There we have it, back to tsav! The Tiv norms caged the economy, eradicated factor markets, and made the lineage the main agent of production. In return, they achieved a balance between the different kin groups, avoided the slippery slope, and made their status quo much more enduring.
Like the enforced generosity of the Tonga, the caged economy of the Tiv had obvious adverse consequences. Markets are critical for an efficient organization of the economy and for prosperity. But they weren’t permitted to function among the Tiv. To the extent that trade happened, relative prices were often fixed. The result in Tivland, just as for the Tonga, was dire poverty. The institutions of Tiv society created little incentive for capital accumulation, other than in the form of simple instruments such as digging sticks and devices for processing food. Indeed, even saving could lead one to be accused of having the wrong sort of tsav, so the fear of retribution made accumulation too dangerous. As a result, at the time of the conquest of Tivland by the British, people were living at close to subsistence levels of income with life expectancy of around thirty years.
Ibn Khaldun and the Cycle of Despotism
Our discussion of the Tonga and the Tiv suggests that Hobbes’s analysis of the economic consequences of statelessness wasn’t exactly right. These societies weren’t mired in continual violence and conflict destroying all economic incentives, even if the Kivus in the Congo remind us that there are plenty of examples of societies without centralized authority locked into such conflicts. All the same, Hobbes’s conclusion turned out to be not completely off the mark, because the norms that these societies fashioned to control conflict ended up creating highly distorted incentives.
Was Hobbes also right that the Despotic Leviathan would be better for economic incentives because it would create security, predictability, and order? Hobbes was partly—and only partly—right, here too, and there is no better place to start understanding the double-edged nature of the economy that the Despotic Leviathan creates than the work of the great Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun. Born in Tunis in 1332 CE, Khaldun traced his ancestry back to Muhammad via Yemen. Khaldun had a remarkable life which included meeting the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane. His most renowned scholarly work was the Kitab al-Ibar, or “Book of Lessons,” whose first volume, known as the Muqaddimah, or “Introduction,” is particularly useful for understanding the economic consequences of a despotic state.
Khaldun’s “Introduction” is rich in ideas. In addition to tracing the economic consequences of the emergence of a state in the Arabian Peninsula, it presents a theory of the dynamics of political institutions based on what he viewed as two fundamental conflicts in society. The first is between the desert, with its nomadic life, and sedentary urbanized society. The second is between the rulers and the ruled. Khaldun argued that the odds are stacked in favor of the desert people in the first conflict due to the type of society that the harshness and marginal nature of desert life creates. Their society was characterized by what he called asabiyyah, which translates as social solidarity or group feeling. Asabiyyah should be a familiar concept by now. It was part of the cage of norms of a stateless society, but Khaldun brings in a new angle on these norms. From our perspective so far, asabiyyah was something that helped regulate conflicts and preserve the political equality in nomadic societies. Khaldun pointed out that it also makes such a society very good at subjugating neighboring sedentary peoples.
We saw in the previous chapter how Islam provided an edge to Muhammad in his state-building efforts. The Bedouin tribes that Muhammad relied on in this process had a lot of asabiyyah, and this gave him and his followers a second edge to expand the Islamic Empire into a massive empire. In Khaldun’s account, this edge was created not only by the economic hardship of the desert, but also by the dense networks of kinship that had evolved to provide mutual help in the tough desert landscape. The desert was always destined to overcome the sedentary world and form new states and dynasties.
Khaldun, however, argued that though asabiyyah helped the desert people to conquer “civilized lands” and set themselves up in power, the intrinsic dynamics of such authority inevitably led to the decay of asabiyyah and the ultimate collapse of a state that groups like the Bedouin founded. Then the whole cycle started over again with a new group from the desert replacing the collapsing state. In Khaldun’s words:
The duration of the life of a dynasty does not as a rule extend beyond three generations. The first generation retains the desert qualities, desert toughness, and desert savagery … the strength of group feeling continues to be preserved among them … the second generation changes from the desert attitude to sedentary culture … from a state in which everybody shared in the glory to one in which one man claims all the glory for himself … People become used to lowliness and obedience … The third generation … has completely forgotten the period of desert life … They have lost … group feeling, because they are dominated by force … When someone comes and demands something from them, they cannot repel him.
Khaldun’s analysis also insightfully illustrates the role of conflict between the ruler and the ruled. After coming in from the desert, “one man claims all the glory for himself,” while the majority of people “become used to lowliness and obedience.” Khaldun gave a new dynasty about 120 years.
*
—
Before delving into these political dynamics and their economic consequences in more detail, it’s worth picking up the history where we left off in the previous chapter and following what happened after the death of Muhammad. The Arab conquests set in motion by Muhammad were initially sustained by four leaders, known as the Caliphs, who derived their authority from their close personal relationships with him. These were Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, who was assassinated in 661. Ali’s murder came at the end of a period of contention over how the newly emerging state was to be governed. Uthman had tried aggressively to increase central control over the nascent state and had been murdered by rebellious soldiers. Ali’s succession was contested by Muawiya, Uthman’s cousin and the governor of Syria. This led to a protracted civil war, which ended with Ali’s death and Muawiya’s being declared caliph. He founded the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled for almost one hundred years until it was replaced in 750 by the Abbasid dynasty, named after Abbas, an uncle of Muhammad. By the time Umayyad rule emerged, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt had been conquered, and the annexation of North Africa, which was finally completed by 711, was well under way. By the middle of the eighth century, much of Spain was conquered and large swaths of inner Asia were added to the empire.
In the conquered lands, the Umayyads initially superimposed the rule of the Arab warrior class on top of the preexisting institutions of the Byzantine (in Syria, Palestine, Israel, Egypt) and Sassanid (in Iraq and Iran) Empires that they had replaced. It was only when Caliph Abd al-Malik assumed power in 685 that the Umayyads began to build a more distinct state structure based in their new capital in Damascus. But the Umayyads were never able to construct a truly effective centralized state, and neither were their successors, the Abbasids. Though their armies had proved to be hugely effective and occupied a large area, transforming this occupation into a real system of government and gaining the loyalty of the occupied people turned out to be a lot harder. The Umayyads and Abbasids then ended up relying more and more on local elites to govern the provinces of their empire, raise taxes, and keep order. To buy the support of these elites, they engaged in “tax farming,” wherein they sold the right to raise taxes for a fixed sum of money. Once you had the right to tax granted to you by Damascus, and subsequently Baghdad when the Abbasids came to power, you had carte blanche to levy whatever taxes you wanted on local communities. This seems to have been a recipe for punitively high rates of taxation and the accumulation of land by elites since they took over the lands of people who could not afford to pay the taxes they levied. This political structure of empire was ultimately self-defeating. Local elites demanded to be named as hereditary governors and recruited their own armies to provide order. Soon Baghdad had no control over them. The empire came apart at the seams and finally collapsed in 945.