Zhengyuan Zhang, University of California, Berkeley
The paper contrasts the different modes in which the high Roman Empire and the early Chinese empires (Qin and Han, 221 BC–AD 220) organized and taxed their respective populations and discusses the consequences each mode had on its respective society. Furthermore, it seeks to explain why each polity came to develop its specific mode of population control and taxation.
For the population under their rule, the early Chinese states consistently pursed an assessment of tax and corvée liabilities down to the household and indeed the individual. Every year, each province organized a household-by-household census, produced records on which the demographic information and tax status of each household member were specified, and, in September, sent officials to the capital to submit these records. Organizing population into households and, on that basis, assessing the tax and corvée liabilities of each individual member of the population was not only a consistent practice, but constituted a dominant ideology of early Chinese political culture. In this conception, any autonomous stratum between the state and the individual, including powerful local families that commanded tenant farmers or voluntary associations of any sort, were conceived as a potential obstacle to state power. The state would only settle for other "fuzzier" methods of population control and taxation when its power waned and assessment on an individual basis was no longer possible. Such developments were invariably considered as failures of the state.
By contrast, the high Roman state never consistently sought individualized assessment of tax liabilities for its population. Provincial censuses were indeed held, but at much longer intervals and in most cases erratically. At no time did the Roman state account for every member of the population. Instead, autonomous civic communities were used as instruments for population control and taxation. Each year, the tax burden was dictated by the state to the community to be further distributed by the local governing élite to all members of that community. Unlike the early Chinese states, it was through a collaborative, rather than hostile, lens that the Roman state viewed the various intermediate strata existing between itself and the individual, including cities and numerous voluntary associations.
The early Chinese states' efforts to render their population "legible" (to borrow James C. Scott's well-known concept) originated in the context of continuous warfare in the last hundred years of the Warring States period (roughly 340–221 BC). The warring states, and above all the final victor, Qin, were compelled by the needs of war to both tax and militarize their populations to the greatest extent possible. A similar tendency can be observed in the case of the Roman Republic, when the entire Roman citizenry–which came to include the entire free population of Italy after the Social War–were thoroughly subjected to census operations, and taxed and militarized accordingly. However, in the Imperial period, ideological considerations and practical obstacles prevented Rome from ever subjecting its full population, including the non-citizens, to a single and coherent regime of taxation and control.