Chapter 5 (Society & Inequality)

Chapter 5: Society and Inequality in Eurasia/North Africa, 500 b.c.e.–500 c.e.

I. Society and the State in China

• Exam system
• Entry into the civil service was based on passing a difficult exam on the Confucian classics
• the exam was open to all males, regardless of social status
• required years of study
• only those with access to enough wealth to spend time studying for the exam would succeed
• system favored the wealthy
• Land as wealth
• Land and agricultural production had been the major source of wealth in China for millennia
• most lands were worked and held by peasant families
• Peasants
• Pressures on peasants
• Rents
• taxes
• military service
• forced labor to the state
• floods and occasional crop failure
• Merchants were barred from certain economic activity by state monopolies or forced to loan money to the state

II. Class and Caste in India

• most Indians saw the caste division of society into four orders as timeless and the natural consequence of the world making up the body of a massive god named Purusha
• occupying the most unclean professions came to be known as “Untouchables.” 11
• Purity, pollution, and privilege
• The system was obsessed with ideas of elite purity and lower caste pollution
• Security and support
• The system provided not only an identity but a mechanism of social support and security for vulnerable or unlucky members of a jati
• Assimilation of new arrivals
• The flexible system allowed for the creation of a new jati for groups that might come into Indian society.
• Exploitation
• This system allowed the wealthy and powerful to rationalize the poorly paid labor of the lower social orders.

III. Slavery: The Case of the Roman Republic

• Slavery and Civilization
• “Social Death”
• Slavery is an age-old institution
• slaves are often described as having a social death as they typically have no rights and are deemed to be permanent outsiders to the society
• Wide diversity of types of slavery
• Throughout the world and throughout human history, there have been numerous forms of slavery, making generalizations difficult.
• Greek slavery
• the rate of slavery was much higher in the Mediterranean world than in India or China
• Slave ownership was widespread in Greece with tens of thousands of slaves living in Athens, the alleged cradle of democracy and individual liberty
• Vast scale of Roman slavery
• Rome also saw massive slave ownership, with the Italian peninsula having a slave population of between 33 and 40 percent
• Roman slavery was often concentrated in the hands of the very wealthy and large landowners who might run estates with hundreds of slave laborers.
• Prisoners, pirates, and orphans:
• War captives made up most slaves, but pirates and even abandoned children could be enslaved
• All levels of the economy:
• With so much cheap labor coming into Rome, slaves could be found in every sector of the economy, from manual labor in the fields to white-collar work in the cities or even in the gladiatorial blood sports of the coliseums

IV. Comparing Patriarchies

•  Yin and Yang:
• The traditional Chinese conception of the world stressed two primary forces
• opposite yet paired
• Confucian teachings:
• Obediences: Confucian teachings were explicitly patriarchal.
• women were taught to obey their fathers, their husbands, and the eldest sons when widowed
• Elite women, mothers and wives, and peasant
• Elite wives could influence their husbands, and concubines could influence their lovers and thus play a role in palace politics
• Mothers had some power within the home due to their age, and wives held more esteem than concubines
• Due to the economic demands of the agricultural lifestyle, peasant women found it very difficult to live up to Confucian ideals as they had to work in the fields alongside men
• Buddhism, Daoism, and pastoral peoples:
• After the collapse of the Han Dynasty, Confucianism was somewhat discredited and people found new ideas in Buddhism, Daoism, and the lifestyles of the pastoral peoples to the west and north.