When will academics stop claiming that China and Europe "diverged"?
This popular idea is based on a false thesis of ancient convergence.
There is an idea that Europe and China were on similar trajectories in antiquity and then that they diverged politically in the Middle Ages (and in terms of economic development only in the Modern period) and that this divergence is some puzzle that needs to be explained. This idea is very popular and comes up frequently in articles regarding economic history. For example, the article by Mokyr and Tabellini (2023), published in Economica, which states on page 11:
In other words, until the collapse of the Roman Empire, China and Europe moved more or less on parallel trajectories of centralization and a high-capacity state. But with the decline of Rome, their trajectories diverged, as the end of the Han dynasty in China in the early 3rd century was not followed by a process of state dismantling and collapse comparable to what took place in Europe.
There is a big problem with this idea that is now taken for granted by many academics: this idea is entirely wrong, and it is wrong on three major dimensions:
First, “Europe” was not an identity until recently. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, there was no such concept as “European” in the sense of a common identity for the inhabitants of the European continent. This is completely different from Chinese identity.
The inhabitants of what we today call “China” shared a common identity for all of documented Chinese history. The Chinese civilization was always a singular culture that developed around the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. This is so evident that a few centuries after writing was invented in China, in 1200 BC, the Chinese were already under centralized rule under the Early Zhou dynasty.
Ancient China was very much like the Egyptian civilization, which developed along the Nile River and maintained a common identity under the rule of dynastic autocrats. Periods of Chinese political fragmentation, like the Warring States period (during the late Zhou Dynasty) and the Age of Fragmentation (after the Han Dynasty), were understood in the context of China being a common culture that was politically fragmented, as if in a state of civil war, and not a heterogeneous set of cultures that existed on the same continent. Periods of fragmentation were followed by unification as China was militarily unified not only once but seventeen (!) times in history.
In contrast, the concept of Europe historically was developed as a geographical concept based on the concept of “continents,” a concept that was developed by the Ancient Greeks. The Greeks divided the world into three parts, which they called Europe, Asia, and Lybia (later renamed Africa); this division was based on the lands that were separated by the Mediterranean, Black, and Red seas. Thus, Europe was originally a geographical concept, not a cultural or political concept.
Culturally, Europeans came to share a common identity only by the 15th and 16th centuries: it was only by that time that nearly the whole surface of the European continent came to be ruled by Christian States. Therefore, it was only at that time that one could talk about “Europeans” as a common identity that was not shared with non-Europeans. This was because, at that time, the geographical concept of Europe became synonymous with Christendom.
Before the year 1500, there were many Christians outside of Europe and many non-Christians in Europe (including non-Christian states in Iberia). Also, even in 1500, a large portion of Europe was ruled by the Muslim Empire of the Ottomans. Then, after 1500, as Europeans began to colonize much of the planet, the cultural “Western identity”, which was synonymous with and later replaced Christian identity, was not constrained to the European continent.
Second, another major singular error is equating Roman Europe with Ancient China as if they were two centralized states ruling Europe and China, respectively. But, unlike Ancient China, the Roman Empire was not actually a State; it was a sphere of military hegemony of a city-state. This is evident if one actually reads what the ancients said regarding the “Roman Empire.” For example, this description (in paragraph 5) of the “provincial city” of Massilia is particularly revealing: it was a Greek city-state in southern Gaul that functioned autonomously with its own political institutions and laws, as described by geographer Strabo, who wrote during the time of Roman emperor Augustus. The Roman Empire lacked a centralized bureaucracy, as is evident that the Roman budget provided for only two things in our sources: paying for the Roman army and providing infrastructure and welfare programs for the inhabitants of the city of Rome. Under Augustus, Rome was still a city-state and not a centralized territorial State actually ruling over a vast territory.
One might point out that the Late Antiquity Roman Empire was more like a territorial state than the Classical Antiquity Roman Empire, and this is true: 300 years after Augustus, emperor Diocletian created a centralized Roman bureaucracy during his rule from 284 to 305 AD. However, this centralized territorial state did not last long: by the late 4th century, it was already disintegrating, and Rome itself was easily sacked by a marauding tribe in 410 AD. Showing clearly that a century after Diocletian’s reign, his ideal of a centralized empire was already dead. Thus, the “Chinese phase” of European history, in the sense that most Europeans lived under a single centralized state, lasted less than a century.
Third, the Roman Empire was not European but Mediterranean: while Rome had militarily dominated about 80% of Europe’s population from the 1st century BC to the early 5th century AD, the European regions under Roman hegemony were only half of the population of the Roman Empire and contained only a few of its major cities: the largest cities in the Roman Empire were often said to be Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, Ephesus, Athens, Ptolemais, and Rhodes. Of these eight, only two were in Europe: Rome and Athens.
The fact was that the Roman Empire was not a “European State” but a highly decentralized Mediterranean empire that happened to subject most of the European population. Most of the European population was regarded by the Romans as mostly peripheral barbarian tribes who were outside of the relevant or “civilized” world. In addition, it is important to point out that while Romans controlled the most populous parts of Europe in antiquity, the bulk of the European continent was never under Roman domination (those lands were sparsely inhabited by Germanic and Scythian tribes). This was very much unlike ancient Chinese states, such as the Qin and Han Empires, which were not really empires (in the Roman sense) but centralized states that ruled over a territory that was synonymous with the territory of Ancient China.
Conclusion
Thus, the puzzle of European and Chinese “convergence” and “divergence” is not as much a puzzle but a false idea that has been advocated by many. They were following a tendency common in humans to attempt to find common patterns, as human minds are pattern-finding minds, but those patterns often do not really exist.
I admit that there is some truth to the parallel between China and the regions of Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. This parallel is in the fact that, like China was militarily unified, Rome also managed to dominate most of the populations of those three regions militarily and, after Diocletian’s reforms, which centralized the Roman Empire and thus “unified” most of the populations of Europe and the Middle East under an autocratic state like the Chinese states. But this unification occurred only once and lasted for a period of a century. In contrast, Chinese civilization had already developed a common identity not long after writing was invented in China over 3000 years ago, and this identity has persisted for thousands of years up to the present, with seventeen cases of military unification. In contrast, the block “Europe+North Africa+Western Asia” has always been a very heterogeneous set of cultures and polities which were briefly unified under autocratic rule during the Late Phase of the Roman Empire.
One important thing to note is that Rome failed to maintain its centralized empire for over a century. Still, this process of centralization created what we conceive as Christianity: the creation of the Christian Church was an attempt to implement a higher degree of ideological and cultural uniformity over the vastly heterogeneous cultures that existed across the Roman Empire. More precisely, what we today understand as the Christian church was created by Diocletian’s successor, Constantine, who wanted to impose a common religion across the whole ancient world; he took what was a marginal religion, one among many which had developed across the Mediterranean in classical antiquity, and tried to impose it as a public policy across the ancient world. He succeeded, as nearly everyone in the Roman world became Christian by the 5th century, while the centralized Roman state had already collapsed.
Later, this “member of Christendom” identity became synonymous with European identity as the Arab invasions resulted in the Muslim conquest of the former Christian lands of the Middle East, reducing Christendom to Europe, which then evolved into our modern Western identity. Thus, during the Middle Ages, while China already had a consolidated identity in their political centralization, Europeans developed an identity during their political decentralization. The European identity was developed as opposed to the Middle East thanks to the division of the Roman world into a Christian world (Europe) and a Muslim world (Middle East).
Really disagree with the claim that Rome was this decentralized prior to Diocletian... I recommend this article on the Rome vs China comparison https://web.archive.org/web/20220129211536/https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/scheidel/110702.pdf