Slate has some very interesting excerpts from The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters posted today. The reality that a great deal of the illness in today's world is caused by fecal contamination is well known. The proximate cause of many minor illnesses is mild food poisoning, but food poisoning itself is ultimately generally caused by poor hygiene.  It seems straightforward to imagine that poor sanitation can be a significant drain on economic productivity. But on this weblog we've also addressed the possibility of pathogens playing a role in changing personalities and temperaments. In Farewell to Alms Greg Clark made the case that the greater mortality due to poor hygiene shifted the death schedule and so relieved Malthusian pressure. In contrast, East Asia was notable for having a rather efficient system of human waste disposal and reuse, and the concomitant lower death rate resulted in more Malthusian pressures and lower per capita wealth. One of the positive developments in the historical disciplines has been the a shift away from narrative annals describing political and social happenings on the elite level, to a more thorough quantitative analysis of the state of mass culture and material condition. Both perspectives are important; in War and Peace and War Peter Turchin reports military historical research which suggests that the presence of Napoleon at a battle was the equivalent of the French having 30% more troops! This suggests that to some extent Great Men do matter, but one must remember that the emergence of parvenu such as Napoleon was conditioned upon the Malthusian economic and social stresses of late 18th century France.

But the Slate piece also puts the spotlight on the particular nature of human psychology and its relation to feces:

Reuse works better when it involves camouflage. This technique is used, appropriately for a militarized country, in Israel. During a presentation at a London wastewater conference, a beautiful woman from Israel's Mekorot wastewater treatment utility, who stood out in a room full of gray suits, explained that they fed the effluent into an aquifer, withdrew it, then used it as potable water. "It is psychologically very important," she told the rapt audience, "for people to know that the water is coming from the aquifer." This is a clever way of getting around fecal aversion. Not having wastewater-and not wasting water-would be better still.

I'm sure this is not surprising to most readers, especially if you have read something like Paul Bloom's Descartes' Baby. One can posit pretty straightforward adaptive reasons for why humans tend to have an aversion to feces and rot; but whatever the ultimate root of these instincts they're pretty universal. Of course, like eating spicy peppers humans seem able to get around these hardwired instincts, or leverage them in some way so as to invert their effect. For example, the application of feces upon wounds had a long history in pre-modern medicine, all the way back to the Egyptians. The detailed inferences can sometimes be surprising, but the point is that though most humans reflectively accept the atomic and molecular understanding of the world, reflexively they are Aristotelians. Intuitions can be overcome or unlearned to a great extent, but if one wishes to reform the human outlook one needs to take into account its a priori biases. The human mind is not amorphous clay which one can mold into any shape in an infinite manner of ways, rather, it is a collection of blocks and units which likely have innumerable combinatorial possibilities, but certainly a finite number subject to various constraints and conditions.

The cultural variation in attitudes which is overlain on human universals illustrates the reality that despite innate tendencies human minds are elastic. Consider:

Sanitation professionals sometimes divide the world into fecal-phobic and fecal-philiac cultures. India is the former (though only when the dung is not from cows); China is definitely and blithely the latter. Nor is the place of excrement confined to the fields. It has featured prominently in Chinese public life and literature for at least a thousand years.

The recycling of "night soil" mentioned in the Slate piece was also highly developed in Tokugawa Japan. Not only did the practice increase crop yields so that a large population was feasible with pre-modern agricultural techniques, but it had a byproduct effect of fostering public hygiene and reducing the disease burden (noted above). As far as the Chinese go, the attitude toward utilization of human waste, as well as other cultural traits such as minimal food taboos, illustrate the deep strain of pragmatic rationalism which many early or proto-Enlightenment philosophers so admired. As for the South Asia tendency to extend and elaborate on human intuitions and tendencies as opposed to channeling toward material ends, if you have nothing good to say, say nothing at all....

Labels: Evolutionary Psychology, History, Psychology

If Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World grated on you because of the transparent lack of scholarly objectivity, I recommend Timothy May's The Mongol Art of War. May usually attempts to present "both sides" in any given scholarly debate, but he also tells you which side is the majority and which the minority. And there's good quantitative data, like the fact that Mongol light cavalry had a range of up to 300 meters in terms of their bows. The Mongol Art of War makes it pretty obvious that courage is sometimes overrated as an ingredient of conquest, the Mongols rarely engaged in pitched battles because they weren't exceptional hand-to-hand fighters. Rather, when battling an enemy on open field they simply barraged their opponents with missile fire until attrition wore them down. Their reputedly high accuracy from long distances meant that they could stay out of danger while simultaneously inflicting casualties on the opposition. Not to be trite but it sounds like a precursor to "shock & awe" via air power medieval style.

It seems understandable that chivalry might emerge in societies where martial elites have incentives to formalize & codify and so minimize the risks inherent in the art of war, which is after all their primary profession. In contrast, the Mongol war machine which emerged in the early 13th century was notable for its relatively exceptional social egalitarianism. The Mongol army did not consist of an elite professional war-band, but rather was drawn from vast swaths of the adult male tribal population of Mongolia (on the order of perhaps 1/2 of the adult males served in the mobile armies during the initial years). Like the Roman legions before 100 BCE this was a nation of soldiers on the march, not the soldiers of a nation. Genghis Khan's light cavalry simply leveraged the typical skills of a nomad on a horse with bow in hand. The rapid expansion from the Yellow to the Black seas was due less to the calculated glory seeking of status seeking aristocrats than the random-walk rapaciousness of nomads whose lives had been characterized by existence on the margins of subsistence supplemented by raiding of surplus producing sedentary farmers. To some extent the emergence of the Mongol Empire was a series of raids writ-large.

Addendum: One thing I found interesting was the suggestion that one of the major reasons that Mongol expansion into the Middle East ran out of steam was lack of pasture for their horses. Each Mongol warrior might have had 5-15 horses. In South China the Mongols under Kublai Khan had to reinvent themselves because light cavalry did not offer any comparative advantage in the local ecology. And later Mongol attempts to expand into Southeast and Maritime Asia generally failed more often than not. In many parts of Eurasia the Mongols were defeated, but like the Romans before them they kept coming and eventually overcame resistance. This makes me wonder about true historical significance of the Mamluk defeat of the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut, as in many accounts this is a great historical turning point. The implication is that if the Mongols had not been defeated in this battle they would have gone on to conquer all of North Africa. But as I alluded to above in Russia there were defeats but the Mongols bounced back. In contrast they were defeated several times by the Mamluks after Ain Jalut. This to me points to ecological constraints on the comparative advantage of the Mongol-way-of-war. Of course it is also quite plausible that empires have natural limits to their size contingent upon the scalability of communication lines as well as the diminishing returns on additional increments of territory.

Labels: History

Many readers of this weblog are familiar with Robert Putnam's research showing that communitarianism may be inversely correlated with diversity. In the American context we're likely to view this through the prism of race and ethnicity. But Peter Turchin in his work tends to focus on religion and other ideologies as the group identities around which humans coalesce. Humans obviously have a need for conformity and solidarity; I recall as a child a Steelers fan getting into a fight with a Browns fan. So it should not be hard to observe the problems which ideological diversity produce even in an ethnically and racially homogeneous nation such as South Korea.

Last week there were mass demonstrations of Buddhists in South Korea against the religious parochialism of the current president, a Presbyterian elder. The president is already unpopular for other reasons, so I don't personally believe that this unrest is a necessary outcome of religious tension. Rather, as documented in books such as The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, a social context where individuals feel under stress and insecure will often produce intergroup conflict. In an age of plenty there is elbow room between factions because of the growing pie, but when we smell the Malthusian trap in the air group level affinities come to the fore as you don't want to become isolated as an individual without communal capital which you can leverage.

South Korea is I suspect a case where these dynamics might become more important in the coming years because of its religious diversity. Additionally, religious tension is not a new feature of the culture. It isn't too hard to find instances of fundamentalist Christians attacking Buddhism. This is similar to cases in Brazil where evangelicals have destroyed statues of the Virgin Mary. There several recent incidents associated with the current head of state which precipitated the present crisis, but note this:

But tension has been building up since December, when newly elected president Lee began filling his first cabinet with Christians. At least a half of his new ministers were people professing to be Christians, with the prime minister, Han Seung Soo, said to be a Roman Catholic. Not a single cabinet minister professed to be Buddhist.

or

Of the 15 members of Lee's Cabinet, 12 are Christian and one is Buddhist while the affiliation of two others was not immediately available.

So obviously there's some disagreement, but one can assume here that though Christians are 1/3 of the population they are the substantial majority of the cabinet. Is this prejudice? Discrimination? Do Buddhists have grounds to be angry? As I have noted before in South Korea Christianity has a strong correlation with higher socioeconomic status. If one assumes that cabinet level positions sample from the social and educational elites, then they will naturally tend to preponderantly be Christians! Of course since the president is a zealous Christian one can always be suspicious of his motive and method, so as a precautionary principle one could argue that there should have been an affirmative action to reach out to Buddhists so that the cabinet "looked like the nation."

In the United States we're so hung up on racial and ethnic factions that we often don't notice that the disparate representations of different religious groups in government. Check the religious affiliations of Congress and Governors. Thank God we live well below the Malthusian limit!

Labels: culture, History, Religion

Variation is interesting. Why are there species, for example? Why do identical twins vary in life outcomes at all? How, and why, do the two antipodal maritime temperate regions of Eurasia, China and Europe, differ? The answers one comes up with vary by discipline and scope. In Farewell to Alms the economic historian Gregory Clark explains the genetic outcome of differences in lactase persistence (LP) as a function of variation in wealth; Europeans were wealthier so they could invest in the expensive production of milk and meat. I suspect most natural scientists would look to environmental constraints as the largest effect variables; LP arises in environments where cattle culture is more productive on a per area unit basis than grain culture. And then there is of course the fact that human lifestyles do not exist in a social and historical vacuum. There is evidence that wide swaths of the north China plain were abandoned by farmers during periods of political disorder due to their vulnerability to the depredations of nomadic groups (Genghis Khan's plan to depopulate the Yellow River plain and turn it into pasture was not as bizarre as one might think). When political stability returned there would be a shift in the boundary between nomad and farmer. If Peter Turchin is right then the variables effecting these changes are endogenous to a model of historical dynamics which are characterized by cycles (Turchin's case study of the expansion of Slavs and farming along the Ukrainian Cossack frontier is a classical case where politics rather than ecology served as the limiting reagent).

But for a moment I want to zoom the scale. In The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, there is a chapter, The Riddle of Longevity: Why Zunhua?:

People lived longer in the late-imperial department Zunhua in the mountains along the old Ming northern frontier...The expectation of life at birth for a woman was in the high forties, twice as long as in Jiaxing....

...The latest gazetteer from imperial times...has no record of epidemics of infectious disease....This was in marked contrast with the coastal province in which Jiaxing was located, namely Zhejiang. In Zheijang people were gripped by a fear of epidemics....

Jiaxing is highlighted because another chapter focuses on the taming of this region and its transition from being a marginal territory on the periphery of Chinese civilization to a rationally managed agricultural heartland. A case in point supporting the thesis of hydraulic despotism. The author notes a few points to contrast Zunhua and Jiaxing:

1) Climate. Zunhua was much colder in winter, with temperatures generally falling below zero. This surely dampened the local pathogen load.

2) Ecological differences. Zunhua is relatively mountainous, while Jiaxing is a coastal wetland region tamed into an expanse of intensive rice production. Irrigation is common in Jiaxing, but there were ecological constraints on its utilization in Zunhua (the soil is very sandy and so there are major issues with drainage which reduced the efficiency of canals).

3) Differences in diet. Zunhua's populace had a relatively diverse diet, where dry land agriculture was balanced with animal husbandry and hunting and gathering. In contrast, Jiaxing was a classic climax rice monoculture where almost all calories were from grain.

4) There were differences in ethnicity. The local historical identity of non-Han peoples was far stronger in Zunhua than in Jiaxing. The process of Sinicization had proceeded to completion in Jiaxing, which now lay along the axis of the economic heartland of China. In contrast, Zunhua was for nearly 3,000 years on the northeast boundary of Han habitation. It was known to the ancient Chinese, and Han populations were generally extant within its territory, but it was often dominated culturally by non-Han groups who would play a large role without Chinese history, culminating in the Manchus.

The author also notes that there was a large difference in the extent of female labor in Jiaxing and Zunhua. It was a prominent feature of the life of peasants in Jiaxing, but not so of Zunhua. Additionally, one bureaucrat observed that unlike many other parts of China it was not typical for very poor women in Zunhua to supplement their income with de facto prostitution (random "walks" in the fields). The inhabitants of Zunhua were consumers of a fair amount of meat, but interesting they were also milk drinkers, atypical for China.

The Census data from 1820 to 1910 suggests that Zunhua was relatively underpopulated (the author's focus here is on observations hinged around the late Imperial Manchu dynasty). This probably explains the relative wealth of a the typical peasant in Zunhua vis-a-vis one in Jiaxing (as well as lack of epidemics). But why was Zunhua so underpopulated in the first place? Are the data from the late Imperial period just a transient which captures a snapshot before the region is caught in a Malthusian Trap? To some extent I suspect so, but, I wanted to note specifically that Zunhua was on the radar of Chinese annalists nearly 3,000 years ago. Unlike vast regions of far southern inland China it was not new to Sinicization, rather, Sinicization simply never completed itself over the ensuing centuries. In fact, the region was for long periods under barbarian rule and outside of China proper.

First, I want to repeat one of the major obvious insights of The Retreat of the Elephants, the process of Sinicization was inevitable, a matter of time, across much of what is today China. The millet and rice based agricultural systems associated with Han Chinese swept away competing lifestyles before them like a deterministic physical system. A proactive program of cutting down forests and clearing land, as well as channeling and controlling the flow of running water across the landscape, was part and parcel of the expansion of the Chinese state and Han identity. Some of the increase in the numbers of the latter is surely a matter of demographics, as Chinese settlers push into cleared land. On the other hand, there is extensive documentary evidence that those non-Chinese tribes which adhered to lifestyles which were at variance with that of the Han on many occasions adopted the intensive farming lifestyle when their territories were impinged upon. Eventually they saw themselves as Han. In the Christian and Islamic world it was common to assert that war against those outside of the bounds of their religious civilization was by nature just because they were infidels, and that enslavement of unbelievers was acceptable. Some of the material in this book highlights a similar ideology on the part of the the Han Chinese through their perception that those who were not Han were fundamentally not human or subhuman. But, just as with Christianity or Islam, tribes and peoples could become Han. This process was one less of ideology, though certainly elites adopted Confucian ethics and the Chinese classics, as opposed to one characterized by a way of life in terms of the optimal mode of resource extraction and utilization. To be Han the commoners farmed like the Han, and the rulers ruled like the Han.

The Han way of life was eminently successful in terms of extracting more productivity per unit are of land, as evidenced by the fact that China is now well over 90% Han, and, its historically high population density. It was not a rigid orthodoxy, the original millet based farming system which arose around the Yellow River plain gave way to the dominance of rice agriculture, likely originally a feature of the culture of non-Han populations of central and south China. The Han way of life was one of maximal resource extraction and mass mobilization of populations under the aegis of a central governing unit. The transition from Han to non-Han seems to have been partly due to demic and cultural diffusion as a bottom-up process, but, as documented in The Retreat of the Elephants, it was also a function of the greater robusticity of the war machines of Han states. Not only could they mobilize more men, but they could they could organize and coordinate their actions because of the central nature of their polities. Local peoples had an advantage in terms of their knowledge of regional conditions and could wage a persistent rearguard action over the centuries by disrupting the social and agriculture systems (e.g., canals, bridges, bureaucrats, etc.) which Han society depended upon, but over the long haul Sinicization marched on. The machine could be broken, but never utterly destroyed.

So why did Zunhua resist Sinicization so long? I suspect that the prevalence of animal husbandry indicates that the Han agricultural complex was simply not as well suited to this region. In areas too dry for agriculture irrigation is an option, but as noted above it was not an ideal one in Zunhua because of the characteristics of the terrain and soils. During the Former Han dynasty the emperor Wu engaged in a series of wars with the nomadic Xiongnu, but a serious problem with defeating these peoples was that a Chinese victory did not result in cultural assimilation. There were instances where the nomads could not win, but they could never truly lose. In areas too dry, cold and rugged for Han agricultural techniques nomadic life simply was more economically more efficient, or, more accurately the only option aside from hunting and gathering. The final Chinese "victory" over the Xiongnu occurred via co-option from their within by dividing their elite and brandishing the allure of civilized luxury goods. To some extent there was little difference in the material conditions of the Xiongnu elite, instead of engaging in raids to obtain wealth they were bribed or paid by the Chinese polity. In terms of efficiency this reduced the uncertainty on the part of the Chinese and so was economically a good decision as it allowed for a shift toward lower time preference.

Reading the chapter in question here, I got the feeling that the economic and social conditions in Zunhua mimicked the contrasts which one might draw between pre-modern Europe and China. Europeans had a more mixed diet than the Asian peasant, and their agricultural complex relied to a far greater extent on animal husbandry and cattle (or, differently stated, more inputs of capital than labor to increase marginal returns). The average European peasants was arguably wealthier than the average Chinese peasant. In Farewell to Alms Greg Clark points to better hygiene in East Asia leading to a different death schedule, so that the Chinese would be pushing against the Malthusian limit to a greater extent (fewer mouths dividing up a finite pie in Europe vs. China at any given time). On the other hand, economic historians such as Raymond Crotty have emphasized the peculiar ecology of Northern Europe, and the incentives that existed toward raising of cattle stock as opposed to cereal agriculture. From what I have read it seems clear that in places such as Scandinavia traditional cereal agriculture gave a relatively low in yield. After all, wheat is a crop of the Mediterranean. Oats were a better bet, but are relatively unpalatable to humans, so they were more effectively grown as fodder for cattle.

A quick look at a world map will show that Europe is far to the north of China. Because of the disparate impact of Westerlies the different sides of continents at the same latitude may experience climatic regimes which vary a great deal. Northern California and New Jersey are an example. Distance from oceans also matter, southern Nebraska has a more "continental" climate than either New Jersey or northern California despite similar latitudes. It seems to me that on reason China and Europe took such radically different paths in terms of agriculture styles, in particular northern Europe and China, were differences in their ecological parameters. Europe is a very high latitude temperate zone characterized by moderation in its climate and relative regularity in its precipitation. China is a relatively low latitude temperate zone because of its exposure to the winter air of central Asia, as well as being subject to the reversal monsoonal flow during the summer, which is the season of greatest precipitation. The region of Europe at the similar latitude as north China, the Mediterranean zone, is characterized by much milder temperatures in winter as well as an inverted precipitation regime from Asia, with a maximum during the cold season of least sunlight.

But in the case of Zunhua ecology is probably not the only constraint. Its local population in the ancient phase included many "friendly" Xiongnu, suggesting its proximity to the steppe heartland. The period which The Retreat of the Elephants surveys is one of relative peace when Zunhua was not on a political frontier, the Manchu dynasty had subjugated Mongolia, and pushed the north boundaries of the Chinese Empire past the Amur river. For much of Chinese history in contrast Zunhua was a borderland, often not under Chinese hegemony. It seems plausible that therefore Zunhua was often a "No Man's Land," and so not subject to economic exploitation because of the risks inherent. I suspect an analogy to arable regions of Ukraine which were long occupied by nomads may be made. Up until the expansion of the Czarist state during the 17th century farmers that lived in central and eastern Ukraine would be subject to brutal exploitation by nomadic peoples, a dynamic one can glean as far back as the Scythians. Only with the rise of the Gunpowder Empires were the nomads on the marchlands finally defeated and extinguished as a threatening wild card which dissuaded farmers from settling vast swaths of Inner Eurasia. To some extent this might be interpreted simply as a variant of Greg Clark's point about shifting the death schedule; during periods when Zunhua was on the borders only those who were willing to risk life and limb would settle there, and periodic wars would "clean out" the region demographically.

Ultimately though I am curious as to why agriculture developed the way it did in China, being so focused on human labor. In The Great Divergence it is pointed out that China was more densely populated than India, and that land was more plentiful in South Asia. In Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches it is argued that cattle reverence in India is a function of the fact that bulls are an essential draft animal (the author notes that a disproportionate number of feral cattle are cows). In When Histories Collide Raymond Crotty argues that cattle reverence in India is due to the fact that killing calves would be counterproductive in terms of milk production. I have already provided some general rationales for why animal husbandry was relatively rational in Europe. In China, the primary animal was the pig. In terms of domesticates it seems that the pig is nearly feral, generally subsisting on offal. The pig can not produce milk, nor can it serve as a work animal. Various regions of Eurasia developed "critical mass" as complex literate societies during the pre-modern era, but gross features of their modes of production still differed. Why? Some ideas.

Going off William H. McNeill's arguments in Plagues and Peoples, I suggest that South Asia had a higher pathogen load than East Asia, and so there was always downward pressure on the population so that it did not "push" against the Malthusian Trap to the same extent. This also freed up more land so that successful farmers might get a relatively larger marginal return from the utilization of cattle as draft animals.

In Europe the variables were not disease related, but structural differences in climatic regimes. Northern Europe was well watered, but extremely cool and moist. It was not suited to the arid adapted grains from the temperate zone because of the latter parameter, but also not appropriate for rice agricultural because of the former (the Po river valley has rice now due to advanced irrigation techniques). Mediterranean Europe is subject to the peculiarities of its winter maxima precipitation regime. This allows for the cultivation of olives and other specialty crops, but, it also results in a situation where most of the rain falls during the season of least sunlight.

The ecological differences between Europe and China had an agricultural/economic implication: the Chinese could maximize caloric output per unit area of land through pure cereal cultivation. In contrast, the Europeans could not maximize calorie output through cereal cultivation but had to engage in "mixed" agriculture. The caloric total extractable out of the land per unit area was lower when summing the complements which were produced in European agriculture, but, the balance of nutritional intakes (protein, vitamins, etc.) was superior. This resulted in naturally greater physiological fitness for Europeans than Chinese as well as a lower final population density, and also natural evolutionary changes such as LP to deal with specific nutritional intakes.

Finally, I want to touch upon the general manner in which farming spread. It is quite clear that over the long term in China the Han way of life resulted in reduced lifetime physiological fitness. Nevertheless, it was above the threshold of fitness necessary for viability so that an individual could reproduce. Additionally during the transient when it was expanding into regions where land was in surplus it might actually have been a lifestyle that lead to relative affluence. The main problem is that this affluence was temporary as the population reached the local Malthusian limit. At this point the exhaustion of the local ecological base which might have supplemented the grain monoculture was beyond a point of no return and the society was "boxed in" to a lifestyle predicated on surviving through the next harvest. Additionally, judging by the fact that Han elites had surplus which they could use to bribe barbarian warlords the quantitative rise in the subjects from which to extract rents was sufficient to more than cancel out the qualitative decline in the character of the tax extracted. The Han way of life might have been misery for the peasantry, but there was a reasonable case that the Confucian bureaucratic fixation on a free peasant base as the ideal subject population was self-interested. Underfed farmers made quiescent subordinates. In contrast, nomads were notoriously factious, and their periodic organized eruptions were contingent upon coalescence around a particularly charismatic figure, or, more often the collapse of the Chinese political order and the opportunity for unparalleled plunder. Nevertheless, the fact that nomads were presences along the northern edge of Chinese civilization implies that there were ecological constraints on the spread of the Han lifestyle. Beyond the reach of dryland farming and irrigation there was no possibility of settlement. While nomads could always turn arable land into pasturage, the Han could not always turn pasturage into arable land.

Labels: Economics, History

Tectonic environments of ancient civilizations in the eastern hemisphere:

The map distribution of ancient civilizations shows a remarkable correspondence with tectonic boundaries related to the southern margin of the Eurasian plate. Quantification of this observation shows that the association is indeed significant, and both historical records and archaeoseismological work show that these civilizations commonly suffered earthquake damage. Close association of ancient civilizations with tectonic activity seems to be a pattern of some kind. In the hope that dividing the civilizations into subsets might clarify the meaning of this relation, primary and derivative civilizations were compared. Derivative civilizations prove to be far more closely related to the tectonic boundaries. Similarly, the civilizations that endured the longest (and that have been described as most static) are systematically the farthest from plate boundaries. It is still unclear how the relation actually worked in ancient cultures, i.e., what aspects of tectonism promoted complexity. Linkages to water and other resources, trade (broadly construed), and societal response seem likely. Volcanism appears not to be involved.

ScienceNow, Did Rumbling Give Rise to Rome? has a nice map. Exogenous shocks playing a critical role in cultural creativity? Remember that earthquakes were often interpreted as negative divine omens and elicited a drive toward soul searching....

Labels: History

Most of you have heard about the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation (which, more accurately should probably be termed the Catholic Reformation). But after posting earlier on the parameters which affect the shape and constraints of religious change, I thought it was important to mention something: in the second half the 16th century Catholicism was very close to becoming purely a Mediterranean sect of Christianity. In other words, Catholicism seemed on the verge of disappearing from Germany to the same extent that it did from England by and large. In East Central Europe, the precursors to the modern states of the Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland and Hungary, it was also being marginalized by Lutheranism, the Reformed Churches as well as even more extreme groups such as Unitarians. France had a large Huguenot minority which was represented disproportionately among the gentry and nobility. If you want to read about the extent of the rollback in the face of Protestantism check out The Thirty Years' War, The Reformation and Divided by Faith. All of them explore the massive penetration and domination of Protestantism among the Polish and Austrian nobility and the near collapse of Catholic parishes in regions which we today view as staunchly Roman Catholic.

But a Catholic world dominated by the peninsular Mediterranean never became. Today we have a German Pope, and the previous Pontif was Polish. Vast swaths of southern and western Germany remain Catholic, while the Protestant minority in France was expelled in the later 17th century (aside from mountainous redoubts such as Cevannes). What happened? The short answer is that the Hapsburgs happened. The Church operated in concert with the Holy Roman Emperor and other monarchs to reinvigorate the institutional framework of Roman Catholicism. The Jesuits were famously instrumental in this process of reform. But this was not a pure program of persuasion; Protestants who were not noble were often given the choice of emigration or conversion to the Catholic faith. Whole districts in Austria where Catholic parishes were no longer a feature of the landscape were re-Catholicized in a few years simply through imperial fiat. The mostly Protestant nobility could not be forced to convert, but they were blocked from patronage and access to the offices which brought glory upon their houses and maintained their fortunes. Additionally, though their private worship was given some latitude on their estates initially a step-by-step process of removal of these privileges also occurred over several generations. The result was that noble lineages who remained in the re-Catholicized regions of the Hapsburg Empire converted to the established religion, while those who would not give up their Protestant faith emigrated to regions where they could practice freely.

There are two domains of the former Hapsburg Empire which retain a large Protestant population; Hungary and Transylvania. And they illustrate the power of imperial fiat in driving religious change, because for much of the early modern period Transylvania was under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. Hungary was divided by a western Hapsburg domain and an eastern Ottoman portion. Not surprisingly, it is in the east that Protestant populations are most numerous because it is in the east that the re-Catholicization program was operative for the shortest period since these regions were under Turkish rule for most of the 17th century. The moral of the story here is that the diplomatic history of Europe between 1600 and 1800 can very accurately predict the religious configuration that we see today. Mass social movements simply could not succeed without the support of the elite, and the potentate had wide powers with which he or she could reshape that elite.

Labels: History, Religion

Peter Turchin's Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall showed up a little sooner than I'd thought it would, and it was an even quicker read than War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires (see review). There isn't really anything new verbal in the more technical treatment, but the book is about half the length because so much of the text was condensed into simple differential equations and figures which displayed the results of simulations. The figure to the left was one that I found particularly interesting, the differential equations which this is based on are:

dA/dt = c₀AS(1 - A/h) - a

dS/dt = r₀(1 - A/[2b])S(1 - S)

Where A = area, c = state's resources translated into geopolitical power, r is the growth rate, h is the spatial scale of power project, a is the geopolitical pressure from the hinterland and S is average polity-wide level of collective solidarity. You can find the elucidation of the details of the simulation in the appendix of Historical Dynamics.

Turchin was obviously pleased with how similar the dynamics of area of polity vs. time were in the simulation to what the empirical data showed. Of course, because of the sensitivity to initial parameters there isn't going to be a real prediction of the trajectory of state rise and fall, as opposed to inferences about the likely patterns. For example, in the comments to the previous post Italy was focused in on as a weakness in many of the generalizations, and Turchin actually spends a fair amount of time admitting that he has no real answer for why Italy turned out the way it did and admits that his model can explain a lot, but not all. He's happy with an r-squared of 0.75.

The above was just a taste, I'm not going to go much deeper since you can get the book yourself. Mathematically oriented works are pretty straightforward and you can reject it or accept it (or not understand it). In any case, I want to focus on another issue which is emphasized in Historical Dynamics, the autocatalytic model of religious conversion. The idea here is simple; the rate of conversion is proportional to the number of converts, and the result is a logistic curve over time. Turchin draws strongly upon Rodney Stark & co's work on the importance of transmission through social networks, and uses textual data to suggest that the growth of Christianity during the Roman Empire, and Islam in both Spain and Iran, seem to map well onto a logistic growth function.

In The Rise of Christianity Rodney Stark comes close to asserting that the conversion of Constantine, and the progression in the 4th century of Christianity becoming a state-identified cult, actually slowed the spread of the religion! Stark's thesis is obviously derived in large part from the American experience of cult, sect and denominational rise and fall. Historically minded readers might wonder as to the generalizable nature of a supply side rational choice model for the ancient world. In The Barbarian Conversion the difference between the Roman and early medieval periods in terms of the spread of Christianity is rather clear and distinct, what was plausibly a "bottom up" dynamic quickly turned into a "trickle down" and fiat process (also see Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity).

A comparison to the Islamic case is perhaps a good analogy for what happened across much of Europe after the fall of Rome. When the elites in the German frontier, or Lithuania, or Russia, converted to Christianity, their nations were considered Christianized. That is, full members of Christendom. But the persistence of pagan practices among the populace was common, and even the newly Christian nobility often exhibited dual religious identities (e.g., public and international practice of Christianity combined with cryptic or local adherence to pagan seasonal rituals and sacrifices). I suspect that here you have a situation where autocatalytic models for the population might be appropriate to describing the dynamics of initially nominally Christian states. In Iran or Al-Andalus the elites were Muslim, and the population as a whole, who were ethnically different, lagged. From an "orthodox" Muslim perspective any state which is ruled by Muslims is by definition part of the domain of Islam (this is the rational for reconquering Spain and India by jihadists, as these lands remain Muslim in perpetuity). To some extent the Christian hierarchy seems to have taken a similar viewpoint, though there were attempts to stamp out open paganism among the peasantry, to a large extent de facto syncretism was tolerated so long as the monopoly of Christianity as the elite public religion was maintained and forms were adhered to during ritual occasions.

As I observed above, the autocatalytic model as elucidated by Rodney Stark comes close to asserting that spread of religions such as Christianity is inevitable. In One True God Stark makes this explicit. Turchin emphasizes the importance of exclusionary religions which also can assimilate outsiders in allowing for the coalescence of identity on metaethnic frontiers. In Darwin's Cathedral David Sloan Wilson promotes the idea that religious belief can serve functional ends in producing higher than individual left units of interest and action. Many cognitive psychologists have observed that universal religions often result in fictive kinship. Note here that the important point is not the propensity toward supernatural belief; that's modal human cognition. Rather, it is the specific theological and institutional character of a religious organization which allows them to successfully compete with other "firms," and if the autocatalytic dynamics are dominant these will result in the extinction of "weaker" religious organizations in the face of "stronger" ones over time via the choice of individual actors along the filaments of a social network.

A classic case study is the rise of Christianity and the late Roman Empire referred to above. It seems likely that around the year 300 about 10% of the Roman Empire's population was Christian. Rodney Stark would hold that the conversion of Constantine and the subsequent sponsorship of the new religion by the emperors was only illustrative of the general trend at best, and possibly even detrimental. On the face of it this seems likely a ridiculous contention. Could it be that paganism was actually strengthened by state sponsorship of Christianity? That Theodosius' forcible suppression of pagan cults around 395 was only the outcome of the relative weakness of Christianity because of its association with the Roman state? Could the fact that as the 4th century proceeded customary subsidies to pagan cults were shifted to the Christian Church have actually taken some of the thunder out of the triumph of Christianity?

Stark and company point to the anemic nature of state sponsored Christianity in Europe as compared to the free market of American religious firms. Their model is to some extent an economical one, and they hold that state enforced subsidies and monopolies do nothing but sap the vigor of any corporate entity, which the early Christian Church was to a great extent. This particular critique is not new, even if the language borrows a bit from modern economic thinking. Early Protestant radicals viewed the Roman Catholic Church as a corrupt corporation, and some of them even looked explicitly back to the "primitive" Church before Constantine as the model for how true religion should organize. The descendants of this sort of outlook are numerous in American Protestantism, though the most direct heirs are the Amish who reject the contention that the world as a whole can be saved. They are the most extreme of the Protestants who turned their backs on the concept of the Church Universal which sanctifies and saves the whole society.

But hypotheses need to be teased apart and tested. The state sponsorship of Christianity manifested in a "soft" form between 320 and 390, and in more explicit and exclusive form after 390. The subsequent identity of the Roman Empire and Christianity adds a rather large confound into the autocatalytic model. After all, though to a large extent unenforceable, the emperor Theodosius I issued edicts which banned private practice of pagan religion. There were also state approved destruction of pagan temples, as well as tacit elite approval of the vigilante violence on the part of radical priests. A good analogy for those of you who aren't versed in this era of history would be the way Christians are treated in the Middle East, they are not forced to convert through direct violence, but there is certainly a general lack of tolerance for religious pluralism and moderate levels of intimidation directed at Christian practice on a day to day basis. The ultimate result is of course emigration and conversion in the face of strong disincentives at practice of the Christian religion. This does not show that Islam is necessarily a better "firm," rather, state subsidy and dominant support have only expanded its operational religious monopoly. At the end of the day state support might result in such a weakened Islam that a new religion supersedes it, but that process might not come to fruition for centuries. Until then....

There are two cases I can think of which do not suffer from this direct confound of state sponsorship and subsidy. The first is Ireland, where Christianity came to dominance via diffusion across the nobility in a decentralized manner. While Ireland was being Christianized, the Roman frontier right across the Irish Sea was seeing the extinction of Romano-British Christianity aside from in enclaves in Wales. The eventual flourishing of Ireland as a center of Christian civilization in the early medieval period is well known, so I won't belabor the point. Though no doubt prominent Irish Christians favored their own religion on their own lands, it remains that this was a decentralized society so unitary fiat could not enforce Christianity from above. In the Irish case I think it is plausible that the strengths of Christianity as a Roman religion, with the attendant associations with Romanitas, was attractive for barbarian warlords who wished to integrate themselves into the international luxury goods trade, or encourage the spread of literacy so as to rationalize their economic arrangements. These warlords likely did load the die for the Christian religion so that the consumer element might be relatively muted from a modern American perspective. But nevertheless, here you have a case where neither direct exogenous Christian force (e.g., the Germans threatening to invade Denmark unless the king converted to Christianity), nor a endogenous compulsion from the center, were operative.

The second case is more obscure, and perhaps less tenable because of the fewer facts known, but to me far more interesting. And that is Mesopotamia. Though there were some periods when what is today Iraq was part of the Roman Empire, by and large Mesopotamia was an extension of Persia before the rise of Islam. The summer capital of the Parthian and Sassanid dynasties, Ctesiphon, was a successor to Babylon and Seleucia, the predecessor of Baghdad. Nevertheless, Mesopotamia was not culturally Persian, it was Semitic. Prior to the Arabicization of what became Iraq the dominant dialects were affiliated with Aramaic, though there were Arab, Persian and Greek speaking minorities. But more importantly as Peter Brown notes in The Rise of Western Christendom, Mesopotamia was a mostly Christian region (with a large Jewish minority, especially in the south). There were no Zoroastrian Fire Temples in Ctesiphon.

In the Sassanid Empire the Zoroastrian religion was very much the ethnic cult of the Persians. Though some non-Persians might espouse this religion (there are attested cases of Zoroastrian Turks, and other converts), this was not a program sponsored by the ruling caste in a proactive manner. The attempts to force Armenian nobles to convert to Zoroastrianism was the exception that proved the rule; the Armenian elite were culturally very similar to the Persian nobles with whom they fought in the armies of the Sassanids, and the Armenian ruling dynasty was even originally a cadet branch of the Parthian Arascids. Proselytising of Armenians was simply part of the project to homogenize the martial elite of the Persian Empire under the same religious ideology. In contrast, the Aramaic speaking peasantry were left to their own devices.

The relatively laissez faire attitude of the Sassanids toward the religious identity of their subjects in Mesopatamia had the expected result in terms of pluralism. Modern Haran was usually within the orbit of the Roman Empire, but it was the only area to persist with organized paganism down into the Islamic area, and it seems likely that the Sabians of the early Muslim period emerged from this milieu (they were by the way extremely overrepresented among those involved in the preservation and transmission of classical learning). Why did they not convert to Christianity? One reason is that they were given religious tolerance because they were explicitly protected by the Shah of Persia, who could have easily intervened because of the geographic proximity of Haran to his domains. In contrast during the mid-6th century the last vestiges of institutional paganism in places like Egypt and Lebanon were blotted out under the order of the Emperor Justinian. Across the border in Sassanid Mesopotamia the majority of the population became Christians in all likelihood, but the extant presence (at least until recently) of heterodox cults such as Mandaeism and Yezidism in this region today are I believe echoes of the diversity which was the norm during late antiquity.

All that being said, it seems likely that when the Arabs conquered Iraq in the mid-600s most of the populace were Christian. It is important to note that they were Christians which the Roman Empire based in Constantinople would perceive as heretical. They were Monophysite or Nestorian in inclination, not only theologically deviant, but institutionally hostile to the Christian Church organized within the Roman Empire (those Christians in the Fertile Crescent who adhered to Roman Church were termed Melkite, which means Imperial, an allusion to their loyalties). The Nestorian Christians are often identified as the Persian Church because of that group's almost total exclusion from the Roman Empire and prominence among ethnic Persians.

I've put the spotlight on Mesopotamian Christianity as it was around 600 as the dominant religion to ask this question: whatever happened to Babylonian paganism? As I said above, Roman hegemony over Mesopotamia only occurred under the religiously tolerant pagan period. The Persian rulers were interested in the religion of their Mesopotamian subjects only insofar as it had political ramifications; obviously they would encourage the anti-Roman Nestorian faction, discourage pro-Roman Melkites, and deal with the Monophysites who spanned both the Persian and Roman Empire on a case by case basis as circumstances dictated (the Persians tended to suppress socially disruptive Mazdakites and Manichaeans because these groups drew from Zoroastrianism). The case of the Sabians and the Persian protection of this pagan-descended cult against the religious cleansing which was a characteristic of Justinian's reign in the mid-6th century also suggests that there was no hostility to polytheistic paganism as such. In fact, many scholars of Zoroastrianism contend that that religion is more monotheistic in its presentation today for two reasons. First, the period of Muslim rule of course incentivized Zoroastrians to present the most acceptable, i.e., monotheistic, face of their religion to the majority. In India the Parsis generally escaped this, but during the period of British rule again they were faced with a monotheistically oriented group to whom they had to bend a knee, so again, an emphasis on similarities with the Abrahamic religions.

In any case, in Mesopotamia outside forces can not account from the shift from institutional polytheism to monotheistic universalist religion. Polytheistic paganism seems to have naturally withered. A quick survey of the situation in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire seems to also show a pattern where paganism was simply not institutionally robust enough to hold off Christianization. A repeated pattern in is one where rulers who wish to cultivate ties to the civilized Roman Christian Commonwealth convert and encourage conversion among their populace, but so invite a backlash. This occurred in Scandinavia and the Slavic lands, as well among the Magyars in Hungary and the Bulgars in Bulgaria. But, the backlash generally is only a short-term correction which only delays the inevitable. In the west Slav lands bordering Germany and in Lithuania a very robust and persistent form of paganism arose which did seem to keep Christianity at bay for several centuries, as opposed to a few generations at most as was the case above. Looking more closely one can see very specific contingent conditions which gave rise to these dynamics. The Christian assault on the Wends (ancestors of the modern Sorbs) was very much also an ethnic German one. The Christian god was identified as a German god, and the German drive to the east was one of of total ethnic and religious assimilation at best and extermination at worst. It is then no surprise that west Slavic paganism was particularly robust in terms of generating an institutional framework around which to rally against the Christian-German invasion; they were fighting total extermination as a people (if not as individuals). In contrast, the Polish who were further from the front used Christianity to buttress their independence from the expanding Germans, cultivate ties to other Christian powers, while the duke, who became a king, used the One True God and One True Church to justify his centralizing drive as the One True King. This was a rational maneuver because of their greater distance from the wave front of German expansion; Christianity was not necessarily a German religion (the Bohemians to their south of course had contact with Byzantium as well as German Christianity). The case of Lithuania is even more explicable in terms of particular geopolitical and historical conditions: with the decline of European states and the Mongol hordes the Lithuanian polity forged against the German drive to the east under the banner of the Sword Brothers and Teutonic Knights expanded to fill the vacuum. By the mid-14th century Lithuania included most of modern Ukraine, White Russia as well as the Baltic lands and parts of Poland. The majority of the subjects of the pagan Lithuanian warrior elite were Christian. Either Western Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. A conversion to Christianity would of course entail that the Lithuanian elite pick a side, Catholic or Orthodox, while persisting in their paganism allowed them to play off the two groups against each other. A substantial number of Lithuanians did convert to Orthodoxy or Catholicism, but the commanding heights remained pagan due to the geopolitical circumstances. In the late 14th century Lithuanians converted to Catholicism, cementing their alliance with Poland, naturally resulting in Lithuania becoming the marcher state aginst Orthodox Muscovy and the last frontier of the West (after the 16th century the Lithuanian nobility was totally Polonized).

The autocatalytic model does work, but I believe social and political incentives also matter. Aside from Ireland every instance of Christianity spreading and absorbing a culture in Europe after the fall of Rome was initiated from the top and down. Though most of these states had small Christian minorities, sometimes of influence, the majority of the logistic growth curve occurred while Christianity was the official religion. Many Protestants even contend that Christianization of the European peasantry was not completed until after the Reformation. But there were strong incentives to become a pious Christian in Europe after 1000, when Christianity and civilization and elite status went hand in hand, and paganism was tatamount to barbarism.

A quick trip back to late antiquity highlights the importance of the incentives and framing social structures in terms of how it affects the trajectory of religious change. According to the data that Turchin and Stark accept, the Empire was over half Christian by around 360. By the 400s it was overwhelmingly Christian. Nevertheless, in 529 Justinian closed the Academy in Athens which was still the locus of pagan philosophical thought. The Diaspora of Neoplatonic pagans remained active until the Islamic period in Alexandria, and likely influenced the Sabians of Haran. By the time of Justinian these pagans could only draw from a small subset of the Empire's population, those whose families remained loyal to the old religion, or, those of other minority religions such as Judaism or Samaritanism. The similiarities to dhimmis under Islam is again rather clear. But the point I want to make here is that despite the presumed autocatalytic dynamics operative through the Christian Empire, philosophers still remained pagan! There were particular incentives within the philosophical culture which fostered adherence to a pagan religious outlook. The autocatalytic process does not operate across the full sample space to the same extent. While most of the Empire was being immersed in a religion which was a synthesis of Roman institutions, Greek philosophy and Hebrew theism, a subset of the population of philosophical inclination was being drawn into a religious system descended from Hellenistic paganism. This quasi-philosophical world-view was the one that drew the pagan convert Julian to the Apostate. It is notable that Julian, a self-conscious Hellenist in his fashions, was relatively well-educated and manor-born in comparison to the military populists who were dominant between 280 and 400. Though the first illiterate Roman Emperor did not come onto the scene until the early 6th century, there was a wide range of cultural sensibilities, from philosopher-kings and scholars such as Marcus Aurelius and Claudius, to military tryants and autocrats such as Decius and Diocletian.

This "different world" was not operative only among philosophers. The Frankish general Arbogast was the son of a Romanized German, and yet he is known to have been a pagan of classical Roman sensibilities. Arbogast led a pagan senetorial rebellion against Theodosius the Great, and was defeated. Because history has minimal interest in losers we do not truly understand with any clarity how it was that a barbarian by ancestry was acculturated to the world-view of the pagan Roman elite at this late date (Roman society had become far more xenophobic and prejudiced against barbarians than it had been earlier by the 4th century). But books such as The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire draw upon a wide range of textual evidence on the late Roman senatorial elite of the West to imply that they did not make the final turn to Christianity until after 400. Additionally, a deeper analysis of the shape of religious variation smokes out intriguing patterns. Roman senators of the 4th century who were Christian were much more likely to be new men, parvenus dependent upon imperial patronage. They were more likely to have risen through the military or civil service, as opposed to having inherited their status. Additionally, Christian senators were also more likely to come from Gaul and other provinces on the frontier, while the pagans were more likely from the old imperial core, Italy and North Africa, two regions relatively insulated from the disturbances of the 3rd and 4th centuries.

Within the status hierarchies of the old senatorial elite paganism and its attendant familial cults had a strong attraction. Even in the mid-5th century, high status nobles such as the general Marcellinus, were devout pagans. Another locus of pagan power in the army is rather clearly illustrated by a revocation of the expulsion of non-Christians from the officer corps by Theodosius II early in the 5th century; so many officers, including generals, protested and offered to resign that it was judged to be impractical in implementation. There were enough crypto-pagans on the ground that as late as the reign of the Emperor Zeno in 474 there were hopes that paganism would be restored as the official religion. In any case, that wasn't to be, at some point the cause of paganism during late antiquity was as futile as that of Roman Catholicism in England by the 17th century. But, with hindsight I think we need to not forget that inevitable dynamics didn't seem so inevitable back then, and different incentives and social networks intersected across the same time and space. Similarly, an autocatalytic process might have been operative in terms of conversion to Islam in the Levant, but even in 1900 around 10-20% of Palestinian Arabs were Christian, and across the coastal mountain ranges of Syria-Lebanon Christians and heretical Muslims (Druze, Alawites) were more numerous than Sunni Muslims (emigration in this case was so strongly biased toward Christian Arabs that the proportions would have changed a great deal even without the differential birthrates which came to the fore in the 20th century).

Despite the specific twists and conditonalities, I do think that the null model of the autocatalytic expansion of particular religious groups is useful. In Persia I believe we have an excellent case study in Mesopotamia which suggests that ethnic polytheism naturally tends to cede ground over time to universal monotheism. As I have outlined I think the likelihood that there was an exogenous confound is sharply dampened in this one scenario. Obviously there isn't the issue of Christian blackmail (i.e., monotheistic states after the fall of Roman had a cheery habit of threatening to invade unbelievers because of the fact that they were unbelievers), nor sponsorship by Christian elites. Granted, like Ireland the Christianization of Mesopatamia might have been facilitated by the mediating role of local notables wishing to integrate themselves into the transnational luxury trade. It seems that Semitic ethnicity was a bar to conversion to Zoroastrianism, and the Arab federates of the Sassanids, the Lakhimids, were not surprisingly Christians (one could argue that the incentives of the pagan piligrimage trade were one of the reasons that the nobles of Mecca did not align themselves with a world religion). But in a pre-modern society there simply wasn't as much individual choice, and patrons followed their clients, whether those patrons were an individual or a corporate entity like a guild or village council.

But the Sassanid Empire also expanded east, into Central Asia and the Punjab. These were regions where Zoroastrianism was simply not much of an option for those non-assimilated to Persian ethnicity or identity. And not surprisingly, Nestorian Christianity was influential along the trade routes. Arnold Toynbee alluded to a stillborn Nestorian civilization, and it was thanks to the reach of the Zoroastrian Sassinid Empire that Nestorianism spread so far and wide. In the 8th century Nestorians were a prominent power not just in Central Asia, but also in China. It seems that the Christians of Kerala were originally affiliated with the Nestorian Church of Mesopotamia. And, it is well known that Nestorians were still extant among the Turco-Mongol peoples swept up in the expansion of the armies of Genghis Khan; the mother of Kubilai Khan was a Nestorian Christian.

And yet, what happened here? Shouldn't the autocatalytic process have increased the frequency of Nestorianism so that it dominated all these regions? In Persia itself Nestorianism declined with the rise of Islam. There are attested conversions, but it seems pretty clear that preponderant ancestry of modern Iraqi Muslims are from Aramaic speaking Christian peasants. In China there was a major suppression of foreign religions in the mid-9th century. This seems to have nearly extirpated Nestorianism, and driven Manichaeanism (which also came from Persia) to such low numbers that it went extinct in a few centuries, and also set Islam back quite a bit (modern Chinese Islam probably owes more to the influx of Central Asians with the Mongol Empire in the 13th and 14th centuries than the original expansion of Islam into China in the 7th and 8th). In India Nestorianism flourished in Kerala, but did not spread to any other region. One would assume that 1,500 years was long enough for autocatalytic dynamics to kick in....but it seems that Kerala's Christians (who are by and large no longer identified as Nestorian, though they retain Syrian affinities) turned into another caste. The modern spread of Christianity in India was spurred by British raj and Western missionaries, though Syrian Christians were often critical conduits.

The case of India is important enough to inspect with greater detail. India is the only civilization which has produced a world religion besides the Middle East. Indians will generally assert that Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism are Dharmic religions set against the Abrahamic religions of of the Middle East. The gap is a real one obviously. Hinduism and Buddhism are very different, but ultimately they deal in the same semantic currency and there are institutional resemblences. In Myanmar the Indians who have remained are by origin either Muslim or Hindu. The latter have been consistently changing their religious identity to that of Buddhism. Muslims have been to a far lesser extent. Though there are tensions between the Chinese and Thai in Thailand, and a religious gap between Chinese Mahayana sects and the Therevada Buddhism of Thailand, the mixing between the communities is rather fluid when compared to the situation in Malaysia, as the relations between Chinese and the Muslim peoples of the Malay archipelago is fraught with more tension. There are orthopraxic gaps which make this comprehensible; the food taboos of Buddhist priests and monks, whether Mahayana or Therevada, are rather intelligible to each other (generally derivations from Indian vegetarianism). In contrast, the Muslim aversion to pork does not generally allow for easy communal meals with Chinese, for whom pork is nearly the obligate meat. I recall that when there were riots in Java in the 1990s against the Chinese many fled to Hindu Bali. Here the proximate dynamic isn't simply reducible to civilizational gaps, after all, both the Balinese and Chinese are outsiders in the mix of the Muslim majority and so a natural empathy might arise (and a substantial number of Chinese Indonesians are Christians, even if only nominally). But on a coarser scale increasing the N I think Turchin's model of a metaethnic border is probably viable and useful, even if it is not likely the avowed rationale given for conflicts, it may lurk in the background as a necessary framing condition, or at least one which increases likelihood.

The East broadly, the Indian and Chinese cultural orbits, are interesting cases when it comes resistence against the expanding orbit of the One True God. On a whole, it's taken some hits. Around 1/3 of South Asians now subscribe to an Abrahamic religion. Island southeast Asia was lost to Islam relatively recently from the Hindu-Buddhist bloc. The Dutch helped along the process in Java because of their rivalry with the Hindu kingdom of Bali (eastern Java was the center of a Hindu kingdom allied with Bali until the 18th century). China has a non-trivial Muslim minority. Myanmar, Thailand and Indochina all non-trivial large Abrahamic minorities. Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea have non-trivial and powerful Christian populations. Japan has a small, but influential, Christian minority. On the other end of the balance sheet, in the secularizing West ideas from Dharmic religions are very popular among the elites, and some, such as reinarnation have penetration rates as high as 25%. But the influence is less institutional and organizational than it is a percolation of ideas and assumptions.

Let's look at India first. By India, I'll include the states not currently in the Republic of India, since before 1947 India meant the whole subcontinent, though Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka were often bracketed off because of their Buddhist leanings. About 1/3 of the Indian population, broadly, is Muslim. Islam was present in India from the 8th century. Sindh was conquered by the Ummayads. In the next few centuries military incursions were minimal, but Arab mercenaries and merchants were a prominent force. The large number of Muslims in Kerala is a function of trade much more than the later rise of foreign Islamic dynasties since most of the time Hindu rulers were preeminent in this region (see Vasco da Gama's reports). In the north of India Muslim warlords were dominant after 1000, and exclusive at the top of the totem pole by 1200. This situation persisted for 500 years until 1700, at which point political fragmentation was the dominant dynamic. After 1700 some non-Muslim groups rose to parity, but only after 1800 and British rule was the political supremacy of Muslim elites off the table.

So a 500 hundred year window of near domination, and quite a bit of power (1000-1200 was a long rearguard action on the journey to extinction on the part of Hindu kingdoms in northern India, not one of parity). And yet only 1/3 of the population is Muslim? First, autocatalytic dynamics assume a level of connectedness perhaps inappropriate in South Asia. Though there were no north Indian Hindu kings, many of the great vassals, rajputs, remained Hindu. So there were mediators who continued to foster the production of Hindu religious ritual through their patronage. There were many instances of conversion, but it seems clear from the extant biographical data Hindu warlords did not want to turn their back on their own cultural heritage, as would be an implication by conversion to Islam (they would also remain inferior in status to Muslims from Persia or Central Asia). There is an element of irony in this because it seems likely that some of the rajputs of northern India were themselves immigrants from Central Asia who filled the power vacuum after the collapse of the Gupta dynasty in the 6th century. But like the Tibeto-Burman Ahoms of Assam later, they became defenders of Hindu Indian cultural traditions on the metaethnic frontier. Additionally, Muslim power projected rather raggedly into southern India for much of this period, where the Empire of Vijayanagar flourished. Though Vijayanagar was contested, and eventually conquered, by south Indian Muslim dynasties, it remained a separate locus of patronage for Hindu cultural production during the period of Islamic domination. Finally, it must be remembered that India is a highly segmented society, and many villages were run by Hindu landlords (patels, thakurs, etc.) who served as mediators between the new Muslim overlords and the masses.

With the fall of the Mughul raj and the rise of the British Hindu notables quickly rose up to fill the void and stepped into the shoes of the Muslim ruling classes to administer India. This shows that a reservoir of non-Muslim elite talent always remained extant. Some of these were no doubt patronized by Hindu dynasts such as the Marathas and those of Vijayanagar. Others were patronized by Hindu vassals of the Muslim dynasties, such as the rajputs. And some of them were patronized by the Muslims themselves (e.g., the Kayasthas served the Muslims more than other high caste groups which had a tradition of literacy). The Sunni Muslim elite seems to have taken a role as a rentier caste, opening up niches for enterprising non-Muslims. It is interesting that some of the most economically successful Muslims in the Indian subcontinent are the marginal Ismailis, who were persecuted by the Mughals and forced to convert to Sunni Islam.

Not only are there complex patterns vertically up and down the class ladder, but one must look at the conversion patterns as a function of geography. In modern India it is no surprise that aside from Kerala and centers of Muslim dynasties (e.g., Hyderabad) that Islam is relatively thin on the ground in the south compared to the north. Additionally, in Orrisa there are very few Muslims, and this is an isolated and frankly backward region which was less exposed to outside currents. But, it is important to note that the Muslim heartland around Dehli remained predominantly Hindu across all those centuries. It is no surprise that Muslims are the majority along the western fringe, not only are these regions closer to the demographic sources of Turkic and Persian immigration which buttressed the Islamic dynasties as soldiers and bureaucrats, but the Sindh was under direct Muslim rule far longer than any other region. Yet in Pakistan it is in Sindh which has the largest Hindu minority (likely due to the relative easy of population exchange along the Punjab border as opposed of the Thar boundary to the east of Sindh). Additionally, of course the other locus of Muslim majority in the Indian subcontinent is far to the east, in Bengal. Not only is it in Bengal, but there is a consistent pattern that the further east you go in Bengal the more Muslim the population gets, with the most pious region the southeastern district of Noakhali. When the British census revealed that there were more Muslims than Hindus in Bengal in the late 19th century they were somewhat shocked.

In fact, Bengal has been under Muslim rule only a century or two less than the Punjab, so the difference of duration isn't that great. But, it is notable that prior to the Muslim conquest these two regions were relatively weak in terms of institutional Hinduism, and Bengal was the last region of India to host a flowering of Buddhism. The social and institutional robusticity of Indian religion, the set of beliefs and rituals which became Hinduism, did not characterize the Punjab or Bengal during this period. Polities in these areas were more often aligned with the "losing" cultural faction, and divided within themselves. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 documents the confluence of social and economic conditions which allowed eastern Bengal, what became Bangladesh, to become a mostly Muslim domain while western Bengal, now part of India, remained mostly Hindu. It is important to remember that eastern Bengal was to a large extent not characterized by the Malthusian trap which we see today, rather, for most of the past 1,000 years its the frontier served as a demographic release valve as peasants cleared the forest under the supervision of expanding elites. Those elites were of course mostly Muslim (though the capital input might have been from Hindu moneylenders). A combination of the relative weakness of extant Hindu institutions in eastern Bengal, combined with the emergence of a new non-Hindu elite, and, an expansion into a frontier so that a small number of pioneers might serve as genetic and cultural "founders" makes the fact that Bengal was much more fruitful for Islam than the central Gangetic plain much more comprehensible. Recall that I observed that there is data which suggests that elites on the geographic margins, the frontiers, were more open switching to the Christian religion and abandoning their older customs and traditions during late antiquity. In contrast, the old civilized cores, such as Italy and Greece, were notable for remaining pagan longer than new frontier metropoles such as Constantinople or Antioch. A similar difference might have applied to Iran and Central Asia, where the latter was Islamicized earlier than the former.

Of course, the analogy between paganism and Hinduism is not very strong. The robusticity of Indian socio-religious structures in the face of domination by another socio-religious framework is impressive and makes it very different from Babylonian paganism. Just as elite Roman senators were resistent to attractions of Christianity for a relatively long period, attempts by Christian missionaries to convert Indians have had to focus on the lower castes and maringally Indianized (e.g., the Tibeto-Burman tribal peoples of the northeast). Once the ball starts rolling though that is a sign that there as an institutional vacuum which Christianity can fill; the instances of forced conversions of pagan and Hindu Nagas by Naga fundamentalist Christians illustrates the power of autocatalyic peer "pressure." On the other hand, among higher caste Hindus it seems that the logistic growth curve tends to saturate at a lower level.

A shift to southeast Asia highlights the importance of conditional parameters in these autocatalytic dynamics. Christianity is a minority religion in most of mainland southeast Asia. But, it is an ethnic religion. Specifically, it is a religion which is popular among minorities who have traditionally been at the cultural and economic margins. Lowland southeast Asia has been dominated by powerful kingdoms with a very strong self-conscious identity as vessels for Therevada Buddhism. Buddhist monarchs in sout