Debt: The First 5000 Years Part 7

Why? The single most important factor would appear to be war. Bullion predominates, above all, in periods of generalized violence. There's a very simple reason for that. Gold and silver coins are distinguished from credit arrangements by one spectacular feature: they can be stolen. A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it. In a world where war and the threat of violence are everywhere-and this appears to have been an equally accurate description of Warring States China, Iron Age Greece, and pre-Mauryan India-there are obvious advantages to making one's transactions simple. This is all the more true when dealing with soldiers. On the one hand, soldiers tend to have access to a great deal of loot, much of which consists of gold and silver, and will always seek a way to trade it for the better things in life. On the other, a heavily armed itinerant soldier is the very definition of a poor credit risk. The economists' barter scenario might be absurd when applied to transactions between neighbors in the same small rural community, but when dealing with a transaction between the resident of such a community and a pa.s.sing mercenary, it suddenly begins to make a great deal of sense.

For much of human history, then, an ingot of gold of silver, stamped or not, has served the same role as the contemporary drug dealer's suitcase full of unmarked bills: an object without a history, valuable because one knows it will be accepted in exchange for other goods just about anywhere, no questions asked. As a result, while credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace, or across networks of trust (whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational inst.i.tutions like merchant guilds or communities of faith), in periods characterized by widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by precious metal. What's more, while predatory lending goes on in every period of human history, the resulting debt crises appear to have the most damaging effects at times when money is most easily convertible into cash.

As a starting point to any attempt to discern the great rhythms that define the current historical moment, let me propose the following breakdown of Eurasian history according to the alternation between periods of virtual and metal money. The cycle begins with the Age of the First Agrarian Empires (3500800 bc), dominated by virtual credit money. This is followed by the Axial Age (800 bc-600 ad), which will be covered in the next chapter, and which saw the rise of coinage and a general s.h.i.+ft to metal bullion. The Middle Ages (6001450 ad), which saw a return to virtual credit money, will be covered in chapter 10; chapter 11 will cover the next turn of the cycle, the Age of Capitalist Empires, which began around 1450 with a ma.s.sive planetary switch back to gold and silver bullion, and which could only really be said to have ended in 1971, when Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. dollar would no longer be redeemable in gold. This marked the beginning of yet another phase of virtual money, one which has only just begun, and whose ultimate contours are, necessarily, invisible. Chapter 12, the final chapter, will be devoted to applying the insights of history to understanding what it might mean and the opportunities it might throw open.

Mesopotamia.

(3500800 BC).

We have already had occasion to note the predominance of credit money in Mesopotamia, the earliest urban civilization that we know about. In the great temple and palace complexes, not only did money serve largely as an accounting measure rather than physically changing hands, merchants and tradespeople developed credit arrangements of their own. Most of these took the physical form of clay tablets, inscribed with some obligation of future payment, that were then sealed inside clay envelopes and marked with the borrower's seal. The creditor would keep the envelope as a surety, and it would be broken open on repayment. In some times or places at least, these bullae appear to have become what we would now call negotiable instruments, since the tablet inside did not simply record a promise to pay the original lender, but was designated "to the bearer"-in other words, a tablet recording a debt of five shekels of silver (at prevailing rates of interest) could circulate as the equivalent of a five-shekel promissory note-that is, as money.5 We don't know how often this happened; how many hands such tablets would typically pa.s.s through, how many transactions were based on credit, how often merchants actually did weigh out silver in rough chunks to buy and sell their merchandise, or when they were most likely to do so. No doubt all this varied over time. Promissory notes usually circulated within merchant guilds, or between inhabitants of the relatively well-off urban neighborhoods where people knew one another well enough to trust them to be accountable, but not so well that they could rely on one another for more traditional forms of mutual aid.6 We know even less about the marketplaces frequented by ordinary Mesopotamians, except that tavern-keepers operated on credit, and hawkers and operators of market stalls probably did as well.7 The origins of interest will forever remain obscure, since they preceded the invention of writing. The terminology for interest in most ancient languages is derived from some word for "offspring," causing some to speculate that it originates in loans of livestock, but this seems a bit literal-minded. More likely, the first widespread interest-bearing loans were commercial: temples and palaces would forward wares to merchants and commercial agents, who would then trade them in nearby mountain kingdoms or on trading expeditions overseas.8 The practice is significant because it implies a fundamental lack of trust. After all, why not simply demand a share in the profits? This seems more fair (a merchant who came back bankrupt would probably have little means of paying anyway), and profit-sharing partners.h.i.+ps of this sort became common practice in the later Middle East.9 The answer seems to be that profit-sharing partners.h.i.+ps were typically contracted between merchants, or anyway people of similar background and experience who had ways of keeping track of one another. Palace or temple bureaucrats and world-roaming merchant adventurers had little in common, and the bureaucrats seem to have concluded that one could not normally expect a merchant returned from a far-off land to be entirely honest about his adventures. A fixed interest rate would render irrelevant whatever elaborate tales of robbery, s.h.i.+pwreck, or attacks by winged snakes or elephants a creative merchant might have concocted. The return was fixed in advance.

This connection between borrowing and lying, incidentally, is an important one to history. Herodotus remarked about the Persians: "To tell a lie is considered by them the greatest disgrace, and next to that to be in debt ... especially because they think that one in debt must of necessity tell lies."10 (Later, Herodotus reported a story told to him by a Persian about the origins of the gold that the Persians had acquired in India: they stole it from the nests of giant ants.)11 Jesus's parable of the unforgiving servant makes a joke out of the matter ("Ten thousand talents? No problem. Just give me a little more time"), but even here, one can see how such endless falsehoods contributed to a broader sense that a world in which moral relations are conceived as debts is also, while in certain ways entertaining, necessarily a world of corruption, guilt, and sin.

By the time of the earliest Sumerian doc.u.ments, this world may not yet have arrived. Still, the principle of lending at interest, even compound interest, was already familiar to everyone. In 2402 bc, for instance, a royal inscription by King Enmetena of Lagash-one of the earliest we have-complains that his enemy, the King of Umma, had been occupying a huge stretch of farmland that had rightfully belonged to Lagash for decades. He announces: if one were to calculate the rental fees for all that land, then the interest that would have been due on that rent, compounded annually, it would reveal that Umma now owes Lagash four and a half trillion liters of barley. The sum was, as in the parable, intentionally preposterous.12 It was just an excuse to start a war. Still, he wanted everyone to know that he knew exactly how to do the math.

Usury-in the sense of interest-bearing consumer loans-was also well established by Enmetena's time. The king ultimately had his war and won it, and two years later, fresh off his victory, he was forced to publish another edict: this one, a general debt cancellation within his kingdom. As he later boasted, "he inst.i.tuted freedom (amargi) in Lagash. He restored the child to its mother, and the mother to her child; he cancelled all interest due."13 This was, in fact, the very first such declaration we have on record-and the first time in history that the word "freedom" appears in a political doc.u.ment.

Enmetena's text is a bit vague on the details, but a half-century later, when his successor Uruinimgina declared a general amnesty during the New Year's ceremonies of 2350 bc, the terms are all spelled out, and they conform to what was to become typical of such amnesties: cancelling not only all outstanding loans, but all forms of debt servitude, even those based on failure to pay fees or criminal penalties-the only thing excepted being commercial loans.

Similar declarations are to be found again and again, in Sumerian and later Babylonian and a.s.syrian records, and always with the same theme: the restoration of "justice and equity," the protection of widows and orphans, to ensure-as Hammurabi was to put it when he abolished debts in Babylon in 1761 bc-"that the strong might not oppress the weak."14 In the words of Michael Hudson, The designated occasion for clearing Babylonia's financial slate was the New Year festival, celebrated in the spring. Babylonian rulers oversaw the ritual of "breaking the tablets," that is, the debt records, restoring economic balance as part of the calendrical renewal of society along with the rest of nature. Hammurabi and his fellow rulers signaled these proclamations by raising a torch, probably symbolizing the sun-G.o.d of justice Shamash, whose principles were supposed to guide wise and fair rulers. Persons held as debt pledges were released to rejoin their families. Other debtors were restored cultivation rights to their customary lands, free of whatever mortgage liens had acc.u.mulated.15 Over the next several thousand years, this same list-cancelling the debts, destroying the records, reallocating the land-was to become the standard list of demands of peasant revolutionaries everywhere. In Mesopotamia, rulers appear to have headed off the possibility of unrest by inst.i.tuting such reforms themselves, as a grand gesture of cosmic renewal, a recreation of the social universe-in Babylonia, during the same ceremony in which the king reenacts his G.o.d Marduk's creation of the physical universe. The history of debt and sin was wiped out, and it was time to begin again. But it's also clear what they saw as the alternative: the world plunged into chaos, with farmers defecting to swell the ranks of nomadic pastoralists, and ultimately, if the breakdown continued, returning to overrun the cities and destroy the existing economic order entirely.

Egypt.

(2650716 BC).

Egypt represents an interesting contrast, since for most of its history, it managed to avoid the development of interest-bearing debt entirely.

Egypt was, like Mesopotamia, extraordinarily rich by ancient standards, but it was also a self-contained society, a river running through a desert, and far more centralized than Mesopotamia. The pharaoh was a G.o.d, and the state and temple bureaucracies had their hands in everything: there were a dazzling array of taxes and a continual distribution of allotments, wages, and payments from the state. Here, too, money clearly arose as a means of account. The basic unit was the deben, or "measure"-originally referring to measures of grain, and later of copper or silver. A few records make clear the catch-as-catch-can nature of most transactions: In the 15th year of Ramses II [c. 1275 BC] a merchant offered the Egyptian lady Erenofre a Syrian slave girl whose price, no doubt after bargaining, was fixed at 4 deben 1 kite [about 373 grams] of silver. Erenofre made up a collection of clothes and blankets to the value of 2 deben 2 1/3 kite-the details are set out in the record-and then borrowed a miscellany of objects from her neighbors-bronze vessels, a pot of honey, ten s.h.i.+rts, ten deben of copper ingots-till the price was made up.16 Most merchants were itinerant, either foreigners or commercial agents for the owners of large estates. There's not much evidence for commercial credit, however; loans in Egypt were still more likely to take the form of mutual aid between neighbors.17 Substantial, legally enforceable loans, the kind that can lead to the loss of lands or family members, are doc.u.mented, but they appear to have been rare-and much less pernicious, as the loans did not bear interest. Similarly, we do occasionally hear of debt-bondservants, and even debt slaves, but these seem to have been unusual phenomena and there's no suggestion that matters ever reached crisis proportions, as they so regularly did in Mesopotamia and the Levant.18 In fact, for the first several thousand years, we seem to be in a somewhat different world, where debt really was a matter of "guilt" and treated largely as a criminal matter: When a debtor failed to repay his debt on time, his creditor could take him to court, where the debtor would be required to promise to pay in full by a specific date. As part of his promise-which was under oath-the debtor also pledged to undergo 100 blows and/or repay twice the amount of the original loan if he failed to pay by the date specified.19 The "and/or" is significant. There was no formal distinction between a fine and a beating. In fact, the entire purpose of the oath (rather like the Cretan custom of having a borrower pretend to s.n.a.t.c.h the money) seems to have been to create the justification for punitive action: so the debtor could be punished as either a perjurer or a thief.20 By the time of the New Kingdom (15501070) there is more evidence for markets, but it's only by the time we reach the Iron Age, just before Egypt was absorbed into the Persian empire, that we begin to see evidence for Mesopotamian-style debt crises. Greek sources, for instance, record that the Pharaoh Bakenranef (reigned 720715 bc) issued a decree abolis.h.i.+ng debt bondage and annulling all outstanding liabilities, since "he felt it would be absurd for a soldier, perhaps at the moment when he was setting forth to fight for his fatherland, to be hauled off to prison by his creditor for an unpaid loan"-which, if true, is also one of the earliest mentions of a debt prison.21 Under the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander, periodic clean slates had become inst.i.tutionized. It's well known that the Rosetta Stone, written both in Greek and Egyptian, proved to be the key that made it possible to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. Few are aware of what it actually says. The stela was originally raised to announce an amnesty, both for debtors and for prisoners, declared by Ptolemy V in 196 bc.22

China.

(2200771 BC).

We can say almost nothing about Bronze Age India, since its writing remains indecipherable, and not much more about Early China. What little we do know-mainly culled from dribs and drabs in later literary sources-suggests that the earliest Chinese states were far less bureaucratic than their western cousins.23 There being no centralized temple or palace system with priests and administrators managing the storerooms and recording inputs and outputs, there was also little incentive to create a single, uniform unit of account. Instead, the evidence suggests a different path, with social currencies of various sorts still holding sway in the countryside and being converted to commercial purposes in dealings between strangers.

Later sources recall that early rulers "used pearls and jade as their superior method of payment, gold as their middle method of payment, and knives and spades as their lower method of payment."24 The author can only be talking about gifts here, and hierarchical ones at that: kings and great magnates rewarding their followers for services in theory rendered voluntarily. In most places, long strings of cowrie sh.e.l.ls figure prominently, but even here, though we often hear of "the cowrie money of early China," and it's easy enough to find texts in which the value of sumptuous gifts are measured in cowries, it's never clear whether people were really carrying them around to buy and sell things in the marketplace.25 The most likely interpretation is that they were carrying the sh.e.l.ls, but for a long time marketplaces themselves were of minor significance, so this use was not nearly as important as the usual uses for social currencies: marriage presents, fines, fees, and tokens of honor.26 At any rate, all sources insist that there was a wide variety of currencies in circulation. As David Scheidel, one of the premier contemporary scholars of early money, notes: In pre-imperial China, money took the form of cowrie sh.e.l.ls, both originals and-increasingly-bronze imitations, tortoise sh.e.l.ls, weighed gold and (rarely) silver bars, and most notably-from at least 1000 BC onward-utensil money in the shape of spade blades and knives made of bronze.27 These were most often used between people who didn't know each other very well. For tabulating debts between neighbors, with local vendors, or with anything having to do with the government, people appear to have employed a variety of credit instruments: later Chinese historians claimed that the earliest of these were knotted strings, rather like the Inca khipu system, and then later, notched strips of wood or bamboo.28 As in Mesopotamia, these appear to have long predated writing.

We don't really know when the practice of lending at interest first reached China either, or whether Bronze Age China came to see the same sorts of debt crises as occurred in Mesopotamia, but there are tantalizing hints in later doc.u.ments.29 For instance, later Chinese legends about the origin of coinage ascribed the invention to emperors trying to relieve the effects of natural disasters. One early Han text reports: In ancient times, during the floods of Yu and the droughts of Tang, the common people became so exhausted that they were forced to borrow from one another in order to obtain food and clothing. [Emperor] Yu coined money for his people from the gold of Mount Li and [Emperor] Tang did likewise from the copper of Mount Yan. Therefore the world called them benevolent.30 Other versions are a little more explicit. The Guanzi, a collection that in early imperial China became the standard primer on political economy, notes "There were people who lacked even gruel to eat, and who were forced to sell their children. To rescue these people, Tang coined money."31 The story is clearly fanciful (the real origins of coined money were at least a thousand years later), and it is very hard to know what to make of it. Could this reflect a memory of children being taken away as debt sureties? On the face of it, it seems more like starving people selling their children outright-a practice that was later to become commonplace in certain periods of Chinese history.32 But the juxtaposition of loans and the sale of children is suggestive, especially considering what was happening on the other side of Asia at exactly the same time. The Guanzi later goes on to explain that these same rulers inst.i.tuted the custom of retaining 30 percent of the harvest in public granaries for redistribution in emergencies, so as to ensure that this would never happen again. In other words, they began to set up just the kind of bureaucratic storage facilities that, in places like Egypt and Mesopotamia, had been responsible for creating money as a unit of account to begin with.

Chapter Nine.

THE AXIAL AGE.

(800 BC 600 AD).

Let us designate this period as the "axial age." Extraordinary events are crowded into this period. In China lived Confucius and Lao Tse, all the trends in Chinese philosophy arose ... In India it was the age of the Upanishads and of Buddha; as in China, all philosophical trends, including skepticism and materialism, sophistry and nihilism, were developed.

-Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom.

THE PHRASE "THE AXIAL AGE" was coined by the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.1 In the course of writing a history of philosophy, Jaspers became fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagoras (570495 bc), the Buddha (563483 bc), and Confucius (551479 bc), were all alive at exactly the same time, and that Greece, India, and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schools, each group apparently, unaware of the others' existence. Like the simultaneous invention of coinage, why this happened had always been a puzzle. Jaspers wasn't entirely sure himself. To some extent, he suggested, it must have been an effect of similar historical conditions. For most of the great urban civilizations of the time, the early Iron Age was a kind of pause between empires, a time when political landscapes were broken into a checkerboard of often diminutive kingdoms and city-states, most often at constant war externally and locked in constant political debate within. Each case witnessed the development of something akin to a drop-out culture, with ascetics and sages fleeing to the wilderness or wandering from town to town seeking wisdom; in each, too, they were eventually reabsorbed into the political order as a new kind of intellectual or spiritual elite, whether as Greek sophists, Jewish prophets, Chinese sages, or Indian holy men.

Whatever the reasons, the result, Jaspers argued, was the first period in history in which human beings applied principles of reasoned inquiry to the great questions of human existence. He observed that all these great regions of the world, China, India, and the Mediterranean, saw the emergence of remarkably parallel philosophical trends, from skepticism to idealism-in fact, almost the entire range of positions about the nature of the cosmos, mind, action, and the ends of human existence that have remained the stuff of philosophy to this day. As one of Jaspers' disciples later put it-overstating only slightly-"no really new ideas have been added since that time."2 For Jaspers, the period begins with the Persian prophet Zoroaster, around 800 bc, and ends around 200 bc, to be followed by a Spiritual Age that centers on figures like Jesus and Mohammed. For my own purposes, I find it more useful to combine the two. Let us define the Axial Age, then, as running from 800 bc to 600 ad.3 This makes the Axial Age the period that saw the birth not only of all the world's major philosophical tendencies, but also, all of today's major world religions: Zoroastrianism, Prophetic Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, and Islam.4 The attentive reader may have noticed that the core period of Jasper's Axial age-the lifetimes of Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha-corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented. What's more, the three parts of the world where coins were first invented were also the very parts of the world where those sages lived; in fact, they became the epicenters of Axial Age religious and philosophical creativity: the kingdoms and city-states around the Yellow River in China, the Ganges valley in northern India, and the sh.o.r.es of the Aegean Sea.

What was the connection? We might start by asking: What is a coin? The normal definition is that a coin is a piece of valuable metal, shaped into a standardized unit, with some emblem or mark inscribed to authenticate it. The world's first coins appear to have been created within the kingdom of Lydia, in western Anatolia (now Turkey), sometime around 600 bc.5 These first Lydian coins were basically just round lumps of electrum-a gold-silver alloy that occurred naturally in the nearby Pactolus River-that had been heated, then hammered with some kind of insignia. The very first, stamped only with a few letters, appear to have been manufactured by ordinary jewelers, but these disappeared almost instantly, replaced by coins manufactured in a newly established royal mint. Greek cities on the Anatolian coast soon began to strike their own coins, and they came to be adopted in Greece itself; the same thing occurred in the Persian Empire after it absorbed Lydia in 547 bc.

In both India and China, we can observe the same pattern: invented by private citizens, coinage was quickly monopolized by the state. The first Indian money, which seems to have appeared at some point in the sixth century, consisted of bars of silver trimmed down to uniform weights, then punch-marked with some kind of official symbol.6 Most of the examples discovered by archaeologists contain numerous additional counter-punches, presumably added much in the way that a check or other credit instrument is endorsed before being transferred. This strongly suggests that they were being handled by people used to dealing with more abstract credit instruments.7 Much early Chinese coinage also shows signs of having evolved directly from social currencies: some were in fact cast bronze in the shape of cowries, though others took the shape of diminutive knives, disks, or spades. In every case, local governments quickly stepped in-presumably within the s.p.a.ce of about a generation.8 However, since in each of the three areas there was a plethora of tiny states, this meant that each ended up with a wide variety of different currency systems. For example, around 700 bc, northern India was still divided into Janapadas or "tribal territories," some of them monarchies and some republics, and in the sixth century there were still at least sixteen major kingdoms. In China, this was the period where the old Zhou Empire first devolved into vying princ.i.p.alities (the "Spring and Autumn" period, 722481 bc), then splintered into the chaos of the "Warring States" (475221 bc.) Like the Greek city-states, all of the resulting kingdoms, no matter how diminutive, aspired to issue their own official currency.

Recent scholars.h.i.+p has shed a great deal of light on how this must have happened. Gold, silver, and bronze-the materials from which coins were made-had long been the media of international trade; but until that time, only the rich had actually had much in their possession. A typical Sumerian farmer may well have never had occasion to hold a substantial piece of silver in his hand, except perhaps at his wedding. Most precious metals took the form of wealthy women's anklets and heirloom chalices presented by kings to their retainers, or it was simply stockpiled in temples, in ingot form, as sureties for loans. Somehow, during the Axial Age, all this began to change. Large amounts of silver, gold, and copper were dethesaurized, as the economic historians like to say; it was removed from the temples and houses of the rich and placed in the hands of ordinary people, was broken into tinier pieces, and began to be used in everyday transactions.

How? Israeli Cla.s.sicist David Schaps provides the most plausible suggestion: most of it was stolen. This was a period of generalized warfare, and it is in the nature of war that precious things are plundered.

Soldiers who plunder may indeed go first for the women, the alcoholic drinks, or the food, but they will also be looking around for things of value that are easily portable. A long-term standing army will tend to acc.u.mulate many things that are valuable and portable-and the most valuable and portable items are precious metals and precious stones. It may well have been the protracted wars among the states of these areas that first produced a large population of people with precious metal in their possession and a need for everyday necessities ...

Where there are people who want to buy there will be people willing to sell, as innumerable tracts on black markets, drug dealing, and prost.i.tution point out ... The constant warfare of the archaic age of Greece, of the Janapadas of India, of the Warring States of China, was a powerful impetus for the development of market trade, and in particular for market trade based on the exchange of precious metal, usually in small amounts. If plunder brought precious metal into the hands of the soldiers, the market will have spread it through the population.9 Now, one might object: but surely, war and plunder were nothing new. The Homeric epics, for instance, show a well-nigh obsessive interest in the division of the spoils. True, but what the Axial Age also saw-again, equally in China, India, and the Aegean-was the rise of a new kind of army, made up not of aristocratic warriors and their retainers, but trained professionals. The period when the Greeks began to use coinage, for instance, was also the period when they developed their famous phalanx tactics, which required constant drill and training of the hoplite soldiers. The results were so extraordinarily effective that Greek mercenaries were soon being sought after from Egypt to Crimea. But unlike the Homeric retainers, who could simply be ignored, an army of trained mercenaries needs to be rewarded in some meaningful way. One could perhaps provide them all with livestock, but livestock are hard to transport; or with promissory notes, but these would be worthless in the mercenaries' own country. Allowing each a tiny share of the plunder does seem an obvious solution.

These new armies were, directly or indirectly, under the control of governments, and it took governments to turn these chunks of metal into genuine currency. The main reason for this is simply scale: to create enough coins that the people could begin to use them in everyday transactions required ma.s.s production on a scale far beyond the abilities of local merchants or smiths.10 Of course we have already seen why governments might have incentive to do so: the existence of markets was highly convenient for governments, and not just because it made it so much easier for them to provision large standing armies. By insisting that only their own coins were acceptable as fees, fines, or taxes, governments were able to overwhelm the innumerable social currencies that already existed in their hinterlands, and to establish something like uniform national markets.

Actually, one theory is that the very first Lydian coins were invented explicitly to pay mercenaries.11 This might help explain why the Greeks, who supplied most of the mercenaries, so quickly became accustomed to the use of coins, and why the use of coinage spread so quickly across the h.e.l.lenic world, so that by 480 bc there were at least one hundred mints operating in different Greek cities, even though at that time, none of the great trading nations of the Mediterranean had as yet showed the slightest interest in them. The Phoenicians, for example, were considered the greatest merchants and bankers of antiquity.12 They were also great inventors, having been the first to develop both the alphabet and the abacus. Yet for centuries after the invention of coinage, they preferred to continue conducting business as they always had, with unwrought ingots and promissory notes.13 Phoenician cities struck no coins until 365 bc, and while Carthage, the great Phoenician colony in North Africa that came to dominate commerce in the Western Mediterranean, did so a bit earlier, it was only when "forced to do so to pay Sicilian mercenaries; and its issues were marked in Punic, 'for the people of the camp.' "14 On the other hand, in the extraordinary violence of the Axial Age, being a "great trading nation" (rather than, say, an aggressive military power like Persia, Athens, or Rome) was not, ultimately, a winning proposition. The fate of the Phoenician cities is instructive. Sidon, the wealthiest, was destroyed by the Persian emperor Artaxerxes III after a revolt in 351 bc. Forty thousand of its inhabitants are said to have committed ma.s.s suicide rather than surrender. Nineteen years later, Tyre was destroyed after a prolonged siege by Alexander: ten thousand died in battle, and the thirty thousand survivors were sold into slavery. Carthage lasted longer, but when Roman armies finally destroyed the city in 146 bc, hundreds of thousands of Carthaginians were said to have been raped and slaughtered, and fifty thousand captives put on the auction block, after which the city itself was razed and its fields sowed with salt.

All this may bring home something of the level of violence amidst which Axial Age thought developed.15 But it also leaves us asking: What exactly was the ongoing relation among coinage, military power, and this unprecedented outpouring of ideas?

The Mediterranean.

Here again our best information is from the Mediterranean world, and I have already provided some of its outlines. Comparing Athens-with its far-flung naval empire-and Rome, we can immediately detect striking similarities. In each city, history begins with a series of debt crises. In Athens, the first crisis, the one that culminated in Solon's reforms of 594 bc, was so early that coinage could hardly have been a factor. In Rome, too, the earliest crises seem to have proceeded the advent of currency. Rather, in each case, coinage became a solution. In brief, one might say that these conflicts over debt had two possible outcomes. The first was that the aristocrats could win, and the poor remain "slaves of the rich"-which in practice meant that most people would end up clients of some wealthy patron. Such states were generally militarily ineffective.16 The second was that popular factions could prevail, inst.i.tute the usual popular program of redistribution of lands and safeguards against debt peonage, thus creating the basis for a cla.s.s of free farmers whose children would, in turn, be free to spend much of their time training for war.17 Coinage played a critical role in maintaining this kind of free peasantry-secure in their landholding, not tied to any great lord by bonds of debt. In fact, the fiscal policies of many Greek cities amounted to little more than elaborate systems for the distribution of loot. It's important to emphasize that few ancient cities, if any, went so far as to outlaw predatory lending, or even debt peonage, entirely. Instead, they threw money at the problem. Gold, and especially silver, were acquired in war, or mined by slaves captured in war. Mints were located in temples (the traditional place for depositing spoils), and city-states developed endless ways to distribute coins, not only to soldiers, sailors, and those producing arms or outfitting s.h.i.+ps, but to the populace generally, as jury fees, fees for attending public a.s.semblies, or sometimes just as outright distributions, as Athens did most famously when they discovered a new vein of silver in the mines at Laurium in 483 bc. At the same time, insisting that the same coins served as legal tender for all payments due to the state guaranteed that they would be in sufficient demand that markets would soon develop.

Many of the political crises in ancient Greek cities similarly turned on the distribution of the spoils. Here is another incident recorded in Aristotle, who provides a conservative take on the origins of a coup in the city of Rhodes around 391 bc ("demagogues" here refers to the leaders of the democracy): The demagogues needed money to pay the people for attending the a.s.sembly and serving on juries; for if the people did not attend, the demagogues would lose their influence. They raised at least some of the money they needed by preventing the disburs.e.m.e.nt of the money due the trireme [wars.h.i.+p] commanders under their contracts with the city to build and fit triremes for the Rhodian navy. Since the trireme commanders were not paid, they were unable in turn to pay their suppliers and workers, who sued the trireme commanders. To escape these lawsuits the trireme commanders banded together and overthrew the democracy.18 It was slavery, though, that made all this possible. As the figures concerning Sidon, Tyre, and Carthage suggest, enormous numbers of people were being enslaved in many of these conflicts, and, of course, many slaves ended up working in the mines, producing even more gold, silver, and copper. (The mines in Laurium reportedly employed ten to twenty thousand of them.)19 Geoffrey Ingham calls the resulting system a "military-coinage complex"-though I think it would be more accurate to call it a "military-coinage-slavery complex."20 Anyway, that describes rather nicely how it worked in practice. When Alexander set out to conquer the Persian Empire, he borrowed much of the money with which to pay and provision his troops, and he minted his first coins, used to pay his creditors and continue to support the money, by melting down gold and silver plundered after his initial victories.21 However, an expeditionary force needed to be paid, and paid well: Alexander's army, which numbered some 120,000 men, required half a ton of silver a day just for wages. For this reason, conquest meant that the existing Persian system of mines and mints had to be reorganized around providing for the invading army; and ancient mines, of course, were worked by slaves. In turn, most slaves in mines were war captives. Presumably most of the unfortunate survivors of the siege of Tyre ended up working in such mines. One can see how this process might feed upon itself.22 Alexander was also the man responsible for destroying what remained of the ancient credit systems, since not only the Phoenicians but also the old Mesopotamian heartland had resisted the new coin economy. His armies not only destroyed Tyre; they also dethesaurized the gold and silver reserves of Babylonian and Persian temples, the security on which their credit systems were based, and insisted that all taxes to his new government be paid in his own money. The result was to "release the acc.u.mulated specie of century onto the market in a matter of months," something like 180,000 talents, or in contemporary terms, an estimated $285 billion.23 The h.e.l.lenistic successor kingdoms established by Alexander's generals, from Greece to India, employed mercenaries rather than national armies, but the story of Rome is, again, similar to that of Athens. Its early history, as recorded by official chroniclers like Livy, is one of continual struggles between patricians and plebians, and of continual crises over debt. Periodically, these would lead to what were called moments of "the secession of the plebs," when the commoners of the city abandoned their fields and workshops, camped outside the city, and threatened ma.s.s defection-an interesting halfway point between the popular revolts of Greece and the strategy of exodus typically pursued in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Here, too, the patricians were ultimately faced with a decision: they could use agricultural loans to gradually turn the plebian population into a cla.s.s of bonded laborers on their estates, or they could accede to popular demands for debt protection, preserve a free peasantry, and employ the younger sons of free farm families as soldiers.24 As the prolonged history of crises, secessions, and reforms makes clear, the choice was made grudgingly.25 The plebs practically had to force the senatorial cla.s.s to take the imperial option. Still, they did, and over time they gradually presided over the establishment of a welfare system that recycled at least a share of the spoils to soldiers, veterans, and their families.

It seems significant, in this light, that the traditional date of the first Roman coinage-338 bc-is almost exactly the date when debt bondage was finally outlawed (326 bc).26 Again, coinage, minted from war spoils, didn't cause the crisis. It was used as a solution.

In fact, the entire Roman empire, at its height, could be understood as a vast machine for the extraction of precious metals and their coining and distribution to the military-combined with taxation policies designed to encourage conquered populations to adopt coins in their everyday transactions. Even so, for most of its history, use of coins was heavily concentrated in two regions: in Italy and a few major cities, and on the frontiers, where the legions were actually stationed. In areas where there were neither mines nor military operations, older credit systems presumably continued to operate.

I will add one final note here. In Greece as in Rome, attempts to solve the debt crisis through military expansion were always, ultimately, just ways of fending off the problem-and they only worked for a limited period of time. When expansion stopped, everything returned to as it had been before. Actually, it's not clear that all forms of debt bondage were ever entirely eliminated even in cities like Athens and Rome. In cities that were not successful military powers, without any source of income to set up welfare policies, debt crises continued to flare up every century or so-and they often became far more acute than they ever had in the Middle East, because there was no mechanism, short of outright revolution, to declare a Mesopotamian-style clean slate. Large populations, even in the Greek world, did, in fact, sink to the rank of serfs and clients.27 Athenians, as we've seen, seemed to a.s.sume that a gentleman normally lived a step or two ahead of his creditors. Roman politicians were little different. Of course much of the debt was money that members of the senatorial cla.s.s owed to each other: in a way, it's just the usual communism of the rich, extending credit to one another on easy terms that they would never think to offer others. Still, under the late Republic, history records many intrigues and conspiracies hatched by desperate debtors, often aristocrats driven by relentless creditors to make common cause with the poor.28 If we hear less about this sort of thing happening under the emperors, it's probably because there were fewer opportunities for protest; what evidence we have suggests that if anything, the problem got much worse.29 Around 100 ad, Plutarch wrote about his own country as if it were under foreign invasion: And as King Darius sent to the city of Athens his lieutenants Datis and Artaphernes with chains and cords, to bind the prisoners they should take; so these usurers, bringing into Greece boxes full of schedules, bills, and obligatory contracts, as so many irons and fetters for the shackling of poor criminals ...

For at the very delivery of their money, they immediately ask it back, taking it up at the same moment they lay it down; and they let out that again to interest which they take for the use of what they have before lent.

So that they laugh at those natural philosophers who hold that nothing can be made of nothing and of that which has no existence; but with them usury is made and engendered of that which neither is nor ever was.30 The works of the early Christian fathers likewise resound with endless descriptions of the misery and desperation of those caught in rich lenders' webs. In the end, through this means, that small window of freedom that had been created by the plebs was completely undone, and the free peasantry largely eliminated. By the end of the empire, most people in the countryside who weren't outright slaves had become, effectively, debt peons to some rich landlord; a situation in the end legally formalized by imperial decrees binding peasants to the land.31 Without a free peasantry to form the basis for the army, the state was forced to rely more and more on arming and employing Germanic barbarians from across the imperial frontiers-with results I need hardly relate.

India.

In most ways, India could not be more different as a civilization than the ancient Mediterranean-but to a remarkable degree, the same basic pattern repeats itself there as well.

The Bronze Age civilization of the Indus Valley collapsed sometime around 1600 bc; it would be about a thousand years before India saw the emergence of another urban civilization. When it did, that civilization was centered on the fertile plains that surrounded the Ganges farther east. Here too we observe, at first, a checkerboard of different sorts of government, from the famous "Ksatriya republics" with a populace in arms and urban democratic a.s.semblies, to elective monarchies, to centralized empires like Kosala and Magadha.32 Both Gautama (the future Buddha), and Mahavira (the founder of Jainism) were born in one of the republics, though both ultimately found themselves teaching within the great empires, whose rulers often became patrons of wandering ascetics and philosophers.

Both kingdoms and republics produced their own silver and copper coinage, but in some ways the republics were more traditional, since the self-governing "populace in arms" consisted of the traditional Ksatriya or warrior caste, who typically held their lands in common and had them worked by serfs or slaves.33 The kingdoms, on the other hand, were founded on a fundamentally new inst.i.tution: a trained, professional army, open to young men of a wide variety of backgrounds, their equipment supplied by central authorities (soldiers were obliged to check their arms and armor when they entered cities), and provided with generous salaries.

Whatever their origins, here too, coins and markets sprung up above all to feed the machinery of war. Magadha, which ultimately came out on top, did so largely because it controlled most of the mines. Kautilya's Arthasastra, a political treatise written by one of the chief ministers for the Mauryan dynasty that succeeded it (321185 bc), stated the matter precisely: "The treasury is based upon mining, the army upon the treasury; he who has army and treasury may conquer the whole wide earth."34 The government drew its personnel first of all from a landed cla.s.s, which provided trained administrators, but even more, full-time soldiers: the salaries of each rank of soldier and administrator were carefully stipulated. These armies could be huge. Greek sources report that Magadha could put to the field a force of 200,000 infantry, 20,000 horses, and about 4,000 elephants-and that Alexander's men mutinied rather than have to face them. Whether on campaign or in garrison, they were inevitably accompanied by a range of different sorts of camp followers-petty traders, prost.i.tutes, and hired servants-which, with the soldiers, seems to have been the very medium through which a cash economy had originally taken form.35 By Kautilya's time, a few hundred years later, the state was inserting itself into every aspect of the process: Kautilya suggests paying soldiers apparently generous wages, then secretly replacing hawkers with government agents who could charge them twice the normal rates for supplies, as well as organizing prost.i.tutes under a ministry in which they could be trained as spies, so as to make detailed reports on their clients' loyalties.

Thus was the market economy, born of war, gradually taken over by the government. Rather than stifle the spread of currency, the process seems to have doubled and even tripled it: the military logic was extended to the entire economy, the government systematically setting up its granaries, workshops, trading houses, warehouses, and jails, staffed by salaried officials, and all selling products on the market so as to collect the pieces of silver paid off to soldiers and officials and put them back into the royal treasuries again.36 The result was a monetarization of daily life unlike anything India was to see for another two thousand years.37 Something similar seems to have happened with slavery, which was quite commonplace at the time of the rise of the great armies-again, unlike almost any other point in Indian history-but was gradually brought under government control.38 By Kautilya's time, most war captives were not sold in marketplaces but relocated to government villages on newly reclaimed land. They were not allowed to leave, and these government villages were, at least according to the regulations, remarkably dreary places: veritable work camps, with all forms of festive entertainment officially prohibited. Slave hirelings were mostly convicts, rented by the state during their terms.

With their armies, spies, and administration controlling everything, the new Indian kings evinced little interest in the old priestly caste and its Vedic ritual, though many kept up a lively interest in the new philosophical and religious ideas that seem to have been cropping up everywhere at the time. As time went on, however, the war machine began to sputter. It's not clear exactly why this happened. By the time of emperor Aoka (273232 bc), the Mauryan dynasty controlled almost all of present-day India and Pakistan, but the Indian version of the military-coinage-slavery complex was showing definite signs of strain. Perhaps the clearest sign was the debas.e.m.e.nt of the coinage, which over the course of two centuries or so had gone from almost pure silver to about fifty percent copper.39 Aoka, famously, began his reign in conquest: in 265 bc, destroying the Kalingas, one of the last remaining Indian republics, in a war in which hundreds of thousands of human beings were, according to his own account, killed or carried off into slavery. Aoka later claimed to have been so disturbed and haunted by the carnage that he renounced war altogether, embraced Buddhism, and declared that from that time on, his kingdom would be governed by principles of ahimsa, or nonviolence. "Here in my kingdom," he declared in an edict inscribed on one of the great granite pillars in his capital of Patna, which so dazzled the Greek amba.s.sador Megasthenes, "no living being must be killed and sacrificed."40 Such a statement obviously can't be taken literally: Aoka might have replaced sacrificial ritual with vegetarian feasts, but he didn't abolish the army, abandon capital punishment, or even outlaw slavery. But his rule marked a revolutionary s.h.i.+ft in ethos. Aggressive war was abandoned, and much of the army does seems to have been demobilized, along with the network of spies and state bureaucrats, with the new, proliferating mendicant orders (Buddhists, Jains, and also world-renouncing Hindus) given official state support to preach to the villages on questions of social morality. Aoka and his successors diverted substantial resources to these religious orders, with the result that, over the next centuries, thousands of stupas and monasteries were built across the subcontinent.41 Aoka's reforms are useful to contemplate here because they help reveal just how mistaken some of our basic a.s.sumptions are: particularly, that money equals coins, and that more coins in circulation means more commerce and a greater role for private merchants. In reality, the Magadha state promoted markets but had been suspicious of private merchants, seeing them largely as compet.i.tors.42 Merchants had been among the earliest and most ardent supporters of the new religions (Jains, owing to their rigorous enforcement of rules against harm to any living creature, were obliged to become, effectively, a mercantile caste). Mercantile interests fully supported Aoka's reforms. Yet the result was not an increase in the use of cash in everyday affairs but exactly the opposite.

Early Buddhist economic att.i.tudes have long been considered a bit mysterious. On the one hand, monks could not own property as individuals; they were expected to live an austere communistic life with little more than a robe and begging bowl as personal possessions, and they were strictly forbidden to so much as touch anything made of gold or silver. On the other hand, however suspicious of precious metals, Buddhism had always had a liberal att.i.tude toward credit arrangements. It is one of the few of the great world religions that has never formally condemned usury.43 Taken in the context of the times, however, there's nothing particularly mysterious about any of this. It makes perfect sense for a religious movement that rejected violence and militarism, but that was in no way opposed to commerce.44 As we shall see, while Aoka's own empire was not long to endure, soon to be replaced by a succession of ever weaker and mostly smaller states, Buddhism took root. The decline of the great armies eventually led to the near-disappearance of coinage, but also to a veritable efflorescence of increasingly sophisticated forms of credit.

China.

Until about 475 bc, northern China was still nominally an empire, but the emperors had devolved into figureheads and a series of de facto kingdoms had emerged. The period from 475 to 221 bc is referred as the "Warring States period"; at that point, even the pretense of unity was cast aside. Ultimately, the country was reunited by the state of Qin, who established a dynasty that was then immediately overthrown by a series of ma.s.sive popular insurrections, ushering in the Han dynasty (206 bc-220 ad), founded by a previously obscure rural constable and peasant leader named Liu Bao, who was the first Chinese leader to adopt the Confucian ideology, exam system, and pattern of civil administration that were to continue for almost two thousand years.

Still, the golden age of Chinese philosophy was the period of chaos that preceded unification, and this followed the typical Axial Age pattern: the same fractured political landscape, the same rise of trained, professional armies and the creation of coined money largely in order to pay them.45 We also see the same government policies designed to encourage the development of markets, chattel slavery on a scale not seen before or since in Chinese history, the appearance of itinerant philosophers and religious visionaries, battling intellectual schools, and eventually, attempts by political leaders to transform the new philosophies into religions of state.46 There were also significant differences, starting with the currency system. China never minted gold or silver coins. Merchants used precious metals in the form of bullion, but the coins in actual circulation were basically small change: cast bronze disks, usually with a hole in the middle so that they could be strung together. Such strings of "cash" were produced in extraordinary numbers, and very large amounts had to be a.s.sembled for large-scale transactions: when wealthy men wished to make donations to temples, for instance, they had to use oxcarts to carry the money. The most plausible explanation is that, especially after unification, Chinese armies were enormous-some Warring States armies numbered up to a million-but not nearly as professional or well paid as those of kingdoms farther west, and from Qin and Han times on, rulers were careful to ensure that this remained the case, to make sure the army never became an independent power base.47 There was also a notable difference in that the new religious and philosophical movements in China were from their very beginnings also social movements. Elsewhere, they only gradually became so. In ancient Greece, philosophy began with cosmological speculation; philosophers were more likely to be individual sages, perhaps surrounded by a few ardent disciples, as founders of movements.48 Under the Roman empire, schools of philosophy like the Stoics, Epicureans, Neo-Platonists did become movements of a sort: at least in the sense that they had thousands of educated adherents, who "practiced" philosophy not only by reading, writing, and debating, but even more by meditation, diet, and exercise. Still, philosophical movements were basically confined to the civic elite; it was only with the rise of Christianity and other religious movements that philosophy moved beyond it.49 One can observe a similar evolution in India, from individual Brahman world-renouncers, forest sages, and wandering mendicants with theories about the nature of the soul or the composition of the material universe; to philosophical movements of the Buddhists, Jains, jvika, and others mostly long forgotten; to, finally, ma.s.s religious movements with thousands of monks, shrines, schools, and networks of lay supporters.

In China, while many of the founders of the "hundred schools" of philosophy that blossomed under the Warring States were wandering sages who spent their days moving from city to city trying to catch the ears of princes, others were leaders of social movements from the very start. Some of these movements didn't even have leaders, like the School of the Tillers, an anarchist movement of peasant intellectuals who set out to create egalitarian communities in the cracks and fissures between states.50 The Mohists, egalitarian rationalists whose social base seems to have been urban artisans, not only were philosophically opposed to war and militarism, but organized battalions of military engineers who would actively discourage conflicts by volunteering to fight in any war against the side of the aggressor. Even the Confucians, for all the importance they attached to courtly ritual, were in their early days mainly known for their efforts in popular education.51

Materialism I:.

The Pursuit of Profit.

What is one to make of all this? The popular education campaigns of the period perhaps provide a clue. The Axial Age was the first time in human history when familiarity with the written word was no longer limited to priests, administrators, and merchants, but had become necessary to full partic.i.p.ation in civic life. In Athens, it was taken for granted that only a country b.u.mpkin would be entirely illiterate.

Without ma.s.s literacy, neither the emergence of ma.s.s intellectual movements, nor the spread of Axial Age ideas would have been possible. By the end of the period, these ideas had produced a world where even the leaders of barbarian armies descending on the Roman empire felt obliged to take a position on the question of the Mystery of the Trinity, and where Chinese monks could spend time debating the relative merits of the eighteen schools of Cla.s.sical Indian Buddhism.

No doubt the growth of markets played a role too, not only helping to free people from the proverbial shackles of status or community, but encouraging a certain habit of rational calculation, of measuring inputs and outputs, means and ends, all of which must inevitably have found some echoes in the new spirit of rational inquiry that begins to appear in all the same times and places. Even the word "rational" is telling: it derives, of course, from "ratio"-how many of X go into Y-a sort of mathematical calculation previously used mainly by architects and engineers, but which, with the rise of markets, everyone who didn't want to get cheated at the marketplace had to learn how to do. Still, we must be careful here. After all, money in itself was nothing new. Sumerian farmers and tradesmen were already perfectly capable of making such calculations in 3500 bc; but none, as far as we know, were so impressed that they concluded, like Pythagoras, that mathematical ratios were the key to understanding the nature of the universe and the movement of celestial bodies, and that all things were ultimately composed of numbers-and they certainly hadn't formed secret societies based on sharing this understanding, debating and purging and excommunicating one another.52 To understand what had changed, we have to look, again, at the particular kind of markets that were emerging at the beginning of the Axial Age: impersonal markets, born of war, in which it was possible to treat even neighbors as if they were strangers.

Within human economies, motives are a.s.sumed to be complex. When a lord gives a gift to a retainer, there is no reason to doubt that it is inspired by a genuine desire to benefit that retainer, even if it is also a strategic move designed to ensure loyalty, and an act of magnificence meant to remind everyone else that he is great and the retainer small. There is no sense of contradiction here. Similarly, gifts between equals are usually fraught with many layers of love, envy, pride, spite, communal solidarity, or any of a dozen other things. Speculating on such matters is a major form of daily entertainment. What's missing, though, is any sense that the most selfish ("self-interested") motive is necessarily the real one: those speculating on hidden motives are just as likely to a.s.sume that someone is secretly trying to help a friend or harm an enemy as to acquire some advantage for him- or herself.53 Neither is any of this likely to have changed much in the rise of early credit markets, where the value of an IOU was as much dependent on a.s.sessments of its issuer's character as on his disposable income, and motives of love, envy, pride, etc. could never be completely set aside.

Cash transactions between strangers were different, and all the more so when trading is set against a background of war and emerges from disposing of loot and provisioning soldiers; when one often had best not ask where the objects traded came from, and where no one is much interested in forming ongoing personal relations.h.i.+ps anyway. Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many of X will go for how many of Y, of calculating proportions, estimating quality, and trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like "profit" and "advantage"-and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace has simply allowed them to drop the pretense that they ever cared about anything else. It was this, in turn, that allowed human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-end calculation, and hence something that could be examined using the same means that one used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies.54 If the underlying a.s.sumption very much resembles those of contemporary economists, it's no coincidence-but with the difference that, in an age when money, markets, states, and military affairs were all intrinsically connected, money was needed to pay armies to capture slaves to mine gold to produce money; when "cutthroat compet.i.tion" often did involve the literal cutting of throats, it never occurred to anyone to imagine that selfish ends could be pursued by peaceful means. Certainly, this picture of humanity does begin to appear, with startling consistency, across Eurasia, wherever we also see coinage and philosophy appear.

China provides an unusually transparent case in point. Already in Confucius's time, Chinese thinkers were speaking of the pursuit of profit as the driving force in human life. The actual term used was li, a word first used to refer to the increase of grain one harvests from a field over and above what one originally planted (the pictogram represents a sheaf of wheat next to a knife).55 From there it came to mean commercial profit, and thence, a general term for "benefit" or "payback." The following story, which purports to tell the reaction of a merchant's son named Lu Buwei on learning that an exiled prince was living nearby, ill.u.s.trates the progression nicely: On returning home, he said to his father, "What is the profit on investment that one can expect from plowing fields?"

"Ten times the investment," replied his father.

"And the return on investment in pearls and jades is how much?"

"A hundredfold."

"And the return on investment from establis.h.i.+ng a ruler and securing the state would be how much?"

"It would be incalculable."56 Lu adopted the prince's cause and eventually contrived to make him King of Qin. He went on to became first minister for the king's son, Qin s.h.i.+ Huang, helping him defeat the other Warring States to became the first Emperor of China. We still have a compendium of political wisdom that Lu commissioned for the new emperor, which contains such military advice as the following: As a general principle, when an enemy's army comes, it seeks some profit. Now if they come and find the prospect of death instead, they will consider running away the most profitable thing to do. When all one's enemies consider running to be th