position; there were exceptions, however (about 20 percent of cases).⁴⁹

The possibility of buying a shengyuan certificate existed because the Chinese state ran into budgetary problems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it can be compared to the French Ancien Régime practice of selling offices and charges and numerous other public functions as well as similar practices in many other European states. The difference in the Chinese case was that even those who purchased a certificate were in theory required to sit for the same exams as the others to qualify for official posts (although there was widespread suspicion that this final requirement was not always honored, it is not possible to say to what extent these suspicions were justified). The Chinese system was perhaps more like the system for admission to the most prestigious US universities today, who openly admit that certain “legacy students” whose parents have made large enough gifts may receive special consideration in the admissions process. I will come back to this point later, as it raises many issues about what a fair admissions system and a just society might look like today and again illustrates the need to study inequality regimes in historical and comparative perspective, including comparisons across countries, periods, and institutions that might prefer not to be compared.⁵⁰

As for Chinese imperial examinations, there is another crucial but relatively little-known aspect of the rules in force during the Qing era: roughly half of the 40,000-odd official posts (equal to about 0.01 percent of the total Chinese population in the nineteenth century and 0.03 percent of the adult male population) were reserved for bannermen.⁵¹ In practice, members of the warrior class sat for special exams, sometimes in the Manchu language, to make up for their inadequate knowledge of classical Chinese; for certain posts their exams were similar to those taken by holders of real or purchased certificates but with places reserved for the bannermen. This Chinese version of the “reservations” system was very different from the Indian quota system, which favored members of the lower castes, and it extended well beyond qualifying exams for public service jobs. In each administrative department and job category, there were also quotas for members of the warrior aristocracy (Manchus and Hans) and for literati and landowners recruited through other channels.⁵² These rules were often contested and permanently renegotiated, but broadly speaking, the warrior aristocracy managed to maintain its advantages until the fall of the empire in 1911, and the wealth privilege (linked to the purchase of certificates) was reinforced throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, partly owing to the growing budgetary requirements of the Qing state (which had to pay off a growing debt to the European powers).

Chinese Revolts and Missed Opportunities

To sum up, imperial Chinese society was highly hierarchical and inegalitarian and marked by conflicts among literate elites, landowners, and warriors. All available evidence suggests that these groups overlapped to a degree: the literary and administrative elites were also landowners who collected rents from the rest of the population just as the warrior elites did, and there were many alliances among these groups. The regime was far from static, however: not only was there elite conflict, but there were also many popular rebellions and revolutions, which might have taken China along trajectories other than the one it ultimately followed.

The bloodiest and most spectacular was the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). In the beginning this was a rebellion like many others, of poor peasants who refused to pay rent to landowners and who illegally occupied the land. Such revolts had always been common, but they proliferated and became more threatening to the regime after China’s humiliating defeat at the hands of the Europeans in the First Opium War (1839–1842). In fact, the Taiping Rebellion came close to toppling the Qing empire in 1852–1854 in the early years of the movement. The rebels established a capital in Nanking, near Shanghai. In 1853 the regime issued a decree promising to redistribute land to families according to their needs and began to implement it in regions controlled by the rebels. On June 14, 1853, Karl Marx published an article in the New York Daily Tribune stating that the rebellion was on the brink of victory and that events in China would soon provoke turmoil throughout the industrial world, leading to a series of revolutions in Europe. The conflict quickly developed into a vast civil war in the heart of China, pitting imperial forces based in the north (and backed by a relatively weak state) against increasingly well-organized Taiping rebels in the south, in a country whose population had grown enormously over the previous century (from about 130 million in 1720 to nearly 400 million in 1840) despite being ravaged by opium and famine. According to available estimates, the Taiping Rebellion may have caused between 20 and 30 million military and civilian deaths between 1850 and 1864, or more than all the deaths in World War I (which claimed 15 to 20 million lives). Research has shown that the Chinese regions most affected by the rebellion never completely recovered from their population losses as fighting continued in rural areas more or less permanently until the fall of the empire.53

At first the Western powers took a neutral stance in the conflict. One reason for this was that the rebel leader compared himself with Christ and professed to be on a messianic mission, which won him sympathy in some Christian countries, especially the United States, where the public had a hard time understanding why the United States should support the Qing emperor (who was portrayed as reluctant to open his country to Christian missionaries). In Europe, some socialists and radical republicans saw the rebellion as a sort of Chinese equivalent of the French Revolution, but this view was less influential than the messianic image in the United States. But once the rebels began to challenge property rights and not only threaten trade disruptions but also halt China’s repayment of its debts to the West (which the French and British had imposed after sacking Beijing in 1860), the European powers decided to take the side of the Qing government. Their support was probably decisive in the ultimate victory of imperial forces over the rebels in 1862–1864, right in the middle of the US Civil War (which in any case facilitated the European intervention, since American Christians were preoccupied by events at home).⁵⁴ If the rebels had triumphed, it is very hard to say how China’s political structure and borders might have evolved.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the moral legitimacy of the Qing dynasty and China’s warrior and mandarin elites had fallen very low in the eyes of the Chinese public. The country had been forced to accept a series of “unequal treaties” with the Europeans powers and found itself obliged to increase taxes sharply to repay the Westerners and their bankers what was effectively a military tribute, together with the accumulated interest.⁵⁵ In such a context, the 1895 defeat of China by Japan (which for millennia had been dominated militarily and culturally by China), together with Japanese incursions into Korea and Taiwan, appeared to signal the end of the road for the Qing.

In 1899–1901, the Boxer Rebellion, fomented by the “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” a secret society whose symbol was a clenched fist and whose goal was both to destroy feudal and imperial Manchu power and to expel the foreigners, nearly brought down the regime yet again. The Western powers, anxious for their territorial concessions, helped the Qing government put down the revolt and experimented in 1900–1902 with a novel form of international government at Tianjin (a strategic port controlling access to Beijing). No fewer than ten colonial powers, already established in China or new to the feast, shared power in an administration charged with liquidating the last Boxer rebels. The archives of this astonishing government record the presence of particularly brutal and undisciplined French and German troops, who were repeatedly accused of rape and plunder by the local population; they were as violent and contemptuous toward the Chinese as they were toward the Indian soldiers that the British had brought in from the Raj (and with whom the Chinese themselves avoided contact as much as possible). Committees composed of representatives of the various powers had to resolve all sorts of complex economic and legal issues concerning supplies to the city and the creation of courts and brothels for the soldiers. After much debate, especially between the French and Japanese, the minimum age for Chinese prostitutes was set at age 13, although it had been raised from 13 to 16 in the United Kingdom in 1885. When it came time to leave and hand power back to the Qing government in 1902, the French soldiers who had stood out for their savagery confided their sadness in diaries and letters in which they lamented having to return to proletarian life in France after so many intoxicating and amusing months occupying China.⁵⁶

The revolution of 1911 ultimately led to the fall of the empire and the founding of the Republic of China; Sun Yat-sen was elected its first president by an assembly of representatives gathered in Nanking. To explain the eventual triumph of the Communists and the transition from the bourgeois republic of 1911 to the People’s Republic of 1949 after nearly four decades of virtual civil war between nationalists (who sought refuge in Taiwan in 1949) and Communists, as well as battles with Japanese and Western occupiers, it is tempting to mention the excessively conservative character of the regime that was founded in 1911–1912, which did not really reflect the aspiration of Chinese peasants for land redistribution and equality after decades and centuries of the Qing inequality regime. In fact, Sun Yat-sen was a republican Anglican and anti-Manchu physician but relatively conservative on economic and social issues, and most of the bourgeois revolutionaries of 1911 shared his respect for the established order and property rights (once the old warrior class was stripped of its unwarranted privileges). The Chinese constitution of 1911 was in this respect not very innovative: it protected existing property rights and made peaceful legal redistribution virtually impossible, in contrast, for example, to the Mexican constitution of 1910 or the German constitution of 1919, which portrayed property as a social institution intended to serve the general interest and envisioned the possibility of legislative revision of existing property rights and far-reaching agrarian reforms or other limitations on the rights of existing owners.⁵⁷ President Sun Yat-sen was himself driven from power and replaced by imperial General Yuan Shikai in 1912 under pressure from Western countries, which felt that a strong military leader would be more likely to maintain order in China and ensure the continued fiscal flows needed to pay the principal and interest owed to the colonial powers.

In view of the complex sequence of events and political-ideological, military, and popular mobilizations in China in the period 1911–1949, however, it would not be very credible to see the advent of the People’s Republic as an ineluctable, deterministic consequence of the shortcomings of the bourgeois republic of 1911–1912 and the profound centuries-old sense of injustice on the part of the anti-imperial, anti-landlord, and anti-mandarin peasantry. The situation might have evolved in any number of ways, perhaps even toward some form of social-democratic republic.⁵⁸ In Part Three we will also see that the advent of a Communist People’s Republic in China left open (and continues to leave open) a range of possible political-ideological and institutional trajectories.⁵⁹ Like the transformation of any inequality regime, the transformation of China’s trifunctional regime into a proprietarian and then a Communist regime must be seen as a set of sociopolitical experiments in which many available roads were not taken. By studying these missed opportunities we can learn a lot that may be useful in the future.

An Example of a Constitutional Clerical Republic: Iran

We turn now to the case of Iran, which offers an unprecedented example of late constitutionalization of a clerical government with the creation in 1979 of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a fragile regime that has nevertheless survived as of this writing. The Iranian revolution, like all events of its type, was the result of a series of more or less contingent factors and events that could well have come together in a different way. The revulsion aroused by the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his connivance with Western governments and their oil companies played a particularly important role, along with the tactical acumen of Ayatollah Khomeini. Leaving aside the logic of events, however, the important point is that the very possibility of a clerical republic in Iran was related to the specific form that the trifunctional structure took in the history of Sunni and Shiite Islam and, more specifically, the role of the Shiite clergy in the resistance to colonialism.60

Broadly speaking, Muslim societies have long been differentiated by the relative importance accorded to military and warrior elites on the one hand and clerical and intellectual elites on the other. From the beginning, Sunnis recognized the authority of the caliph, the temporal and military leader chosen to lead the umma, or Muslim community, whereas Shi’as followed the imam, the religious and spiritual leader recognized as a leader among the learned. Sunnis criticize Ali (the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law, first imam and fourth caliph, along with his successor imams) for rejecting the authority of the caliphs and dividing the community. By contrast, Shi’as revere the authority of the first twelve imams and refuse to forgive the Sunnis for impeding their unifying efforts and supporting sometimes brutal caliphs who possessed no genuine knowledge of religion. After the occultation of the twelfth imam in 874, the leading Shiite ulemas (bodies of scholars) temporarily renounced temporal power and in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries published in Iraqi holy cities collections of traditional sayings and judgments attributed to the twelve imams. All believers are supposed to be equal in their efforts to imitate the ideal example of the imams.

The political-ideological equilibrium changed in the sixteenth century. Although the Shiite community was then confined to a few sites in western Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon (mainly among poor segments of the population, which responded to the imams’ denunciation of princes and other powerful figures, thus establishing a bond between the Shiite clergy and disadvantaged social groups that persists to this day among Shiite minorities in Lebanon and Iraq), the Safavid dynasty sought, for both political and religious reasons, the support of Shiite ulemas to convert all of Persia to Shiism (which explains why Iran became the only Muslim country that is almost entirely Shiite).⁶¹ Little by little, Shiite ulemas extended their power to interpret ancient precepts and justify the use of reason. Their political role increased further in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries toward the end of the Safavid era and the beginning of the Qajar (1794–1925): for example, when the new sovereigns asked them to declare jihad against the Russians, for which the ulemas obtained in return confirmation of their right to pass judgment and collect taxes.

From their fiefs in Najaf (south of Baghdad, where the tomb of Ali is located), Karbala (site of the sacrifice of Ali’s son Hussein), and Samarra (where the twelfth imam vanished),⁶² the ulemas regularly defied Persian and Ottoman sovereigns whose actions they disapproved and set themselves up as veritable counterpowers. In the nineteenth century, a clear doctrine emerged: every Shiite had to follow a mujahid; the marja was the most learned of all mujahideen; and some maraji specialized in certain domains of wisdom or possessed special competences. The views of the marja are transmitted either by direct contact or through men who have heard them from the lips of the marja himself.

In general, there are no more than five or six living maraji throughout the Shiite world. To rise from mujahid to marja is the work of a lifetime and requires both wisdom and religious learning; by contrast, membership of Sunnite ulemas is based on official recognition by the temporal powers. Under the Persian and Ottoman Empires in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the Shiite clergy became virtual heads of state thanks to the extraterritorial status of the holy Shiite cities in Iraq and Iran where they exercised moral, fiscal, and military authority. Their status was not unlike that of the Papal states in medieval and modern Europe, with one important difference: the Shiite clerical class is a true social class unto itself, with matrimonial alliances uniting families of major ulemas (for example, Khomeini’s grandson is married to a granddaughter of the marja Sistani, based in Najaf). Through these alliances the clergy control large amounts of property, although it is usually held on behalf of mosques, schools, and religious foundations and linked to the provision of social services.

On the Anticolonialist Legitimacy of the Shiite Clergy

While the Ottoman and Persian Empires were increasingly accused of giving in to the demands of the Christian colonial powers as well as succumbing to corruption themselves, the Shiite clergy stood out as the voice of the resistance, especially during the tobacco riots of 1890–1892. The great marja Shirazi, already quite popular for his relief work during the Mesopotamian famine of 1870, opposed the monopolies on tobacco, railroads, and natural resources granted to the English in 1890–1891 at a time when the Imperial Bank of Persia had fallen under the control of British creditors (the Ottoman Imperial Bank had been under the control of a Franco-British consortium since 1863). The ensuing riots and other expressions of popular discontent were such that the Shah had to give up his plans for a time in 1892.63 Subsequently, the Western powers regained the upper hand, especially after the discovery of oil in 1908, the occupation of Iranian cities by English and Russian troops in 1911, and then the division of Ottoman territory between France and Britain in 1919–1920. But the Shiite clergy had stood out as a major anticolonial force and would reap the fruits of its resistance later on. In general, intense proselytizing in the late nineteenth century by Christian missionaries from the West (convinced of the superiority of their cultural and religious models) helped stimulate various forms of Hindu and Muslim religious revival from the early twentieth century on.⁶⁴ For example, the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928. It subsequently developed social services and fostered solidarity among the faithful that in some ways resembled the Shiite quasi-states, with one difference: the latter enjoyed the support of a much more organized religious hierarchy and clerical class.

After Iranian prime minister Mossadegh tried to nationalize the oil industry in 1951, the English and Americans instigated a coup in 1953 to bring the Shah back to power and above all reinstate the privileges of the Western oil companies. The Shah belonged to a family of soldiers who had risen from the ranks and had little to do with religion; after taking power in 1925, they were regularly accused of nepotism. In 1962 the regime tried to do away with the Shiite clergy once and for all by attacking its financial base: an agrarian reform forced the waqf (pious foundations) to sell their land. This led to huge rallies, to Ayatollah Khomeini’s exile to Najaf from 1965 to 1978, and to increasingly violent repression.

Finally, in February 1979, the very unpopular Shah was forced to flee the country and cede power to Khomeini, who joined with the ulemas to promulgate a constitution for which there are few if any historical precedents. The 1906 Persian constitution had stipulated that any law passed by parliament had to be ratified by at least five mujahideen appointed by one or more marjas. But this rule was circumvented in 1908–1909, and the drafters of the 1979 constitution took care to ensure that the clergy’s power would be firmly protected in the Islamic Republic of Iran. To be sure, the Majlis (parliament), Assembly of Experts, and president were to be elected by direct universal suffrage (including women, who obtained the right to vote in Iran in 1963). But only religious men (in principle with diplomas in theology or other sufficient religious education) could run for the eighty-six-member Assembly of Experts, the body that elected the Supreme Guide and could in theory remove him. In practice, there have only been two Supreme Guides: Ayatollah Khomeini from 1979 to his death in 1989 and Ayatollah Khamenei since 1989. The Guide clearly dominates the civil authorities, especially in times of serious crisis: he is the head of Iran’s armies; he appoints senior military leaders and judges; and he arbitrates disputes among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. In addition, the Guide directly appoints six of the twelve men of religion who make up the Council of Guardians (the six others must be approved by the Majlis after nomination by the judicial authorities, who are controlled by the Guide). The Council is the supreme constitutional body that controls the electoral system since it must approve all candidates for the Majlis, the Assembly of Experts, and the presidency.

Although there are many modern political regimes that grant full power to the military class (usually in the form of military dictatorships with relatively loose legal structures) and some constitutional regimes that grant the military special prerogatives within the context of a parliamentary system, especially in relation to budgets (examples include the current constitutions of Egypt and Thailand), the Iranian constitution is a case apart.⁶⁵ The clerical class has organized and codified its grip on political power in a very sophisticated way while leaving quite a bit of room for relatively open and pluralist elections or, at any rate, elections more open and pluralist than one finds in most political regimes in the Middle East.

Note, however, that the state power officially granted to Shiite religious leaders by the Iranian constitution has always aroused a great deal of suspicion in much of the clerical class, which has generally preferred to stay out of politics for fear of being caught up in its vagaries. This is particularly true of the highest marjas and other religious dignitaries in Iraq’s holy cities as well as of the lower Shiite clergy and imams in Iran’s mosques, who are mostly hostile to the current regime. Those religious leaders and theologians (or people passing themselves off as theologians) who make their careers in the Assembly of Experts, in politics, or in the state apparatus therefore constitute a distinct group, which should not be confused with the clergy as a whole.⁶⁶ It is interesting to note that the constitution of 1979 initially stipulated that only an authentic marja could be elected Supreme Guide of the Islamic Republic. But in 1989, when Khomeini (who had been awarded the title of marja during his exile in Najaf) died, no living marja met the conditions and wished to become Supreme Guide. Hence the decision was made to elect the current Guide, Ali Khamenei (who was only an ayatollah)—an outright breach of the constitution. The constitution was then retroactively amended in late 1989 to make Khamenei’s election legal. Subsequently, the regime sought to persuade living marjas to recognize the Supreme Guide as a marja but without success.⁶⁷ This humiliating episode marked a clear divorce between Shiism’s transnational religious authorities and the national governing bodies of the Islamic Republic of Iran.⁶⁸

Egalitarian Shiite Republic, Sunni Oil Monarchies: Discourses and Realities

Today, the Iranian regime still tries to portray itself as more moral and egalitarian than other Muslim states, especially the Saudis and other Gulf oil monarchies, which Iran regularly accuses of instrumentalizing religion to hide the monopolization of natural resources by a family, dynasty, or clan. In contrast to those regimes, governed by princes, billionaires, and the newly rich, the Iranian regime claims to stand for republican equality among its citizens, without dynastic privilege of any kind, and for the wisdom of religious scholars and experts, regardless of their social origins.

Available data do in fact show that the Middle East today is the most inegalitarian region in the world.69 This is primarily because the economic resources have been captured by oil states with small populations and, within those states, by very thin social strata. Among the fortunate few are the ruling families of Saudi Arabi, the Emirates, and Qatar, which for decades have relied on strict religious doctrine in certain respects (notably with regard to women) in the hope, perhaps, of covering up their financial misdeeds. In Part Three of this book I will return to this important feature of the current global inequality regime and more generally to the question of how to reduce inequalities at the regional and international level.⁷⁰

At this stage, note simply that such extreme levels of inequality cannot fail to engender enormous social and political tensions. The perpetuation of such regimes depends on a sophisticated repressive apparatus as well as on Western military protection, especially from the United States. If Western armies had not come to boot Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991 and restore the emir’s sovereignty over the country and its petroleum resources (as well as to protect the interests of US and European firms), it is likely that the redrawing of regional boundaries would not have ended there. Within Islam, the Shiite regime in Iran is not the only actor to denounce the corruption of the oil monarchies and the alleged connivance of Western infidels. Many Sunni citizens and political groups share this view, most of them pacifists and straining to make their voices heard, while a few engage in terrorist actions that have captured a large share of the world’s headlines in recent years (especially organizations such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State).⁷¹

Note, too, that the Iranian regime, rhetoric notwithstanding, is also quite opaque as to the distribution of its wealth. This lack of transparency, together with the suspicions of corruption that it arouses in the population, explains the extreme fragility of the regime today. The pasdarans, or Revolutionary Guards, under direct orders of the Supreme Guide, constitute a veritable state within the state and according to some estimates control 30–40 percent of the Iranian economy. The many pious foundations controlled by the Guide and his allies are also said to possess considerable assets, officially in support of their role in providing social services and assisting in the development of the country, but the virtually total absence of detailed information prevents any precise accounting and naturally arouses suspicion.⁷² Iranian films give us occasional glimpses of what is going on, and the picture is not very reassuring. In A Man of Integrity (2017), Reza lives in fear that his house and land will be taken by a mysterious company close to the regime and to local authorities. He ends up distraught amid his dead fish. The director, Mohammad Rasoulof, was arrested and stripped of his passport with no official reason given, and since then he has been living under threat of imprisonment.

Equality, Inequality, and Zakat in Muslim Countries

Broadly speaking, there is no denying that the promises of social, political, and economic equality that Islam has preached over the centuries, like those of Christianity, Hinduism, and other religions, have regularly ended in disillusionment. It is true, of course, that for millennia religions have supported the development of essential services at the local level. The clerical and intellectual classes associated with various religions (including Confucianism and Buddhism) also served to balance the power of warrior and military classes in trifunctional societies around the world. The messages of equality and universality promoted by religion have often been seen as possible avenues of emancipation for disadvantaged minorities, as evidenced, for example, by Hindu conversions to Islam (for which some Hindu nationalists today attack their Muslim fellow citizens).

But when it comes to organizing society and reducing inequality on a broader scale, the rigidity, conservativism, and contradictions of religious ideology, particularly regarding familial, legal, and fiscal matters, become glaringly apparent. Of course, we find in Islam as in all religions a certain attachment to the idea of social equality at the theoretical level, but the practical and institutional recommendations that flow from this are generally fairly vague. And they are often so malleable that they can be pressed into service by the conservative ideology of the moment. Take slavery, for example: Christianity proved to be quite capable of accommodating the slave system for centuries. We saw this in the attitude of popes and Christian kings in the Age of Discovery and in the social justifications of slavery offered by Thomas Jefferson and John Calhoun in the early nineteenth century, and we find the same fundamental ambiguities throughout the long history of Islam. In theory, slavery is condemned, especially when it involves coreligionists or Muslim converts. In practice, we find huge concentrations of Negros in many Muslim states from the days of the hegira onward, starting with the black slaves who toiled on Iraqi plantations in the eighth and ninth centuries during the “golden age” of the Abbasid Caliphate.73 Today, in the early twenty-first century, Muslim theologians, like nineteenth-century senators from Virginia and South Carolina, continue to supply learned explanations of why slavery, while unsatisfactory in the grand sweep of history, can be abolished only after extensive preparation with due attention to contemporary concerns and with the time needed to ensure that liberated slaves have sufficient skills and maturity to live without the oversight of their masters.⁷⁴

As for taxation and social solidarity, Islam in principle proposes the obligation of the zakat: those among the faithful who have the means are supposed to contribute to help meet the needs of the community and its poorest members, ostensibly in proportion to their assets (in cash, precious metals, inventories, lands, harvests, livestock, and so on). The zakat is mentioned in several surahs (chapters) of the Koran, but in a somewhat vague way. Various formulations have been passed down through Muslim legal tradition, at times in contradictory terms. In the nineteenth century, in the Shiite regions of Iraq and Iran, the faithful were supposed to give from a fifth to a third of their income and a third of their inheritances to a mujahid of their choosing.⁷⁵ Note, however, that the amount actually paid was often quite small: in most Muslim societies, the zakat was generally the result of a direct dialogue between the individual, his conscience, and God, so a certain flexibility was essential. That is probably why no records of the zakat have survived from any Muslim society (Shiite or Sunni) and hence no documents that can be studied to see how much was actually given or how such gifts affected the distribution of wealth and income. In the case of the oil monarchies, gifts proportioned to the wealth of oil sheiks and billionaires could in fact provide substantial resources to the community while also yielding invaluable information about the distribution of wealth and its evolution. Note that the zakat was generally seen as a strictly proportional tax (with the same rate for rich and poor); in some cases there were two tranches (a certain amount of wealth was exempted, while a single rate was applied to the rest) but never an explicitly progressive tax with multiple tranches—the only way to ensure that the effort required of each contributor would depend on his ability to contribute, which might have offered a genuine prospect of wealth redistribution.⁷⁶

The lack of transparency, progressivity, and redistributive ambition that we find in the zakat is, moreover, something we find in all religions. For example, the tithe that was paid in France under the Ancien Régime, which was given the force of law by the monarchy and seigneurial elites, was a strictly proportional tax.⁷⁷ Not until the debates of the French Revolution and later, in the twentieth century, do we see the emergence of explicitly progressive taxes allowing for more ambitious efforts of social justice and inequality reduction in societies that had by then become secular. We find the same type of conservatism in more recent religions such as the Church of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith on the basis of a revelation that enabled him to link the United States to the stories of Abraham and Jesus Christ; the Mormon church is today financed by a tithe of 10 percent on the income of the faithful.⁷⁸ These large payments have allowed the development of new forms of sharing and solidarity in a community of 16 million Mormons around the world (of whom nearly 7 million live in the United States, mainly in Utah). But the Mormon tithe is a strictly proportional tax, the finances of the church are unusually opaque, and everything is under the exclusive control of a college of twelve Apostles who serve for life (like the Catholic Pope and the justices of the US Supreme Court) and are based in the prosperous Mormon capital of Salt Lake City. The oldest Apostle automatically becomes the head of the church and its official Prophet. If one of the Apostles dies, the remaining eleven choose a successor. The current Prophet, Russell Nelson, assumed his post in 2018 at the age of 94, replacing his predecessor, who died at 91. Coincidentally, it may be worth noting that a papal bull issued in 1970 denied cardinals over the age of 80 the right to participate in the conclave that elects a new pope. Here is proof that any institution can evolve, even the most venerable.

Proprietarianism and Colonialism: The Globalization of Inequality

To recapitulate: in the first two parts of this book we have studied the transformation of trifunctional societies into ownership societies and the way in which the encounter with European colonial powers and ownership societies affected the evolution of ternary societies elsewhere in the world. We learned that most premodern societies, in Europe as well as in Asia, in Africa as well as in America, were organized around a trifunctional logic. Power at the local level was structured around, on the one hand, clerical and religious elites charged with the spiritual leadership of society and, on the other hand, warriors and military elites responsible for maintaining order in various evolving political-ideological configurations. Between 1500 and 1900, the formation of the centralized state went hand in hand with a radical transformation of the political-ideological devices that served to justify and structure social inequalities. In particular, trifunctional ideology was gradually supplanted by proprietarian ideology based on a strict separation of property rights (supposedly open to all) and regalian powers (henceforth the monopoly of the centralized state).

This movement toward proprietarianism, which accompanied the construction of the state and the development of new means of transportation and communication, also coincided with intensified contacts with remote parts of the world and far-flung civilizations that had previously almost entirely ignored one another. These encounters took place under plainly hierarchical and inegalitarian conditions, given the superior fiscal and military capacity that European states had developed because of their internal rivalries. This contact between European colonial powers and societies on other continents resulted in a variety of political-ideological trajectories, depending especially on the way in which the legitimacy of old intellectual and warrior elites was affected by these encounters. The modern world is a direct result of these processes.

There are many lessons that can be drawn from these historical experiences and trajectories, and I want to stress the great political, ideological, and institutional diversity of the means by which different societies structure social inequalities at both the local and the international level, in contexts marked by numerous rapid transformations. Think, for example, of the European strategy to outflank Islam along the African coast and the discovery of India (followed by codification of its castes); or of Europe’s powerful fiscal-military states, which became fiscal-welfare states in the twentieth century; or of proprietarian ideologies; or of the audacious colonial joint-stock companies invented in Europe. Think of dietary purity, of multilinguistic and multiconfessional racial mixing; of social quotas and large-scale federal parliamentarism in India; of the lettered administrators who served the Chinese state and people and of Chinese imperial exams and Chinese Communist policies development policies; of Japan’s shogunate and social integration strategies; and of the social role of the Shiite quasi-states, or the role of the Council of Guardians and other novel republican reforms invented in Iran. A good many of these political-ideological constructs and institutions have not survived. Others remain in an experimental state, and we have made no attempt to hide their weaknesses. The common point of all these historical experiences is that they show that there is never anything “natural” about social inequality. It is always profoundly ideological and political. Every society has no choice but to make sense of its inequalities, and the claim that inequality serves the common good is effective only if it has some degree of plausibility and some embodiment in durable institutions.

The objective of Parts One and Two—through which we have surveyed the history of trifunctional, proprietarian, slave, and colonial inequality regimes up to the turn of the twentieth century, with occasional excursions into more recent times—was not just to illustrate the political-ideological ingenuity of human societies. I also tried to show that it was possible to glean from history certain lessons for the future, concerning especially the capacity of various ideologies and institutions to achieve their objectives of political harmony and social justice. We saw, for example, that the proprietarian promise of greater diffusion of wealth, which found forceful expression during the French Revolution, collided with a very different reality: the concentration of property in France and Europe was greater on the eve of World War I than it had been a century earlier or under the Ancien Régime (Chapters 1–5). We noted the hypocrisy of civilizing rhetoric and of efforts to sacralize property and to justify racial and cultural domination in the development of colonial society. We saw the lasting effects of modern state codification of longstanding status inequalities (Chapters 6–9). Above all, the study of these various trajectories has afforded us a better understanding of the intertwined socioeconomic and political-ideological processes by which the various parts of the globe came into contact with one another and gave rise to the modern world. To go further, we must now analyze the way in which the events and ideologies of the twentieth century radically transformed the structure of inequality both within countries and at the international level.

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1.     1.  See Chaps. 6–7.

2.     2.  See the online appendix (piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology); see also K. Karaman and S. Pamuk, “Ottoman State Finances in European Perspective, 1500–1914,” Journal of Economic History, 2010.

3.     3.  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the tax receipts of France and England were always below one hundred tons of silver a year, with many ups and downs linked to military conflicts and shifting territorial boundaries. See, for example, J.-P. Genet, “France, Angleterre, Pays-Bas: l’Etat moderne,” in Histoire du monde au XV^e siècle, ed. P. Boucheron, tome 1, Territoires et écritures du monde (Hachette Pluriel, 2012), pp. 248–249.

4.     4.  Recall that national income is equal to what we would today call gross domestic product (GDP; the sum of all goods and services produced in a given territory in a year less the cost of the goods and services required to produce them) minus depreciation of capital (which in practice amounts to 10–15 percent of GDP), plus or minus the net income received from abroad (which can be positive or negative for a given country but which sums to zero at the global level). The first British and French estimates of national income in the period 1690–1710 were later refined, especially during the French Revolution (see, for example, the work of Lavoisier on the “national wealth of France”). On the history of national accounts, see T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, translated by A. Goldhammer (Harvard University Press, 2014), chaps. 1–2. In Chap. 10 I will say more about the various measures of “national wealth” that were also developed after 1700.

5.     5.  See the online appendix. The national income calculations use the urban wage data cited here but in combination with many other sources of data on output and trade, which in theory can lead to a better estimate of true national income. But when the various basic sources are quite uncertain, aggregating them into a national income or GDP estimate does not always lead to clarity of debate; hence my choice and that of many other scholars to express tax receipts in terms of days of urban wages.

6.     6.  Assuming that people employed by the state (police, military, administrators, etc.) have on average the same level of skills and remuneration as the average person in the rest of society and that the equipment and supplies they need to do their jobs are also on the same order as the average.

7.     7.  These orders of magnitude are still valid for military budgets today, which run about 2 percent of national income in countries that are not very active militarily (as in Europe), more than 4 percent in the United States, and more than 10 percent in Saudi Arabia. Globally, military expenditure fell from more than 6 percent of global income in the early 1960s (the era of colonial wars and the Cold War) to just 3 percent in the 2010s. See the online appendix.

8.     8.  See esp. K. Karaman and S. Pamuk, “Different Paths to the Modern State in Europe: The Interaction Between Warfare, Economic Structure, and Political Regime,” American Political Science Review, 2013. See also M. Dincecco, “The Rise of Effective States in Europe,” Journal of Economic History, 2015; M. Dincecco, State Capacity and Economic Development (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

9.     9.  C. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Blackwell, 1990). See also N. Genniaoli and H. J. Voth, “State Capacity and Military Conflict,” Review of Economic Studies, 2017.

10.   10.  On the scope of these technological innovations, see P. Hoffman, “Prices, the Military Revolution, and Western Europe’s Comparative Advantage in Violence,” Economic History Review, 2011; P. Hoffman, “Why Was It Europeans Who Conquered the World?” Journal of Economic History, 2012.

11.   11.  Karaman and Pamuk, “Ottoman State Finances,” p. 612.

12.   12.  In addition to these quantitative differences, it is important to stress the role of superior military organization (especially in naval matters) developed in intra-European warfare in previous centuries. See esp. C. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford University Press, 2004).

13.   13.  See the illuminating book by K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2000). For a global perspective on the exploitation of the world’s natural resources between 1500 and 1800, see also J. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (University of California Press, 2003).

14.   14.  See Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, pp. 211–230, 264–297, 307–312.

15.   15.  See Chap. 7. On the Opium Wars, see, for example, P. Singaravelou and S. Venayre, Histoire du monde au XIX^e siècle (Fayard, 2017), pp. 266–270.

16.   16.  See Chap. 7.

17.   17.  The most grandiose project associated with John Law and the Mississippi bubble (1718–1720) was a company dreamed up by French merchants, who were to receive a monopoly on trade with the Americans with a capital of 80 million pounds sterling (about one year of British national income at the time). Several projects promised to discover the mythical kingdom of Ophir, which was reputed to be in possession of King Solomon’s treasures and was generally believed to lie somewhere between today’s Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Another project aimed to produce textiles in Africa and exchange them for slaves so as to adapt more quickly to the tastes of local merchants. See S. Condorelli, From Quincampoix to Ophir: A Global History of the 1720 Financial Boom (Bern University, 2019). See also A. Orain, La politique du merveilleux. Une autre histoire du Système de Law (Fayard, 2018).

18.   18.  Note that the role of slave and colonial extraction in the development of industrial capitalism was already analyzed by numerous nineteenth-century observers (beginning with Karl Marx) as well as by Eric Williams (prime minister of Trinidad from 1956 to 1981) in E. William, Capitalism and Slavery (1944). By contrast, Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), stressed cultural and religious factors, whereas Fernand Braudel in Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme (1979) focused on the role of high finance in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. The recent work of Pomeranz, Parthasarathi, and Beckert is much less Eurocentric; it represents a return to Marx and Williams but with the richer tools and sources associated with global and connected history.

19.   19.  See J.-L. Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Harvard University Press, 2011).

20.   20.  S. Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf, 2014). See also S. Beckert and S. Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

21.   21.  To be clear, Adam Smith’s views were in part normative and prospective. He did not claim that military power and slavery had played no role in Britain’s prosperity (which would have been a difficult argument to make), but rather that the key to future wealth was respect for property rights and the laws of supply and demand. Similarly, D. North and B. Weingast defend a neo-proprietarian view centered on the protection of property rights and the virtues of British institutions (see esp. D. North and B. Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment,” Journal of Economic History, 1989), although they do not deny the importance of other factors. The approach developed by D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, which was initially centered on the role of systems of property rights stemming from the Atlantic revolutions, was subsequently extended; they now insist on the role of “inclusive institutions,” a broad notion that potentially encompasses many social, fiscal, and educational institutions. See, for example, D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (Crown Publishers, 2012).

22.   22.  See, for example, S. Broadberry, H. Guan, and D. Daokui Li, “China, Europe and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850,” Journal of Economic History, 2018. These authors conclude that the divergence of per capita output and average wage between China and the United Kingdom is clear starting in 1700, which is a little earlier than Pomeranz finds (he argues that wage parity between the more advanced parts of Europe and Asia persisted until 1750–1800) but “later than prior Eurocentric arguments.” It is not clear, however, that the sources allow us to draw such precise conclusions, and it may be preferable to concentrate on specific regions of China and Europe (as Pomeranz does).

23.   23.  See the illuminating book by P. Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

24.   24.  According to available estimates, of 142 kilotons of precious metals (in silver equivalent) extracted between 1600 and 1800 (132 in America, ten in Japan), roughly twenty-three kilotons (20 percent) were exported to India. See Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich, pp. 46–47.

25.   25.  See Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich, pp. 97–131, 234–235. See also Singaravelou and Venayre, Histoire du monde au XIX^e siècle, pp. 90–92.

26.   26.  For the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, it was Japan’s good fortune that its modernization took the form of a restoration: because the emperor and a segment of the old elite took power, he argues, industrial success was possible while maintaining respect for tradition, whereas the French revolutionary bourgeoisie was only good for occupying bureaucratic posts after dispossessing the old nobility (which was prepared to take a chance on capitalism). While this argument is not entirely convincing, it illustrates the pressing need to make sense of different national socioeconomic and political-ideological trajectories. See C. Lévi-Strauss, L’autre face de la Lune. Écrits sur le Japon (Seuil, 2011), pp. 75–76, 155–156; in English, The Other Face of the Moon, tr. J. M. Todd (Belknap Press, 2013).

27.   27.  See, for example, E. Reischauer, Histoire du Japon et des Japonais (Seuil, 1997), tome 1, Des origines à 1945, pp. 164–196; originally published in English as Japan: The Story of a Nation (Knopf, 1981).

28.   28.  See the online appendix for detailed analysis of the data from Japanese censuses of the Edo and Meiji eras, collected with the help of G. Carré.

29.   29.  See Fig. 5.2 and Fig. 8.2.

30.   30.  See G. Carré, “Les marges statutaires dans le Japon pré-moderne: enjeux et débats,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2011; T. Morishita, “Le Japon prémoderne: une société de statuts. Réflexions sur quatre décennies de débats,” Histoire, économie et société, 2017.

31.   31.  According to some estimates, Japanese fiscal revenues were already fairly high (nearly 10 percent of national income, hence closer to European than to Chinese or Ottoman levels) in the middle of the nineteenth century, hence before the Meiji era; they subsequently increased to more than 10 percent of national income. See T. H. Sng and C. Moriguchi, “Asia’s Little Divergence: State Capacity in China and Japan before 1850,” Journal of Economic Growth, 2014.

32.   32.  There is a monument honoring the Kagoshima students in the city’s museum.

33.   33.  In his last film, The Wind Rises, dir. H. Miyazaki (Walt Disney Pictures, 2013), Hayao Miyazaki, the author of many splendid pacifist and feminist mangas, tenderly evokes the life of Jori Horikosui (the designer of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter, which proved particularly lethal during World War II) and, more generally, the doubts of Japanese engineers who tried to win the esteem and respect of German and European engineers between the two world wars.

34.   34.  The Western powers, sure of their domination, frequently administered such insults in those days. In 1926, Brazil quit the League of Nations when it was refused a seat as a permanent member of the council. See B. Badie, Nous ne sommes plus seuls au monde. Un autre regard sur l’“ordre international” (La Découverte, 2016), p. 142.

35.   35.  Among other major examples of intra-Asian colonization in the modern era is the extension of the Kingdom of Viet Nam into Cambodia in 1806–1848. This project was part of an ambitious Vietnamization-Sinicization of the barbarian west, before the Khmer kings called on France for assistance in 1863. The French needed no other excuse and took advantage of the invitation to begin their conquest of the entire Indochinese peninsula. See Singaravelou and Venayre, Histoire du monde au XIX^e siècle, pp. 171–172.

36.   36.  See Fig. I.6.

37.   37.  See, for example, I. Mendizabal et al., “Reconstructing the Population History of European Romani from Genome-wide Data,” Current Biology, 2018.

38.   38.  Before 1856, the Roma were exploited by both nobles and monasteries. The 160th anniversary of the abolition of Roma slavery was celebrated in Romania and elsewhere in Europe in 2016. At several points I have stressed the complexity and porosity of the boundaries between slavery, serfdom, and other forms of forced labor (see esp. Chaps. 6 and 7). To answer the question of whether the Roma were slaves or serfs before 1856 would require detailed examination far beyond the scope of this book. The same can be said of the slavery-serfdom of the nobis in Korea, whose revolt, emancipation, and “debt” nullification in 1894 led to the fall of the Korean Empire and the invasion of the Japanese. See, for example, B. R. Kim, “Nobis: A Korean System of Slavery,” Slavery and Abolition, 2003.

39.   39.  On the inadequacy of European policy with regard to the Roma, see, for example, EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, Working with Roma: Participation and empowerment of local communities (Publications Office of the European Union, 2018).

40.   40.  Roman Catholicism also sought to work toward European political unity: the spiritual power of the papacy found its official counterpart in the temporal power of the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806). In practice, this fragile, unstable political construct covered only a part of Christendom (mainly Germanic and Central Europe). More than that, the decisive difference between the Confucian literati who served the Chinese empire and the Christian clerics and bishops was that the latter served primarily the papacy (and not the emperor). The two powers were frequently in conflict, moreover, which contributed to the fragility of the whole edifice. Obviously, many other political-ideological, socioeconomic, and geographic factors also figure among the reasons why Europe was so fragmented compared to China.

41.   41.  Research suggests that the fiscal pressure was higher under the Song dynasty (960–1279) at a time when China was more divided politically (and during which the empire developed a permanent navy, gunpowder, and paper money) before stabilizing at lower levels in the united neo-Confucian Ming and Qing eras (2–3 percent of national income in tax revenues compared with 5–10 percent earlier). See R. von Glahn, The Economic History of China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 358–382.

42.   42.  According to official counts, the empire employed 24,653 functionaries (1,944 in the central government in the capital and 22,709 in the provinces) in the early Ming years (the late fourteenth century, when the population was around 100 million), or 0.02 percent of the population. See J. Gernet, “Le pouvoir d’État en Chine,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1997, p. 19.

43.   43.  One finds the same mythology in Spanish absolutism, said to be responsible for Iberian backwardness, when in fact the Spanish state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lacked the capacity to enforce its decisions and was largely dependent on local clerical and noble elites.

44.   44.  See M. Elliott, C. Campbell, and J. Lee, “A Demographic Estimate of the Population of the Qing Eight Banners,” Études Chinoises, 2016, for a detailed presentation of the sources and methods used.

45.   45.  See Fig. 8.2.

46.   46.  See Fig. 5.2.

47.   47.  See S. Chen, State Sponsored-Inequality: The Banner System and Social Stratification in Northeast China (Stanford University Press, 2017).

48.   48.  See Yifei Huang, “Social Mobility and Meritocracy: Lessons from Chinese Imperial Civil Service Examination” (PhD diss., California Institute of Technology, 2016), pp. 5–11, table 1.1. See also C. Chang, The Chinese Gentry: Studies on their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society (University of Washington Press, 1955). See also J. Osterhammel, La transformation du monde. Une histoire globale du XIX^e siècle (Nouveau monde éditions, 2017), pp. 1023–1027.

49.   49.  See Yifei Huang, “Social Mobility and Meritocracy.” See also B. Elman, Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (Harvard University Press, 2013).

50.   50.  See esp. Chaps. 11 and 15.

51.   51.  The total number of posts open to holders of the shengyuan was thus barely 0.01 percent of the adult male population: the potential success rate was therefore about one in fifty certificate holders (0.5 percent of adult males), and one in 400 literati (4 percent of adult males). The funnel was even narrower because the central administration in Beijing accounted for fewer than 10 percent of official posts (versus 90 percent for territorial posts).

52.   52.  Elliott, Campbell, and Lee, “A Demographic Estimate of the Population of the Qing Eight Banners”; Chen, State-Sponsored Inequality.

53.   53.  See esp. L. C. Xu and L. Yang, Stationary Bandits, State Capacity, and Malthusian Transition: The Lasting Impact of the Taiping Rebellion (World Bank Group, Policy Research Working Paper, 2018).

54.   54.  See Singaravelou and Venayre, Histoire du monde au XIX^e siècle, pp. 286–288.

55.   55.  Between 1880 and 1910 China therefore had to run an increasing trade surplus to repay its debts. See von Glahn, The Economic History of China, p. 394, fig. 9.11.

56.   56.  See especially the interesting diary of one Jacques Grandin, quoted in P. Singaravelou, Tianjin Metropolis. Une autre histoire de la mondialisation (Seuil, 2017), pp. 224–225, 281–299, 331–335. The occupying powers included the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Germany, Russia, Japan, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Belgium, and Denmark.

57.   57.  See Singaravelou and Venayre, Histoire du monde au XIX^e siècle, pp. 393–399. I will return to these constitutional and ownership issues later (see esp. Chap. 11 on the German constitutions of 1919 and 1949).

58.   58.  In the 1930s and early 1940s, many American diplomats and geopoliticians invested their hopes in a social democratic China to counterbalance the Soviet Union and the European colonial powers in organizing the postwar order. See O. Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 59–99.

59.   59.  See esp. Chap. 12.

60.   60.  See the illuminating book by J. P. Luizard, Histoire politique du clergé chiite, XVIII^e–XXI^e siècles (Fayard, 2014).

61.   61.  The high Shiite clergy is still based primarily in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon and “reigns” over approximately 170 million Shiites throughout the world (constituting 11 percent of all Muslims), accounting for 85 percent of the population of Iran, 75 percent in Bahrain, 55 percent in Iraq, 35 percent in Lebanon (but more than half of the Muslims in that country), roughly 15–20 percent in Pakistan and Afghanistan (and of Muslims in India), and generally less than 10 percent in other Muslim countries. See Luizard, Histoire politique du clergé chiite, pp. 40–41. Some authors insist that the pishtras, functional social classes in trifunctional Iran in the Zoroastrian period (first millennium BCE to early first millennium CE), accorded a preeminent place to the priestly class as opposed to the warrior class (see, for example, E. Sénart, Les castes dans l’Inde. Les faits et le système [1896], pp. 140–141). It would be risky, however, to link the power of the Iranian clerical class too strongly to this tradition, since conversion to Shiism also involved other regions. On debates over the process of Iran’s conversion to Shiism, see I. Poutrin, “Quand l’Iran devint chiite. Religion et pouvoir chez les Safavides (16e–17e s.),” Conversion/Pouvoir et religion, 2017.

62.   62.  These three holy cities are located in Iraq. In Iran, only Mashhad can boast of the tomb of an imam. Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, and other imams are buried in Medina (Saudi Arabia), which is a source of great tension with the (Sunni) Saudi authorities during pilgrimages.

63.   63.  See Luizard, Histoire politique du clergé chiite, pp. 77–88.

64.   64.  See Singaravelou and Venayre, Histoire du monde au XIX^e siècle, pp. 147–148.

65.   65.  For example, the Egyptian constitution of 2014 stipulates that the military budget is to remain secret (only a total figure is released to the public) and must be negotiated with army commanders. The Thai constitution of 2016 gives military commanders the power to appoint senators, who can bring down the government.

66.   66.  The only nonreligious leader to serve as president to date is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–2013), who was seen as stricter and more conservative than many presidents drawn from the clerical and religious class.

67.   67.  See Luizard, Histoire politique du clergé chiite, pp. 217–230.

68.   68.  The regime does, however, continue to command a certain prestige among the religious owing to its regional standing and protection of Shiites, as well as to the memory of the war with Iraq (1980–1988), at a time when all the Western countries were supporting and arming Saddam Hussein, a member of the Sunni minority in Iraq (and not very religious), who had not hesitated to execute the grand marja of Najaf in 1980.

69.   69.  See Fig. I.4.

70.   70.  See esp. Chap. 13.

71.   71.  Recall that al-Qaeda is a Sunni terrorist group known primarily for its attacks on September 11, 2001, and relatively open to Shiites, whereas the Islamic State (Daech) is a territorial project that aims to establish a Sunni Caliphate “in Iraq and the Levant” (including a radical redrawing of the boundary between Iraq and Syria, which it came close to achieving between 2014 and 2018); Daech is violently opposed to Shiites in Iraq and throughout the region.

72.   72.  On recent changes in the regime, see esp. A. Chelly, Iran, autopsie du chiisme politique (Cerf, 2017); C. Arminjon Hachem, Chiisme et Etat. Les clercs à l’épreuve de la modernité (CNRS, 2013).

73.   73.  See esp. A. Popovic, La révolte des esclaves en Iraq au IIIe/IXe siècle (1976); C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Les Routes de l’esclavage: Histoire des traites africaines (Albin Michel, 2018), pp. 67–68.

74.   74.  See, for example, T. Ramadan, Le génie de l’Islam. Initiation à ses fondements, sa spiritualité et son histoire (Archipoche, 2016), p. 47. In the same vein the author explains that while certain limitations on the rights of women (such as half-shares of inheritances) are certainly not satisfactory, they can be justified if men assume their roles and take good care of their women (p. 150).

75.   75.  See Luizard, Histoire politique du clergé chiite, pp. 38–39.

76.   76.  References to the zakat do however sometimes mention variable rates depending on the tax basis, such as “2.5 percent on sums of money and 5–10 percent of harvests.” See Ramadan, Le génie de l’Islam, p. 127; see also A. D. Arif, L’Islam et le capitalisme: pour une justice économique (L’Harmattan, 2016), p. 70. The fact that the first rate seems to refer to a tax on a stock of capital and the second to a tax on an annual income flow (or else a product not immediately consumed or reinvested, according to some interpretations) adds to the confusion, especially since no comparison is made with actually existing taxes on income, estates, or wealth. In practice, the zakats seem to have varied a great deal with the context, the society, and local norms.

77.   77.  See Chap. 2.

78.   78.  According to the Book of Mormon, one of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ four sacred texts that include the Bible, a Jewish tribe fled Mesopotamia and later the coast of Arabia by ship and settled in America in the sixth century BCE. The story of what took place in biblical lands was supposedly recounted to the lost tribe directly by Jesus Christ, who visited America shortly after his resurrection. The corresponding tablets were then allegedly recovered by Joseph Smith in 1828 in western New York State. This way of associating a place with a community that sees itself as peripheral to the great monotheistic narrative was not unlike the way in which the Koran linked the Hejaz to the Jewish and Christian narrative (the Arabas are said to be descendants of Ishmael, who built the foundation of the Kaaba in Mecca with his father Abraham). This egalitarian aspect of the messianic narratives and this refusal to hierarchize territories and origins is an essential feature of these texts. On the social context of the emergence of Islam, see the classic book by M. Rodinson, Mahomet (Seuil, 1961).