Globalizing Empires: The Han Dynasty and Imperial Rome

The Han and the Roman states became truly globalizing empires: they covered immense amounts of territory; included huge, diverse populations; and exerted influence far beyond their own frontiers. Their major innovation was not that they found new ways to plow resources into big armies and civil bureaucracies or that their rulers gave new justifications for their rule. Rather, what distinguished the Romans and the Han from their predecessors was their commitment to integrating conquered neighbors and rivals into their worlds—by extending laws, offering systems of representation, exporting belief systems, colonizing lands, and promoting trade within and beyond their empires.

Subject peoples gradually became members of empires, not just the vanquished. Those who resisted not only waved away the benefits of living under imperial rule but also became the targets for military retribution.

Even today, geopolitical boundaries bear remarkable resemblances to those defined by these two empires at their peak. These states transcended the limits of previous territorial kingdoms and empires by deploying resources in new ways. The leaders of each empire laid out the political and cultural boundaries of regions that we now recognize as “China” and “Christendom.”

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A double panel rectangular Han tomb door with carved designs. In the center of each panel there is a circle with two dots above it.

To be “Han Chinese” meant that elites came to share a common written language based on the Confucian classics, which qualified them for public office. It also meant that commoners from all walks of life shared the elites’ belief system, which emphasized appropriate decorum and dress for each social level, the view that the agrarian-based Han Empire was a small-scale model of the entire cosmos, and ritual practices associated with ancestor worship. Consistent with Confucian ideals of the previous centuries, the Han practiced filial piety toward their elders, living and dead; for example, family members honored their ancestors with offerings at their tombs. In addition, the Han considered people who lived beyond Han boundaries uncivilized, even if some were ultimately folded into Han rule. Similarily, to be “Han” was to be strongly identified with the Han imperial state (founded in 206 BCE) and with the culture of its ruling elite—the Han aesthetic and cultural ideals spread only gradually over time to provincial elites.

What it meant to be “Roman” also changed over time as Rome’s imperial reach expanded. In the fifth century BCE, being Roman meant being a citizen of the city of Rome, speaking Latin (a regional language of central Italy), and sharing the culture of other Latin-speaking peoples. Ever important to the Romans was a sense of family, centered on the domus (or home), and an ongoing remembering of their ancestors. While wealthy, elite Romans would commission funerary parades to honor their familial dead, Romans of every social class honored their family’s dead with graveside offerings of garlands and wine-soaked bread, especially during February’s festival of the Parentalia. By the late second century BCE, the concept of Roman citizenship expanded to include not only citizens of the city but also many free persons who had formal membership in the larger territorial state that the Romans were building. By the beginning of the third century CE, being Roman meant being a subject of the Roman emperors. This Roman identity became so deeply rooted that when the western parts of the empire disintegrated two centuries later, the inhabitants of the surviving eastern parts—who had no connection with Rome, did not speak Latin or share many other cultural traits of the “original” Romans—still considered themselves “Romans” in this broader sense.

The two empires differed in their patterns of development, types of public servants, and ideals for the best kind of government. For example, the civilian magistrate and the bureaucrat were typical of the Han Empire, whereas the citizen, the soldier, and the military governor were at the heart of the Roman Empire. In China, dynastic empires fashioned themselves according to the models of past empires. By contrast, Rome began as a collectively ruled city-state and pursued its road to domination according to its own innovative modes. Nonetheless, like the Chinese, Romans were strongly traditional. Both new empires united huge landmasses and extraordinarily diverse populations.

While both China and Rome participated in Silk Road exchange, both economies were primarily agrarian. Yet free peasants worked the land in China, along with some enslaved people, whereas a huge enslaved population worked the fields of the Roman Empire. At its height, the Han Empire included around 59 million inhabitants and covered 3 million square miles in China proper and, for a while, another 1 million square miles in central Asia. Just over a decade after the Han census and far to the west, the emperor Augustus oversaw a census that counted 4,937,000 Roman citizens (free adult men), which likewise amounted to around 60 million people (when women, children, and enslaved people were accounted for). The Roman Empire governed an area nearly as great as that of Han China, especially when counting the almost 1-million-square-mile area of the Mediterranean Sea, which was like a water highway for the lands encircling it. An estimated two out of every three human beings on earth now fell directly under the authority of China or Rome. Their imperial control shaped the destiny and identity of the countless millions living within their respective realms.

Both empires left indelible legacies; following their collapses, both survived as models. Successor states in the Mediterranean sought to become the second Rome, and after the Han dynasty fell, the Chinese people identified themselves and their language simply as “Han.” Both empires raised life to a new level of bureaucratic and military complexity and offered a common identity on a grander scale than ever before. It was an imperial vision that would never be lost.