F rom C onvergence to D ivergence   225

The state of Qin may have gone the farthest in this regard: its rulers
strove to break aristocratic power, subjected the entire population to a
ranking system, divided it into small groups for mutual surveillance and
collective liability, and instituted formalized rewards for military prow-
ess. Taxes—in money, kind, and military as well as civilian ­labor—­were
relatively high. Qin’s overarching ambition, to the extent that it could
be realized, was the creation of a centralized territorial state that was
fully controlled by employees of the ruler and left no po­liti­cal space for
rival groups such as nobles or the wealthy.7
As we saw in chapter 2, Republican Rome achieved intense mass mo-
bilization with the help of a much slimmer governmental apparatus and
overt streamlining of local arrangements. Its state was highly spatially
centralized in that the entire top tier of its leadership was concentrated
in the city of Rome. Autocracy had long been blocked by an assertive anti-­
regal aristocratic oligarchy. In the absence of a monarch, competition
within the aristocracy was constrained by tightly regimented popu­lar
po­liti­cal participation. This system was structurally opposed to formal
bureaucracy and onerous taxes on insiders. A modest number of aristo-
cratic ­houses relied on patrimonial resources to fulfill their public func-
tions and on patronage relations and ritual per­for­mances to exercise
power. Fiscal operations w ­ ere largely farmed out to private contractors,
and taxes ­were relatively low, especially in the Italian core, where mili-
tary ser­v ice represented the principal civic contribution for elite and
commoners alike.
Overall, the Roman domain came to be hierarchically stratified into
an Italian core and a growing provincial periphery, a feature that was
largely missing from imperial China. Urban autonomy and effective self-­
governance ­were preserved, and no salaried state agents w ­ ere imposed
on or created in the numerous constituent communities. The main rea-
son that this more loosely structured system managed to prevail lies in
the fact that unlike the Warring States, the maturing Roman Republic
engaged mostly in asymmetric competition with differently or­ga­nized
challengers: somewhat lopsided in Rome’s f­ avor, this competition did not
spur invasive restructuring. It was only early on, as Rome strug­gled for
supremacy over the Italian peninsula, that conflict with more opponents