Introduction

In this chapter we see the limits of the Old System, the traditional structure perfected over previous centuries, withstand internal disintegration even before the West is ready to pose a major challenge from the outside. This cycle of rise and fall, found in civilized monarchies in many countries at many points in history, reflects the close relationship among the government, the economy, and the high culture by which we judge the status of a past civilization. For example, we judge economic strength by government tax revenues. If they are high, then the state is considered "healthy"; if low, then the state is judged to be declining. Similarly, cultural vitality is assessed by the output of literature, painting, and architecture. In the civilizations examined in this chapter, all these arts are tied fairly closely to the central government or established religious institutions that financed them.

The rise, growth, and decline of the Ming empires as well as those of the minor states of Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia are all, in the time frame covered by this chapter, pinned to the qualities of autocratic heads of state. No other factor, such as outside invasion, is as directly relevant. It is true that a ruler's high officials could, to some extent, buffer the ruler's impact on the country, but they could not alter the major policies of a despot who held the power of life and death over his subjects. Nor could officials reduce the ruler's spending. That power would not come in world history until Parliament in seventeenth-century England gained the "power of the purse" over the monarch.

A good ruler (and there are some splendid examples in this chapter) whose decision was required on even the most trivial matters had to be energetic, self-disciplined, talented in war, ruthless, and able to make quick judgments. Successful rulers were often tolerant, preferring to avoid rather than stir up domestic controversy. If Hung-wu, Yung-lo, Tokugawa Ieyasu and Yi Sejong could have collaborated to write a textbook on successful monarchy, the book would have provided a useful guide for rulers in every civilization until the revolutions of the eighteenth century. Under the Old System they were the best of the breed.

The declines of the empires can be traced to incompetent or self-indulgent rulers who had as much negative impact as their predecessors, like Yung-lo and Ieyasu, had positive effects. We attribute the decline of the states to bad rulers who were, like successful rulers, locked into a system that centralized authority and responsibility. It was the only system that could hold together a premodern empire, but its efficacy depended on good rulers. The empires that emerged later would be under pressure to develop new political systems that could compensate for the inevitable bad rulers. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these states, one by one, would reluctantly grope toward some form of democracy.