F rom C onvergence to D ivergence   227

Yet this contrast, while noteworthy, must not be overrated. Roman

city officials and Han provincial agents hailed from comparable socio-
economic backgrounds, and the formally bureaucratic features of Han
administration barely masked rampant patronage and simony, which
­were similarly common in the Roman empire. Roman self-­governing
plutocrats and Han salaried state agents w ­ ere equally a­ dept at siphoning
off resources claimed by the center, and landlords shielded their own
assets and t­ hose of their clients, slowly but surely eroding the founda-
tions of the imperial edifice. What­ever differences remained in terms of
the relative weight of the military and civilian spheres, of center and
periphery, and of bureaucracy and local self-­rule, they w ­ ere very much
a ­matter of degree. Driven by the internal logic of traditional empire, the
two systems had become about as similar as their discrepant starting
conditions permitted them to be.10

MI D-­F I RST-­M ILLENNIUM EU­R OPE:

TH E F I RST ­G REAT DIVERGENCE

This gradual if imperfect convergence makes the following divergence

in state formation seem even more striking. That pro­cess spanned
roughly the second half of the first millennium of the Common Era. By
about 500 CE, the Roman empire had split into an eastern half, ruled
from Constantinople, and five major kingdoms ­under Germanic suc-
cessor regimes in the west, a number that fell to only two within the next
few de­cades. In China, the collapse of the Jin empire ushered in the
period of the “Sixteen Kingdoms,” a series of often ephemeral polities.
Yet by the early fifth ­century, just two states controlled the northern and
southern halves of China. This number fluctuated between two and
three u­ ntil the late sixth c­ entury when the north conquered the south.
With only a brief interruption, China was then at least formally unified
­until around 900. The Song restoration ended another period of frag-
mentation in the first half of the tenth ­century.
By then, eleven major states, alongside a number of smaller entities,
occupied the area once held by the Roman empire. Moreover, the larger