In 617 Li Yüan (566–635), the Duke of T'ang and one of the most powerful Sui generals, joined the scores of rebels who had arisen in the waning years of the Sui dynasty. His armies marched on the Sui capital, overwhelmed its defences, and took the city. There, six months later, he founded a new dynasty which was to endure for almost three centuries, and would rank alongside the Han as one of China's two golden ages of empire. As Li Yüan went on to impose firm central authority throughout the country, he was fortunate in being the heir to the great achievements of the Sui, who, barely three decades before, had brought centuries of disunion to an end. The institutions of his new dynasty were established on the solid foundations left by his predecessors.

Like the majority of rebel leaders throughout Chinese history who succeeded in founding dynasties of their own, Li Yüan was not a commoner but a nobleman of distinguished lineage. His ancestry can be traced with certainty as far as his grandfather, Li Hu, one of the ‘Eight Pillars of State’ (Pa Kuo-chu), the chief commanders associated with Yü-wen T'ai in the foundation of the Northern Chou state in the 550s. At that time the Li clan was centred on Wu-ch'uan chen, a garrison established by the Toba state of Northern Wei inside the Great Wall near modern Tat'ung, which was also the home of Yü-wen T'ai.

The powerful decentralized provincial order which emerged in China after the middle of the eighth century was a direct result of the An Lu-shan rebellion of 755–63. After the founding itself, the rebellion is without doubt the most significant event in the history of the dynasty. It transformed a centralized, rich, stable and far-flung empire into a struggling, insecure and divided one. It has long been treated by historians as a turning-point in T'ang history; in recent decades it has even been treated as a major turning point in Chinese history as a whole. Yet, there is a striking disparity between the event and its consequences. Although such a major internal upheaval was bound to have grave and far-reaching effects, could what was essentially a military event have brought about the profound changes which differentiate the second half of the dynasty from the first so completely?

In reality, the changed situation of China after An Lu-shan's rising resulted not merely from the rebellion alone, but had its roots in developments long under way. As preceding chapters in this volume have shown, T'ang political institutions had undergone significant modifications since the beginning of the dynasty. These changes already anticipated the emergence of forms of government quite different in character from those of early T'ang. But it is imperative to distinguish these long-term changes from the specific origins of the rebellion itself. There was nothing inevitable about this event, even though when it came, it caused a tremendous disruption and acted as a powerful catalyst.

The sources for eighth and ninth century Chinese history, most of which have been described in the scholarly literature, far outnumber those for earlier periods, and so we can readily imagine what the general quality of life in late T'ang Ch'ang-an must have been. Moreover, the subject of this essay, high politics from 75 5 to about 860, is probably better represented among the documents and in the histories than any other topic. Nevertheless, to the particular frustration of the political historian, there are some basic questions about the late T'ang court that we may never be able to answer satisfactorily owing to the lack of sufficient reliable data. This is not merely a matter of details, or of refinement of interpretation, for the quantity and quality of ninth-century data represent a severe constraint. We must therefore subject the extant Chinese records to the most pains-taking scrutiny, so that their preconceptions and omissions will mislead us as little as possible. That procedure is not unusual in itself, of course, but for some late T'ang topics (such as ninth-century political factionalism, which has suffered from a thousand years of biased interpretation), the lack of substantial new evidence makes it difficult to do more, in honesty, than unravel inherited distortions. Occasionally we can glean bits of information on such difficult questions from the general collections of T'ang poetry and prose, but it should come as no surprise that corroborative material about events which took place so long ago frequently proves thin, or untrustworthy.

In the last quarter of the sixth century, China had been politically fragmented for nearly three hundred years – the longest period of disunion in Chinese history. The Sui dynasty brought this period to an end, swept away much of the institutional detritus that was the legacy of disunion and laid the foundations of a new unified state and society. All later empires were indebted to the Sui's accomplishments, but the immediate beneficiary was the great dynasty of T'ang (618–907) which built on Sui foundations and dominated the culture and politics of all eastern Asia for nearly three hundred years.

The problem before us in this chapter is to assess the accomplishments of the Sui and come to an estimate of the significance of this period in Chinese history. It is not enough to say, as many historians have, that the Sui was like the Ch'in (221–207 BC) in bringing to an end an older order, sweeping away the accumulated rubble of the centuries and building a new kind of empire. This is no doubt true as far as it goes, but only when we consider the vastly greater extent and complexity of China in the sixth century and measure in a tentative way the new forces – the legacy of steppe invaders, of Buddhism and religious Taoism, for example – shall we understand the character of the Sui's accomplishments.

T'ai-tsung's doubts about the ability of his heir apparent, Li Chih, to lead the country effectively proved to be well founded. Chih, T'ai-tsung's ninth son, was the youngest son born to him by the empress Wen-te, née Chang-sun. Born on the thirteenth day of the sixth month of 628, he had been enfeoffed as the Prince of Chin in 633, and had been heir apparent since 643. When he ascended the throne before his father's coffin on the first day of the sixth month of 649, he was still not quite twenty-one years old. He is known to history by his posthumous temple-name of Kao-tsung.

In spite of the systematic efforts which were made to prepare him for the throne – the appointment of carefully selected tutors and preceptors and the composition of imperial injunctions to guide his behaviour – he proved to be a well-meaning but ineffectual and indecisive ruler.

At the beginning of his reign the new emperor conscientiously attempted to emulate the style of government which his father had practised so successfully. He diligently practised economy, eschewed the hunt and lavish court entertainments, and sought the frank remonstrances and counsel of his court advisers. But T'ai-tsung's highly personal style of leadership demanded qualities and a sheer force of personality which Kao-tsung did not possess. The emperor's ineffectiveness, at least later in his reign, was in part due to recurrent illness, which brought on in-capacitating attacks of dizziness and impaired vision.

FISCAL PROBLEMS, RURAL UNREST AND POPULAR REBELLION

It was only after 884, at the very end of the dynasty, that the T'ang dynastic house finally abandoned its attempt to control all of China proper, and until then it never really lost its sovereignty over any part, however little actual authority it had in some areas. Even in the most obdurately independent provinces, T'ang titles were inevitably adopted, and formal court appointment to office was usually sought. Thus the T'ang continued to maintain a presence even in places it could not govern. But its frequent and costly efforts to reassert authority in ‘rebellious’ areas, the inescapable need to defend the empire from foreign invasions, and the maintenance of a large bureaucracy even after the central government's effective administrative power had been severely diminished, all put serious pressures on the resources actually at the dynasty's command. Those pressures led to a series of cumulative developments, each more serious and complex than the last: from 780 to 820 an increasing tax burden was loaded upon the peasantry, to support campaigns to restore dynastic unity; from 820 to 860 a growing pattern of disorder and local banditry emerged; from 860 to 875 broadly supported garrison insurrections broke out, coupled with a serious attempt to form an independent regional state in the lower Yangtze valley; from 875 to 884 a popular rebellion of immense proportions arose. The rebels captured the T'ang capital and held it for more than two years.

THE PERIOD OF PREPARATION (684–90)

The fourth T'ang emperor, who ascended the throne as Chung-tsung in the twelfth month of 683, was only the third son of Kao-tsung and the empress Wu. Since his chances for the succession had always seemed remote, he had been prepared neither by upbringing nor by his brief three years as heir apparent for his new dignity, and it was probably for this reason that his father's will had provided for the continuing political influence of the experienced empress Wu. Her intervention, strictly speaking, was to be permitted only ‘where matters could not be decided’, but she lost no time in showing that an honoured but impotent retirement as empress dowager was far from her mind. The first sign of this was her contravention of the will's provision that Chung-tsung should succeed immediately ‘in front of the coffin’; and in delaying the coronation a full week, she revealed both her own ambition, and the fact that she felt certain misgivings about her son's suitability. Too little is known of the character of the new emperor to make judgments on the validity of his mother's suspicions, but it is clear even at this stage of his career, that he had inherited at least one of his father's weaknesses, and had fallen under the domination of his own wife, the empress Wei. Within a month of his accession, he promoted her father, Wei Hsüan-chen, to the rank of chief minister.

The Renaissance, 1450–1530

Part of the charm of Renaissance writers is their firm conviction that they were living in a ‘golden age’. Their world was bigger and better than anything in the past and, they sometimes reflected, the heroes of antiquity would have been miserable failures as Renaissance men, even as Renaissance soldiers. ‘We must confesse’, wrote Sir Roger Williams, an English general of the later sixteenth century, ‘Alexander, Caesar, Scipio, and Haniball, to be the worthiest and famoust warriers that euer were; notwithstanding, assure your selfe, …they would neuer haue…conquered Countries so easilie, had they been fortified as Germanie, France, and the Low Countries, with others, haue been since their daies.’ We may smile at this characteristic Renaissance hyperbole, but in the field of warfare at least it was fully justified: the military realities of the sixteenth century were indeed far more complex and far more daunting than those of the Classical (or any previous) Age.

European warfare was transformed between 1450 and 1530 by a number of basic changes. First came the improved fortifications of which Sir Roger Williams wrote, linked to the introduction of powerful new artillery. An entirely new type of defensive fortification appeared in Italy in the later fifteenth century: the trace italienne, a circuit of low, thick walls punctuated by quadrilateral bastions. The development of large siege-cannon – made of cast-iron from the 1380s and of bronze from the 1420s – rendered the high, thin walls of the Middle Ages quite indefensible.

Introduction

It may be an indiscreet question, but it is nevertheless a highly legitimate one: ‘What actually happened during the last 2,500 years in Western history?’ – given that the answer should be a chapter rather than a book, one lecture rather than a series. There is nothing more illegitimate in this question than to ask for a description of what happens at street level as seen from a helicopter circling above, with a macro-view of the situation. This view would necessarily lack insight into the micro-perspective possessed by drivers and pedestrians, their anguish and delight or sheer boredom in trying to match their intentions to get ahead with their capabilities, against the intentions and capabilities of others in the traffic throng. It is legitimate to give answers in terms of traffic flows and charts, of periods of movement and periods of standstill, of the traffic being most rapid in the centre of the lanes and very slow towards the edges (as in hydrodynamics); an analysis of traffic does not have to be through the eyes and minds of those involved although that helps understanding. The question is not illegitimate, it is only indiscreet because of the difficulty of answering; itself a good reason why the question is usually rejected. And yet the question tends to appear and reappear: it is unnecessary to invoke a curious Martian on a quick visit wanting to get some information about ‘this thing called Western history’.

Before and after

Let us first take a look at the birth and death columns which appear regularly in our newspapers: most of the announcements are to do with elderly people; there are some deaths of young adults or children, of course, usually the victims of accidents, but the typical announcement is that of the funeral of a widow of about 80, attended by two of her children and about four or five grandchildren. We have hardly any similar evidence for the sixteenth century, with the exception of a few family records, but by using the method of family reconstitution we could find analogous cases. To leave behind one or two children and four or five grandchildren, if one was lucky enough to live to 80, was not unusual.

At first sight, there seems to be little difference in the composition of families and in the kinship relations: in the sixteenth century, as in the twentieth, the dominant type is the nuclear family, made up of father, mother and children. The gap between generations has not changed much either: about twenty-five to thirty years, as a result of a relatively high age of marriage; western Europe has never known adolescent marriage: in India, in 1891, the average age of girls on marriage was only 12½, while in western Europe it was as high as 23.

The maximum life span has not changed much either: in the twentieth century as in the sixteenth, this does not exceed 115 years; and the reported cases of extreme old age owe more to the lack of official records or to general ignorance, than to the quality of life or the progress of medical science.

‘Revolution’ in its fullest sense should mean a vital transformation of society, something far beyond any ordinary shaking-up, a decisive transfer of power both political and economic. This can happen very seldom. But Europe has known many lesser eruptions, resembling it in some measure. Overt class conflict has been only occasional, disharmony among classes or social groups has been ubiquitous, and in all these collisions its presence can be traced. They have been of many species; and with Europe's always uneven development growing more and more uneven, forms of revolt belonging to distinct stages of history might be going on in different regions at the same time.

Europe's mutability must be traced to fundamental features of its makeup. Underlying them has been its duality, the discordant nature it derived from its Roman-Christian and Germanic-feudal ancestry. Both strands made for close interweaving of state and society, in most of Asia joined by mechanical, external clamps. Both gave rise to a wealth of political or politically relevant institutions of all kinds, which forces of change could work on and through, even if often obstructed by them. In Europe also, unlike most of Asia, many autonomous polities packed close together meant that exterior factors were always liable to intensify internal frictions.

In medieval times movements of revolt included those of peasants against landowners, towns against lords, urban workers against employers in centres of nascent capitalism, peoples against foreign domination. Most strident of all was the example set by the dominant class itself, the feudal lords.

Coutinuity and change: in a sense this is what all historians study all the time, and it is no surprise to find historical monographs on a wide variety of subjects appearing under this kind of title. Historians are professionally concerned with change, and therefore with the absence of change (which is one of the ways of defining continuity). If volumes I-XII of the New Cambridge Modern History have already dealt with these themes, the reader may well be asking what is the point of a thirteenth volume, which covers the same period as all the rest, from the late fifteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The short answer to this question is that there is more than one way of being concerned with change, or more than one kind of change to be concerned with.

Historians have traditionally dealt with the narrative of events, especially political events; Thucydides, Tacitus, Guicciardini, Clarendon and Ranke are among the great masters of this genre in the West. This style of history involves a close study of changes over the short-term. The traditional historian may also be interested in changes over the long-term; he may choose his subject because he thinks it a ‘turning-point’ in history; but he is likely to assume rather than to argue that a break in continuity occurred at this point. Guicciardini began his History of Italy and Ranke began his Latin and Teutonic Nations with the turning-point of the 1490s, just like the old and the New Cambridge Modern History, but they did not justify their choice in any detail.

Definitions

Bureaucracy is a word in constant everyday use. Over the last generation or so, its use has become far more common among historians, as well as social scientists, political commentators, journalists, politicians, and the public at large. Perhaps inevitably, its meanings have multiplied to the point where clarity and agreed definitions often seem to have been lost, and more heat than light is generated. For the purpose of historical discussion, there are three principal meanings of the word which need to be distinguished before proceeding any further.

(1) Bureaucracy as administration, either public or private, by full-time salaried officials, who are professionals, graded and organised hierarchically, with regular procedures and formalised record-keeping, and recruited for the tasks in hand. This is essentially the definition established by the great German sociologist of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, Max Weber; the word has most often been used in this sense by historians and social scientists since then.

(2) Bureaucracy as a political system or other institution where power resides in the hands of such officials. Logically this meaning is impossible without (i), but it is often used independently without strict adherence to (I). The Oxford English Dictionary and political theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular have used this meaning, where the word is an amalgam of classical Greek and modern French – an addition to terms like aristocracy and democracy.

(3) Bureaucracy as a pejorative description of (I), and/or (2), signifying: ‘form-filling’; ‘red-tape’; procrastination and frustration; a waste of time, money and resources; the stifling of enterprise and initiative; the rule of ‘jacks in office’. In recent years, this heavily political or 'ideological' meaning has come to be shared by the neo-laissez-faire, individualist Right and by some sections of the revolutionary Marxist as well as anarchist Left; but it is frequently used by people of all political persuasions or none in particular, to describe something they instinctively dislike and cannot otherwise define.

Europe's natural environment has interacted with the Continent's vigorous economic history over the last several hundred years largely in ways conducive to growth. Three attributes of the European environment – its particular location on the surface of the earth, its comparative freedom from natural disasters, and the variety of its resources – are discussed in this first section. The next section discusses influences of the environment on the location of industry, the section after that touches on the effect of industrial and other forms of pollution on the human habitat, and the final section deals with the way Europeans expanded their effective resource base by securing control over other continents.

In considering these matters it is worth emphasising the experience of the western part of Europe. That experience is not a close guide to what was happening simultaneously in the remainder of the Continent, but there are two reasons for thinking it exceptionally significant in the history of almost the whole world. The former is that from the fifteenth century western Europeans disrupted other ecosystems by plunder, trade and colonialism, and by introducing old world diseases among vulnerable populations, sufficiently to amount to a reshaping of the whole globe's demographic, economic and political life.

At first sight it all seems quite simple and obvious. Medieval man lived in a predominantly religious culture, but we live in a predominantly secular one, and the process of the secularisation of European culture took place, for the most part, in the period covered by this volume. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment were all milestones on the road to a secular culture and society, and the secularisation process accelerated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One theological position after another was made untenable by repeated attacks and was abandoned for another, further behind the lines, in the shrinking territory of the sacred. Belief in the supernatural was gradually replaced by a more rational, scientific out-look, a process summed up by the sociologist Max Weber as ‘the disenchantment of the world’ (Die Entzauberung der Welt). The clergy lost in turn their monopoly of learning, their power to persecute the unorthodox, and their influence on the policy of governments.

The fundamental change of attitude between the sixteenth century and the twentieth may be summed up in two quotations. In his General History of the Indies (1552), Francisco López de Gómara described the discovery of America as ‘The greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it).’ But in 1969, when men first landed on the moon, Richard Nixon spoke quite simply of ‘the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation’.

The history of the social science disciplines as we know them is a fairly recent one. The word ‘sociologie’ was invented by Auguste Comte in the 1820s; ‘political economy’ was first used (in French) in 1613 but did not become current until the second half of the eighteenth century. ‘Economics’ was first popularised in its modern sense by Alfred Marshall in his Principles of Economics (1890); in the 1740s the word was still being used as Aristotle had used it, to denote household management, an activity which included the control of slaves and wives among other possessions. The notion of a ‘science’ as a distinct discipline did not emerge clearly in England until well into the nineteenth century, and nor did the word ‘scientist’, invented by Whewell in 1840. Even more significantly, perhaps, the words ‘society’ and ‘social’ acquire their modern meanings in English and French only in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The contrast between society and the state was central to nineteenth-century German thought but rarely made explicit before that time (though it was anticipated by Thomas Paine, who wrote in 1776 that ‘society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness’).

Social thought, in other words, was until recently both intellectually diffuse, in the sense that ‘society’ or ‘societies’ had not yet clearly emerged as an object of study, and socially diffuse, in that the occupational role of ‘social scientist’, like that of ‘natural scientist’, had not yet emerged.

The forms of late medieval industry

Industrial activity in Europe in the late fifteenth century fell typically into five forms. Two of these were destined to decline over the following several centuries; one was to continue a vigorous life over the whole period covered in this essay, then virtually to disappear; and two, under pressures from changes in technology, were to blend together to create the industrial technique and organisation, larger-scale and continuously dynamic, that we recognise as characteristically modern.

The village industry, descended from the specialised crafts on manorial estates was perhaps the most widespread of these forms. The serf status of the artisan, continued or restored in eastern Europe, had been permanently transmuted in the West to that of free worker owning his tools and materials. But markets were local, pay was often made in kind, and the artisan, particularly if he held a bit of land from a lord or one of his subtenants, was effectively immobilized. The shoemaker, the smith, the carpenter, the thatcher, the mason, the miller, the butcher, the baker, the weaver – all were distributed in local markets over the countryside, drawing upon the locality for most materials and serving the households of village and rural families. Their work was supplemented by the industry of itinerant craftsmen who transported their capital – i.e. their skills and a few tools – from place to place, eating their way through the countryside, sometimes in the training years of an urban apprenticeship, sometimes in a permanently gypsy-like existence.

The activity of science has dramatically transformed society; since 1850 applied science has become the basis of the means of economic production in Europe. While modern society depends on industrial production based on the application of scientific results, the spectacular achievements of science in the last century have led to a transformation in the nature of science itself. The organisation of scientific activity for the generation of useful, practical knowledge has acquired a new meaning and impulse in the twentieth century, a development which has been described as the emergence of ‘industrialised science’, science as an industry producing applicable knowledge. An understanding of the dominance of science in contemporary culture and society demands an analysis of the social and intellectual transformations which led to such striking confidence in the value of the investigation and control of nature and the emergence of science as a socially-organised activity.

The profound conceptual changes in physics in the twentieth century, the abandonment of the doctrines of absolute space and time in Einstein's theory of relativity and of causality and determinism in quantum mechanics, has customarily led to a depiction of the development of science by means of a disjunction between ‘classical’ or ‘Newtonian’ and ‘modern’ science. This historiographic framework is unsatisfactory, for the development of science must be seen in a broader perspective, as a social and cultural phenomenon. The attainment by natural science of appropriate methods of enquiry and social institutions, its methods being viewed as trained and organised common sense and its aims customarily regarded as value-free, is a feature of its recent history.