CHILDE’S CHECKLIST
Childe’s Checklist (1950) for the Urban Revolution, requires
the presence of:
1 Cities that are ‘more extensive and more densely settled
than any previous settlements’…
2 Full-time specialists—craftsmen, transport workers,
merchants, officials and priests—who ‘did not secure their share directly by
exchanging theirproducts or services for grains or fish with individual
peasants’, but instead worked for organizations that could command surplus from
peasants.
3 Concentration of surplus (limited by low productivity) ‘as
tithe or tax to an imaginary deity or divine king’.
4 ‘Truly monumental public buildings [which] not only
distinguish each known city from any village but also symbolize the
concentration of the social surplus.’
5 The presence of a ruling class, including ‘priests, civil
and military leaders and officials [who] absorb a major share of the
concentrated surplus’.
6 Members of this class develop technical expertise,
particularly systems of writing and numerical notation, from which emerge:
7 ‘Exact and predictive sciences—arithmetic, geometry and
astronomy….12 Calendrical and mathematical sciences are common features of the
earliest civilizations and they too are corollaries of the archaeologists’
criterion [separating the historic from the prehistoric], writing.’
8 Specialists in representative art emerge—‘full-time
sculptors, painters, or seal engravers [who] model or draw likenesses of persons
or things, but no longer with the naive naturalism of the hunter, but according
to conceptualized and sophisticated styles which differ in each of the four
urban centres’.
9 Regular foreign trade, involving comparatively large
volumes and long distances, emerges to exchange part of the concentrated social
surplus for ‘industrial materials’. ‘To this extent the first cities were
dependent for vital raw materials on long distance trade as no neolithic
village ever was.’
10 ‘Peasants, craftsmen and rulers form a community…. In
fact the earliest cities illustrate a first approximation to an organic
solidarity based upon functional complementarity and interdependence between
all its members such as subsist between the constituent cells of an organism.
Of course this was only a very distant approximation.’ In apparent
contradiction to which:
11 This social solidarity is represented and misrepresented
by ideological means ‘as expressed in the pre-eminence of the temple or
sepulchral shrine’.
12 State organization is dominant and permanent.
Criteria 10, 11 and 12 are all contained in Childe’s lengthy
point 10. As each is important in its own right, to the extent some would say
of being pre-eminent characteristics, I have separated them out, so expanding
Childe’s ‘ten traits’ to a dozen. For an up-to-date discussion of Childe’s life
and work see Harris (1994). Progress will be west to east—Egypt to China—from
the world’s oldest territorial state to the world’s most populous. But before
setting off, let me give a specific answer to the question ‘How does the past
illuminate the present?’ Take China for example; or rather, for two examples,
one particular, the other general.
THE PRESENT ILLUMINATED: PATHS OF THE PAST, SPIRALS TO THE FUTURE
The antiquity and continuities of Chinese society,
comprising a quarter of mankind, are so well known as to be almost a cliché. It
should not be thought that China is ‘unchanging’: its very borders have changed
over the centuries and it has undergone many profound changes over lengthy periods.
Against this background, however, it is possible to identify strong,
structuring continuities which include: family organization; intensive peasant
agriculture divided north/ south; ancestor worship and nature veneration;
social stratification, warfare, and territorial state organization employing
literate administration. Certain key facets of Chinese culture history have
their origin in the Neolithic: animism (veneration of natural phenomena) and
shamanism; hierarchical family structure ordained by ancestor worship; central
importance of family, lineage and clan; and hierarchic ranking of lineages. A
consequence was the early emergence of ‘lords’ with control of people and
territory, sanctioned by genealogical rank plus ritual, and defended by force.
This form of class domination produced the territorial state in the particular
form of village state, an extensive agrarian regime with the bulk of the
population living as peasants in villages dominated by a capital/garrison
(Maisels 1987). There was not one, but a congeries of states in competition,
alliance and conflict even during the Bronze Age. The Warring States Period
(475–221 BC) which marked the final breakup of the formerly hegemonic Zhou
regime saw interstate conflict, death and destruction on a scale not again met
with until the First World War. From it came three major ideological systems of
enduring importance: Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism (though there were
nominally ‘Six Schools’ of pre-Qin philosophy).
Confucianism stressed rites and
fitting behaviour; Daoism was a sort of nature religion (the folk basis)
combined with poetic inscrutability (Laozi’s elaboration); while Legalism,
developed by Han Fei (c. 280–233 BC) and Shang Yang (executed 338 BC)
emphasized harsh measures, including constant surveillance and control,
restraining the populace for the greater freedom of the state to engage in
economic and military development.
This supposedly would result in benefits for
all, eventually. Why was Mao Ze Dong so pleased to compare himself in ferocity,
autocracy and anti-intellectualism with the first Emperor (Qin Shihuangdi,
259–210 BC), who burned books, engaged in mass executions, buried intellectuals
alive and instituted the bao jia method of total social control? Mao led a
party that espoused scientific socialism and which claimed to embody ‘people’s
power’! Saying that power corrupts and that the claims to scientific socialism
were just rhetoric does not explain the form that post-revolutionary power took
in China, or for that matter in the USA after 1776, France after 1789, or in
Russia after the squalid putsch of 1917. King Zheng of the state of Qin was, of
course, the unifier of China and an extreme centralizer, as are all
totalitarians.
It is most significant that Mao choseto identify himself with
the first emperor Qin Shihuangdi (at, for instance, a Communist Party Central
Committee meeting in 1958) and not with the commoner Liu Bang (206–195 BC). At
that 1958 meeting Mao bragged: ‘What does Qin Shihuangdi amount to anyway? He
buried only 460 scholars alive, while we have buried 46,000
counter-revolutionary scholars alive.’ And this as early as 1958, well before
the Cultural Revolution.
Liu Bang founded the subsequent Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD
220) of 400 years duration, a period popularly and historically regarded as
China’s golden age, hence his posthumous title of Gaodi, Sublime Emperor, or
Gaozi, Sublime Ancestor. In philosophy, Mao and the Communist Party utterly
failed to identify with Mohism, the school founded by Mo Zi (c. 479–391
BC)—utilitarian, pragmatic, meritocratic and ethical-humanist—insisting on the
greatest good of the greatest number through peace, efficiency and economic
development. But although Mao’s ‘dialectics’ owed everything to Mo Zi, in
practice he identified with and indeed pursued the brutal Legalist principles
embraced openly by the first Emperor (Qin Shihuangdi) and implicitly by most
subsequent emperors. Why? Because, always stressing the ‘Chineseness’ of his
revolution, Mao embraced an indigenous state ideology and practice that emerged
from local conditions, rooted in the Chinese Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze
Ages.
As such considerations still motivate his successors, and as they will
have a major say in shaping the world of the twenty-first century, it is as
well to understand those origins in some detail. Paradigmatic of a particular
mindset or cultural disposition is the fact that the tomb of Shihuangdi is
known to lie at Mount Li near Xi’an, defended by his famous ‘terracotta army’.
Yet no one in contemporary China dare excavate his tomb for fear of offending
and unleashing so powerful a spirit! Further, the scale, complexity and
longevity of Chinese civilization can serve as a conceptual testbed for the
processes of social evolution. The two centrally dominant Bronze Age states
were the Shang (1575/54–1050/40 BC) and the Western Zhou (1040–771 BC). Centred
in the Yellow River valley, they existed in a landscape composed of other
polities of varying scales and sophistication and all in a state of flux,
variously allied to, competing, at war with, or distant from others in this set
of ‘Chinese’ interaction spheres. Amidst this, the hegemonic Shang ruling
dynasty sent out branches to occupy distant territory. This would, as it were,
secure its rear, hold corridors to allies, etc. One such was the site of
Panlongcheng on a tributary of the Yangzi, dating to the Middle Shang period
(Bagley 1977:168–9).
It has a city-wall enclosing palatial constructions on
stamped earth platforms, fine bronzes and rich burials with human sacrifice—all
the signs of elite residence and territorial control. At the same period, 300
kilometres farther south, the site of Wucheng contrastingly indicates a local
culture adopting Shang characteristics. In addition to direct bronze and
ceramic imports, high-grade local versions of Shang products were made in large
amounts, including high-fired stamp-impressed ware, ‘protoporcelain’ and glazed
ware (Bagley 1977:211). This is a local elite consolidatingits position using
Shang attributes, even attempting a local pictographic script inscribed on
stone moulds and pottery (ibid.). Later, ‘peripheral’ cultures such as Zhou
would overthrow the (Shang) centre and for a time become the ‘centre’.
In its
turn, the Zhou centre undertook direct colonization, spreading metropolitan
culture and technology yet further afield (see Fig. 5.21). By the time of the
Eastern Zhou, comprising the Spring and Autumn (770–476 BC) and the Warring
States (475–221 BC) periods, there was only a nominal centre. The landscape was
covered by large, mechanistic, fiercely competitive states with similar
cultural and technological levels. All of them strove to come out on top by
uniting the interaction sphere under their own leadership. As already
mentioned, the state of Qin won, and that is why we call this sphere China.
This process tells us a great deal about ‘peer-polity interaction’ (Renfrew and
Cherry 1986). Within an interaction sphere even of approximate equals, there is
always one area in advance of others and it thereby serves as a general
catalyst within its interaction sphere. For a while it is dominant, provoking
others to strive to catch up. In time, one or several areas do overtake,
becoming the leading element(s) and catalysts.
The new synthesis brings new players
into being as its effects spill over into other interaction spheres. Existing
players are spurred on to make fundamental changes as they are overtaken by new
players in newly dynamized interaction spheres. From this emerges a yet more
advanced synthesis which acts as a further catalyst, and so on in an ever
widening spiral that first embraces whole regions and then, since the
nineteenth century AD, the whole world. Of course the process does not stop at
that point, but is played out on a global scale. Indeed, the process is now
known as ‘globalization’, with all that means for international competition and
intercontinental flows of information, capital, skills, jobs and people. One
could not ask for a clearer or more important example of how the past illuminates
the present.
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