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The complexity that is being referred to is social and administrative complexity, the huge military upkeep being a side effect of that. A simple policy can sti

The complexity that is being referred to is social and administrative complexity, the huge military upkeep being a side effect of that. A simple policy can still reflect a highly complex, expensive form of social organization. It's rather hard to argue that stationing massive garrisons throughout an empire is not a massive exercise in social complexity and organization. > Diversity isn't exactly complexity. Keeping large groups together is hard, It's difficult to argue that late Imperial Rome, with its multiple levels of bureaucracies, military and civilian, a nascent Church, along with large standing garrisons wasn't far more socially and economically complex than the societies of the invading barbarians. And all that complexity went exactly towards 'keeping large groups together' without the benefit of a unified ethnicity or other identity. But note that in earlier times, Rome's technological and social complexity was able to pay for itself and then some: it was able to field and man large military organizations, and the complexity brought in a profit by conquest and war booty. In other words, size was a logical end result to earlier complexity: in order to keep the system running, Rome had to continue to grow. Unfortunately, Rome ran out of rich easily-conquered lands and its inefficient (and complex) economy could not make the economic transition (unlike the Eastern Empire, which had richer and more densely populated lands). Your example of stationing two-thirds of a massive standing army just to keep order is an example of just how inefficient the late Western Imperial economy must have been, and why it fell against barbarian groups that had much simpler, flatter social hierarchies based on ethnic kinship and trust.

Nomentatus 9y ago
Much conflation of size and complexity, here, once again. And you seem to merely elide my points. The size of the Roman army allowed a remarkable degree of standardization in the tools of war, and training. That's not complexity. Roman society hadn't gotten poorer; but it had gotten less cohesive, fewer were ready to sacrifice for the whole.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  Size automatically required large amounts of social complexity in the days of Rome, especially if you measure complexity in the actual cost it took to hold Rome together. I'll remind you that the contemporaneous Chinese Han dynasty also evolved into a large militarized, centralized bureaucratic state despite the wide differences in geography and developmental path, and faced very similar problems of replacing conscripts with professional soldiers and then keeping them loyal. What forced them to have similar organization was their sheer size and the organizational pressures this caused.
  - Nomentatus 9y ago
    But I started with a profound example of the reverse. Cost is size, not complexity. There were considerable savings due to scale in Rome, including assembly lines for manufacturing amphora, etc. Re China you give another example of size creating simplicity and standardization. In contrast to your first paragraph.
    - smallnamespace 9y ago
      > Cost is size, not complexity. You're narrowly defining 'complexity' as only 'complexity of procedure' and completely ignoring social complexity and specialization. How about you justify why only the single measure of 'complexity' is sufficient for our discussion? A few direct responses to your example: 1. Standardization may save costs overall, but they represent a form of social complexity (you now have specialized bureaucrats and administrators to determine standards and communicate with troops, weapons must move a long way to supply every legion, training is now done in a centralized fashion) 2. This social complexity adds fragility to the system—if your army depends on having standardized gear to function properly, and barbarians capture your centralized workshops, then all of a sudden you lose the ability to equip the troops effectively; barbarians don't have that problem 3. It's not even clear that standardization saves overall costs here; it may save administrative cost at the Imperial level (it's easier to manage and train troops if they are interchangeable) but incur large hidden costs at the local level; in other words standardization may be an externalization of administrative problems onto the provinces. A direct example would be: if you force all the troops to use standard gear, they might fight worse than if they used weapons that were specialized for dealing with local enemies; also now your troops have a huge delay in being equipped from a central armory, and may end up pay out of their own pockets for local wares just to survive. Anyone who has sat through multiple re-orgs at a large corporation will understand that what is 'simple' for the administrator (let's make the org chart simple and clear!) may actually cause tons of hidden additional complexity at the bottom layers, so that total complexity has risen even though things look 'simpler' at one particular level.
      - Nomentatus 9y ago
Nomentatus 9y ago
The Barbarian societies were often more complex, being less well-integrated and uniform than Roman society; Rome was far more interested in integrating conquered populations. Trust didn't work well for the Persians or Mongolians (at the leadership level.) I don't know a society that solved that one from my reading, highly religious and superstitious societies in which the ruling families were Gods, such as the Egyptians came closer to a solution. Simplicity of a kind.

Nomentatus 9y ago

Much conflation of size and complexity, here, once again. And you seem to merely elide my points. The size of the Roman army allowed a remarkable degree of standardization in the tools of war, and training. That's not complexity. Roman society hadn't gotten poorer; but it had gotten less cohesive, fewer were ready to sacrifice for the whole.

smallnamespace 9y ago
Size automatically required large amounts of social complexity in the days of Rome, especially if you measure complexity in the actual cost it took to hold Rome together. I'll remind you that the contemporaneous Chinese Han dynasty also evolved into a large militarized, centralized bureaucratic state despite the wide differences in geography and developmental path, and faced very similar problems of replacing conscripts with professional soldiers and then keeping them loyal. What forced them to have similar organization was their sheer size and the organizational pressures this caused.
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  But I started with a profound example of the reverse. Cost is size, not complexity. There were considerable savings due to scale in Rome, including assembly lines for manufacturing amphora, etc. Re China you give another example of size creating simplicity and standardization. In contrast to your first paragraph.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago
    > Cost is size, not complexity. You're narrowly defining 'complexity' as only 'complexity of procedure' and completely ignoring social complexity and specialization. How about you justify why only the single measure of 'complexity' is sufficient for our discussion? A few direct responses to your example: 1. Standardization may save costs overall, but they represent a form of social complexity (you now have specialized bureaucrats and administrators to determine standards and communicate with troops, weapons must move a long way to supply every legion, training is now done in a centralized fashion) 2. This social complexity adds fragility to the system—if your army depends on having standardized gear to function properly, and barbarians capture your centralized workshops, then all of a sudden you lose the ability to equip the troops effectively; barbarians don't have that problem 3. It's not even clear that standardization saves overall costs here; it may save administrative cost at the Imperial level (it's easier to manage and train troops if they are interchangeable) but incur large hidden costs at the local level; in other words standardization may be an externalization of administrative problems onto the provinces. A direct example would be: if you force all the troops to use standard gear, they might fight worse than if they used weapons that were specialized for dealing with local enemies; also now your troops have a huge delay in being equipped from a central armory, and may end up pay out of their own pockets for local wares just to survive. Anyone who has sat through multiple re-orgs at a large corporation will understand that what is 'simple' for the administrator (let's make the org chart simple and clear!) may actually cause tons of hidden additional complexity at the bottom layers, so that total complexity has risen even though things look 'simpler' at one particular level.
    - Nomentatus 9y ago

Nomentatus 9y ago

The Barbarian societies were often more complex, being less well-integrated and uniform than Roman society; Rome was far more interested in integrating conquered populations. Trust didn't work well for the Persians or Mongolians (at the leadership level.) I don't know a society that solved that one from my reading, highly religious and superstitious societies in which the ruling families were Gods, such as the Egyptians came closer to a solution. Simplicity of a kind.