Morris asserts that the cores in the East and West survived the crises of the first millennium BCE “by restructuring themselves, inventing new institutions that kept them one step ahead of the disruptions that their continuing expansion itself generated” (228-229). States run themselves in two ways, high-end (a strongly centralized state where administration is conducted by a large central bureaucracy) and low-end (a more decentralized state where administration is mostly or entirely handled by “local elites” (229)). States in both the West and East shifted toward high-end administration over the course of the first millennium BCE.

One example of a low-end state is the Zhou kingdom, which was built on vassal states run by members of the royal family who were mostly independent from direct control by the king. The Zhou kings based their “legitimacy” (231) on being the patriarch of the royal family and on their religious significance. Further, it became believed that the Zhou kings were recognized by the highest god, Di, who destroyed the Shang because of their decadence and empowered the Zhou dynasty instead. This theory became known as “the mandate of heaven.” The dynasty was finally weakened when the Zhou suffered military defeats, which meant they could not share loot from conquests with their vassals, calling into question their claim on the mandate of heaven. The Zhou kings tried to build up a centralized administration, as in a high-end state, but they were stopped by their nobility.

The start of the first millennium BCE also saw the development of low-end states after the recent collapse. One case was the Assyrian Empire. The kings of Assyria claimed divine favor from the empire’s patron god Ashur, but in reality they depended heavily on regional governors called the “Sons of Heaven” (236). While they engaged in conquests, the Assyrian Empire also expanded by pressuring weaker kingdoms into submission but leaving the existing kings in power.

Further climate changes that caused winds to grow stronger from 800 to 500 BCE benefited agriculture in some regions but caused devastation in other areas, causing populations in some places to grow while destabilizing some states. This trend harmed low-end states while benefiting their vassals and small states. Egypt and Assyria fell apart into smaller states while the small states of Greece and Phoenicia prospered, established colonies around the Mediterranean, and created the first alphabetic writing systems, which eventually led to higher literacy rates in the societies that adopted them. Morris argues that Phoenicia and Greece at the time were examples of how “higher levels of social development spread outward from the core, overlaying earlier systems and being transformed in the process as people in the peripheries added their own twists and discovered the advantages in their backwardness” (241).

Morris suggests this was similar to what happened in China during the same period. By 700 BCE, the Zhou kings were reduced to figureheads while their vassals fought among each other for power and territory. A few of the vassal states like Chu, Wu, and Yue became major powers in their own right. At the same time, like in the West, despite the fragmentation the Eastern cores managed to spread further into southern China.

Next, Morris describes the period of 750-500 as “the turning point when history didn’t turn” (245). In Assyria, King Tiglath-Pileser III “catapulted Assyria from a broken, low-end state to a dynamic, high-end one” (245) by growing the bureaucracy, curbing the power of regional elites, and reforming state tax collection. Periods of increased centralization and consolidation also unfolded in Judah and Assyria. However, in 612 BCE, the Assyrian Empire collapsed, which Morris describes as repeating “a pattern […] in which military upheavals enlarge a core by giving previously peripheral peoples the chance to push their way in” (248). In other words, states at the frontiers of the Assyrian Empire like Babylon and Media (which was later taken over by the Persians) were able to emulate Assyria’s institutions and strategies for their own benefit and at the expense of Assyria itself. The rapid rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus I and Darius I saw, according to Morris’s metrics, “Western social development” become “a good 10 percent higher than the twenty-four points it had reached around 1200 BCE” (250).

Morris’s social development scores reached the same amounts in the East as “[m]odernizing rulers created bigger armies, fought harsher wars, and capitalized on economic growth like that in the West” (251). Chinese cities and trade also grew. This further empowered local rulers to resist the Zhou kings, unlike in the West where some states like Assyria managed for a time to centralize. Chinese rulers began to address this problem by recruiting ministers from other states, rather than from their own nobles. Over time, the former vassals of the Zhou kings became high-end states themselves.

These developments led into the “Axial Age.” Coming from a term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, the Axial Age was named for being an “axis around which history turned” (254), referring to foundational literary, religious, and philosophical texts and movements that emerged across Eurasia. Examples include Socrates in Athens, Buddha in India, Confucius and Daoism in China, and the Hebrew Bible. Many of these sources encouraged the personal, moral reform of individuals without simply invoking the authority of God or the gods. In China’s Axial Age, different competing schools of thought emerged. One such school was Legalism, which argued that a strong state with a harsh law code was the best way to organize society, while Confucianism instead argued that society could be reformed through adherence to ritual and virtue.

Morris argues that “Greece’s real contribution” (260) to the Axial Age was not the democratic government that developed in Athens, but Socrates’s belief in finding the good through debate and reason. In addition, Morris cautions against viewing the West as developing “a uniquely rational, dynamic culture” (261). For Morris, the significance of the Axial Age is that it led to the development of a range of ideas and belief systems even within single regions, whether Greece, India, or China. Morris sees the Axial Age as a response against the rise of the high-end state. However, eventually states were able to co-opt the movements of the Axial Age, such as King Ashoka in India who adopted Buddhism and the Roman Empire’s embrace of Greek philosophy.

At almost the same time, both the West and the East saw total conquest by Rome and Qin respectively, both high-end states with advanced organizational capacities that had started out in the periphery of the cores. Qin was also influenced by Chinese culture while Rome was shaped by Greece. Another example of a once-small state on the frontier that quickly became a major imperial power is Macedon under Alexander the Great. By 200 BCE, both East and West were dominated by large empires with their own “literate, sophisticated elite schooled in Axial thought” (270).

The first direct contact between China and the Roman Empire may have been in 101 BCE, when a Chinese military expedition in Bactria (a region of Central Asia) may have fought Roman soldiers; in 97 CE, when an official named Gan Ying sent to explore the unknown western regions may have reached the Mediterranean; or in 166 CE, when Roman diplomats arrived at the Chinese capital of Luoyang. However, studies suggest there may have been less formal contacts forgotten by history, like Roman merchants in India and people from East Asia who lived and died in ancient Italy according to DNA evidence. However, even though the social development of the Roman Empire and China was both high, the migrations and raids from the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes posed a threat to both East and West.

Within a similar time frame, Qin and Rome both expanded until they established “superstates” (281) that conquered all rival states. However, Qin collapsed far faster than Rome did because “Qin’s centralized, repressive institutions had been magnificent for conquering but turned out to be less good for ruling” (281). The First Emperor of Qin crushed Zhou and the other Chinese states and used harsh, authoritarian policy to build his empire, but it also “generated resistance at every level” (282). Shortly after the First Emperor’s death, there was a rebellion that overthrew Qin and eventually brought a new dynasty to power, the Han.

A major difference between Rome and Qin was that, while Qin was heavily centralized, Rome’s “institutions were too diffuse” (283) with the government split between a senate and citizen assemblies, which made it difficult to run a large empire. The tension led to civil war until one Roman leader, Octavian, established a position that could centralize power, the office of emperor.

Still, Morris asserts that the rise of the superstates was not inevitable. The Roman and Han empires could have—and almost did—split into separate states. Morris believes that this is shown in the fact that in South Asia, there was another powerful and vast state, the Mauryan Empire, which split into many smaller states. In Morris’s view, the Han and Roman empires survived intact because their rulers tended to be skilled at “compromise” (284) with regional elites and military leaders.

Compromises and the lack of political rivalries enabled economic development and people being able to develop energy efficient methods from “four revolutionary sources—coal, natural gas, water, and wind” (287), especially the latter two. Both the Han and Roman empires benefited from two broader forces as well. One was growing development under a strong and wealthy government, the other was a new climate period, the “Roman Warm Period” (290). This created challenges that encouraged people to further development by experimenting with water power and coal and by further developing overseas trade. The growing warmth also benefited both empires by causing some lands to become more agriculturally fertile as the empires had inadvertently expanded into such areas.

The success of the empires also caused neighboring states to develop. For Rome, this rising state was the Parthian Empire of Iran. The equivalent for the Han Empire was the Xiongnu, the “first true nomad empire” (293) on the steppes. In both cases, neither the Han nor the Romans were able to completely secure their frontiers against the Xiongnu and the Parthians, despite some military and diplomatic successes. The Han had enjoyed a number of key successes against the Xiongnu, but this had the unfortunate side effect of destabilizing the lands just outside the frontiers.

The size of the empires and their involvement with nomads beyond their borders led to a “huge zone of shared material culture” (295). However, it also had one negative consequence: It made it easier for epidemics to spread. Plagues that likely spread along the Silk Road, the major trade route that ran from East Asia to Europe, hit both empires by the 160s CE, which Morris terms the Old World Exchange (296). At about the same time, the end of the Roman Warm Period also negatively impacted both empires.

The Han responded to these crises by relying on “barbarians” (298) as military leaders instead of the native landowning aristocracy and trying to reduce their power. The conflict between the emperors and the aristocracy led to the Han being briefly overthrown by an official, Wang Mang, who “nationalized all land, abolished slavery and serfdom, and pronounced that from now on only the state could own gold” (299). These reforms failed and the Han took back power. Under the first Han emperor to resume power, Guangwu, the Han radically changed their policies to cooperating with landowners, which led to the aristocracy becoming powerful and able to resist taxation.

Since the landowners were starving the Han government of tax revenue, the Han had less money to spend on the army. As a result, the Han Chinese struggled to deal with a new threat, the Qiang, who began to encroach on the Han Empire’s western provinces, forcing provincial governors and landowners to form their own armies, increasing their own power. Aristocratic ministers, eunuch officials, and the families of the emperors’ wives gained power over politics in the imperial court, to the point that no emperor survived past the age of 14. The Han court “degenerated into backstairs intrigues among senior ministers, eunuchs, and boy emperors’ in-laws” (301).

The corruption grew until the Yellow Turban popular revolt and the rise of warlords like Cao Cao caused the Han Empire to collapse into three separate kingdoms. A new dynasty, the Jin, were able to reunify China. However, an emperor of the Jin had 27 sons who, after the emperor’s death, went to war with each other for the throne while depending on nomadic mercenaries, who eventually turned on the Jin. Under pressure from Qiang and Xiongnu attacks, the Jin state quickly fell, and China again was split into several kingdoms.

As for the Roman Empire, it reacted to the crises by the emperors becoming military leaders themselves. This backfired by making it easy for soldiers to turn on emperors and replace them with one of their own, leading to endless coups and civil wars. Meanwhile, Roman victories against the Parthians weakened their empire to the point that they were soon replaced by a new and stronger power in Iran, the Sassanids, who had a decisive victory over Rome, leading to the capture and violent death of the emperor Valerian.

Rome fractured into three separate states by 270 CE. However, the Roman Empire was forcibly reunified 12 years later. One emperor, Diocletian, successfully reformed the empire with administrative and fiscal reorganizations, increasing the size of the army, and splitting power between two co-emperors and two deputy emperors. After Diocletian, some civil wars broke out again, but Rome was relatively stable.

Still, the Roman Empire unsuccessfully faced systemic problems, as “[t]he economic integration built up over so many centuries had been shaken” (312). While the eastern provinces prospered, the western provinces declined, with landowners empowered during the civil wars foiling taxation efforts and instituting policies that resulted in “tying ‘their’ peasants to the land” (312). Aggressive movements by the Huns in Central Asia had the chain effect of sending nomadic groups like the Goths moving against the Roman Empire’s borders.

The emperors tried to enlist nomads in their militaries, but mistreatment of the Goths by corrupt officials led them to revolt. Eventually they established their own territories within the Roman Empire. While the emperors who ruled over the eastern half of the empire from Constantinople remained relatively secure, the western emperors failed to stem the tide of Goths, who seized and established their own kingdoms in Europe and North Africa, and other Germanic tribes that pressed against the Roman borders as the Huns advanced. The Huns themselves, led by Attila, menaced the eastern emperors, preventing any efforts to support the western half of the empire. Morris muses that one admiral, Basiliskos, who lost a possible chance of rescuing the key territory of Carthage for the western empire, might have changed the course of history if he had been less incompetent. Nonetheless, he concludes that “preserving a Mediterranean-wide empire was beyond anyone’s power” (317).

Another similarity was that, after their collapses, both Rome and China left behind vestigial states, the Byzantine Empire centered around Constantinople and the Eastern Jin kingdom in southern China respectively. Meanwhile, in western Europe and northern China, the kings of the newly emergent smaller kingdoms established by the so-called barbarians “were determinedly low-end, feasting with their long-haired warrior lords in the grand halls they had captured” (317). The old landowning elites “intermarried with their conquerors” (319) while peasants continued using agricultural techniques developed in better times to improve the lands. Still, the old merchant and administrative classes collapsed, causing economic, urban, and cultural decline.

In both the former empires, old traditions were questioned and blamed for the collapse while people sought personal comfort from the problems that emerged after imperial collapse. In China, the culture shifted from describing society and life’s pleasures to focusing on natural landscapes. The Mahayana sect of Buddhism, which had previously been a marginal movement among the Chinese elite, became more popular and simplified its own requirements to appeal to a wider group of people. Buddhist monasticism also became popular, with monasteries becoming “oases of stability and even islands of wealth” (323).

As the Roman Empire declined, it also saw a major shift away from classical forms of art and the embracing of foreign cults like the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis and Christianity. Much like Mahayana Buddhism, Christianity offered “practical paths to salvation in troubled times,” yet it was “familiar enough to be comprehensible” (325). Also, Christian bishops and monasteries helped preserve learning, took over administrative and diplomatic functions as the government collapsed, and offered havens of safety and security. 

As Christianity and Buddhism spread, they were co-opted by rulers, who derived legitimacy from them. Overall, Morris concludes that, while this era saw larger and more prosperous states, it also experienced more severe disruptions.

According to his social development score system, 541 was the year the East finally overtook the West. Morris argues this was because of how the cores “contracted geographically” (332). The collapse of the Han and Jin empires led to Chinese migrating southward to lands that were underpopulated and “humid and hot, where their staples of wheat and millet grew poorly but rice flourished” (334). This forced people to develop new kinds of agriculture that were more productive, along with more efficient ways of transporting goods through rivers. However, the government of southern China, the Eastern Jin, did not benefit much, since most of the profits went to regional governors.

In northern China, a nomadic people from Manchuria, the Xianbei, established the empire of Northern Wei. Starting out as a low-end state that depended on loot taken in war, during Emperor Xianbei’s reign Northern Wei, later known as the Sui dynasty, transitioned into a high-end state. Overall, the situation in China was that there was “a high-end state” in northern China “with a powerful army” that “sat atop a fragmented, run-down economy” and “in the south” there was “a fragmented state with weak institutions” that “largely failed […] to tap the wealth of a booming economy” (337). When the Sui managed to invade the south, a high-end state taking over prosperous and well-developed territories led to “an eastern revival” (337).

The policies of the Sui state encouraged social development, but they also imposed regulations that hindered commerce and land development. To find recruits for its massive bureaucracy, the Sui reformed the civil service entrance exams, making performance on the exams, not aristocratic birth, the main criteria. With this, “China can fairly be said to have developed the most rational selection processes for state service known to history” (339). The intellectual competition over the exams fueled China’s literary culture and “created unprecedented social mobility within the educated elite” (339). The spread of Buddhism, which had more tolerant attitudes toward women than Confucianism, also gave women relatively more autonomy within society.

A dramatic example of the empowerment of women was the empress Wu, who was married to an emperor but after the deaths of her husband and sons became “the only woman who ever sat on China’s throne in her own right” (340). By Wu’s reign, China expanded to new frontiers. Also, Buddhist missionaries and merchants spread Chinese culture to Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

The Western core also seemed to be on the route to recovery, at least at first. Emperor Justinian of the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century worked to recover the lands of the former western Roman Empire, namely Italy and North Africa. However, Justinian’s military efforts failed. Morris believes this is because Justinian was trying to conquer multiple kingdoms, which were poor but each had considerable military resources, instead of one state as in China. The Byzantine Empire was threatened by Persia from the east and was hit by a plague that broke out in 541. Finally, while the Sui Empire in China had fertile and rich territories to expand into, the territories Justinian conquered and would fail to hold were impoverished and further damaged by war. A vicious war between the Byzantine and Persian exhausted both empires and “hollowed out the Western core with a century of violence, plague, and economic decline” (348).

Morris sees the Byzantine-Persian wars as repeating the pattern of peoples on the margins benefiting, with “Arabia […] being drawn into the core” (348). This had the result of Arabs, unified by a new religion, Islam, becoming able to take advantage of the decline of both the Persian and Byzantine empires by expanding into their territories. Islam “was in many ways a classic second-wave Axial religion” which, because it emerged in a war-torn region, provided “combination of salvation and militarism” (351). In Morris’s view, over the course of its territorial expansion the Islamic state, the Caliphate, became the new Western core by 700.

Unlike the Roman and Han empires, neither the Islamic Caliphate nor the Sui emperor were good at the essential skill of compromise. The Sui dynasty was destroyed by a series of failed military campaigns against Korea and the Turks and by rebellion. Nevertheless, China did not see a major collapse again, since “just as bungling idiocy had been enough to start the crisis, good leadership was enough to end it” (355). A new dynasty, the Tang, emerged to fill the void left by the Sui.

The Tang did not last long, however. According to one account, the Tang emperor Xuanzung fell in love with his son’s wife, Yang Guifei. He bestowed great control over the Tang armies to one of Yang Guifei’s favorites, a Turkish general. When the general turned against the Tang, Xuanzung’s heir depended on Turkish mercenaries to defend his throne, which only led to the Turks becoming emboldened and overrunning the Tang, causing China to once again fracture into smaller kingdoms.

Morris believes that “China’s fundamental political problem” was “strong emperors” that “had too much power and could override institutions” (356). For the West, the issue was weak rulers. The caliphs, the term for the rulers of the Islamic Caliphate, were weakened by their office being torn between their religious and political responsibilities. This problem led to a religious and political schism between Shi’a Islam, which rallied around ‘Ali, a murdered candidate for the office of caliph, and Sunni Islam, which supported the reigning caliphs. The Caliphate weakened until 860 when the caliphs had become “virtually hostages of their own slave armies” (358) of Turks. By 945, the Islamic Caliphate crumbled into multiple states.

Even after the fragmentation experienced by both West and East, the East continued to have more social development overall. Northern China as well as Japan and Korea saw “economic slowdown and state breakdown” (360) over the course of the 9th century, although merchants in southern China thrived without having to deal with a large, centralized state. The increase in trade also had the effect of funding strong states in Southeast Asia through tax revenue.

In the West, by uniting the old Persian homelands with some of the eastern territories of the former Roman Empire, the Islamic Caliphate caused new goods like sugar, cotton, and rice, and new technologies and agricultural techniques to spread westward. Still, the collapse of the Caliphate caused some regions to become isolated.

Meanwhile, the “Christian periphery” (361) saw the Frankish empire under the emperor Charlemagne become a large but low-end state. As powerful as he was, Charlemagne “had no chance of reuniting the core or even turning the Christian fringe into a single state” (363). Raids by the Vikings and conflicts between Charlemagne’s descendants caused the Frankish Empire to deteriorate.

In this era, climate changed again with the “Medieval Warm Period” (363). While it negatively impacted much of the Islamic world, it benefited northern Europe and North Africa. Egypt, which by 908 came under the rule of the Fatimid dynasty, became a thriving economic and social center with “the highest social development in the West” (364).

As for Europe, Germanic groups migrated into eastern Europe, encouraged by the Medieval Warm Period. This did not benefit Europe in the same way as similar developments in southern China, since there were no waterways that allowed the easy transport of crops from eastern Europe to the west. However, Europeans were adopting energy efficient technologies that had developed in the Islamic world, such as metal horseshoes and watermills that boosted agricultural productivity.

Europe also suffered from power struggles between kings, nobles, the Church, and town and city governments. By the 11th century, though, secular governments were becoming stronger. While this led to the increased persecution of groups such as Jewish people, religious non-conformists, and gay people, it also saw improved tax systems, a boost in architectural development shown in the fad for cathedrals, and an intellectual revival, which was nourished by interactions between Europeans and the “Muslim core” (371).

By 960, the Song dynasty managed to reunite China and survived by the emperors taking on military leadership. At this time, the Chinese started experimenting with the earliest guns. The movement of Neo-Confucianism led to intellectual developments and a focus on social reform. China further benefited from the Medieval Warm Period, which improved conditions in both the south and the north. Textile and iron manufacturing also boomed. In fact, one historian, Mark Elvin, speculated that China under the Song came close to having a “true industrial revolution” (380).