Asia

Origins of Oriental Despotism

Asia was the home of the three world's oldest civilizations, located in river valleys of the Indus and the Huang Ho and in Mesopotamia. A fourth one, on the Nile, bordered on Asia. The empires of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, Media, Persia, and Muslim civilizations of Arabs and Turks prospered in Southwest Asia, while in the South and Far East the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Japan thrived. The nomadic tribes of North and Central Asia (Huns, Mongols, etc.) induced the immense westward migration and established great empires in the Middle East.

Because of Asia's peculiar semiarid climate and territorial conditions, artificial irrigation by canals and waterworks had to be the basis of a flourishing agrarian economy. Only despotic state power resting on the mighty bureaucratic system could really become the principal organizer of such works. Oriental despotism was also founded on common property. But there was one more important cause for the formation of despotic rule in the East. Cultural relativists deduce the reason from the peculiarities of the commune's existence in the ancient East. The representatives of this approach rest on Karl Marx's (March 1881) observation about communes being isolated units disconnected from each other. He labeled a commune a localized microcosm.

While in solving internal problems each commune is really almighty, the complete helplessness of this archaic unit is revealed when facing outward. The outside world might appear as a foe in numerous forms. It could be nomadic coup de main or pirate inroad, locust attack, or floods. This danger of being devastated by the hostile outer world urges communication between agrarian microcosms. As a result of such a composition of the people (out of small communes), whose economic interests were the same, and precisely because of that they were not common, state power becomes the condition of the nation's existence. The absence of immediate (direct) ties between communes in the ancient East was compensated for by the emergence of state power as a whole-creating entity. But this uniting single entity by necessity turns to despotic rule. The insularity and negligibility of each element of the ancient Asian social edifice, the hostile estrangement of their like interests, and the same level of social relations around the country turn the social power into an omnipotent entity that intrudes into all spheres of physical and spiritual life and the property relations of its citizens.

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