The Imperial AGe
The Roman and early Chinese empires were not exactly simultaneous, but their chronology overlapped. The unification by Qin was the definitive turning point in Chinese history, which initiated its imperial age. The Republic led Rome to acquire an empire in less than five centuries, before Julius Caesar started the civil war that destroyed it. For the purpose of comparing two careers of rise and fall, it is convenient to shift their relative timelines. I match up the unification of China in 221 BCE and Caesar's march on Rome in 49 BCE, so that we can talk about the progress of their "imperial age", here shaded in grey.
The Roman and Chinese had much similarities but also many differences. Their economies were both agrarian and monetized, but adopted different models of production organization. Their societies were both patriarchic, conservative and stratified. Each person had specific social roles and had moral duty to be contended with them. Both societies valued the family, the nursery of authoritarianism, but the Roman made a clear legal separation between the state and the family, the Chinese did not. Their political power was mostly held by aristocrats, but the Roman senatorial aristocracy and the Chinese feudal aristocracy differed in characters. Initially, their states were all city-sized, but the western city-state and Chinese feudal states had different political structures.
In the course of rise to empire, Rome and China each undertook technological and economic development, cultural transformation, political reform, and conquest, which depended much on military organization and the government's capacity to mobilize and direct resources. Because the conditions of the infant Republic and the early Spring and Autumn period were so different, and because the two realms undertook radical reforms in different stages of development, their rises followed different paths, and ended in two forms of absolute monarchy, a military dictatorship with wealthy elites for the Roman Empire, a bureaucratic autocracy with doctrinaire elites for imperial China.
Questions:
- Compare and contrast the characteristics of the rise of Imperial Rome and Imperial China.