The hypernetwork structure and resilience: the European example

The robustness of regime dynamics resides in the structure of the hypernetwork—in the patterns of connectivity among the hubs of the system—rather than from a simple aggregation of agent-level equilibria (Johnson, Reference Johnson2013). As we will see, there were advantages and disadvantages in the network designs of China and Europe, as illustrated in their sociocultural evolution over many centuries. Europe's state resilience lay in the connected dynasties ruling across the continental ‛fabric’. The aggregate hypernetwork structure that those dynasties formed kept Europe from transitioning into instability when abrupt shocks disabled a particular royal lineage. Even if a royal house fell, the remaining hubs would self-organize by ‛rerouting the traffic’ on the network. Thus, for example, the Royal House of Plantagenet, the Royal Houses of Tudor and Stuart, and the House of Hapsburg all became extinct, but dynastic rule persisted. Understanding this ability to reconfigure without system-level breakdown is essential for explaining the dynamics of Europe's long-term development trajectory.

Europe's cultural continuity thus resides in its small-world network connectivity, a hierarchy of many small nodes held together by a few larger hubs that are themselves connected to a small number of yet larger hubs. In such networks, if one hub is destroyed, the remaining nodes diffuse and reconnect to a neighbor. Links to a few highly connected hubs prevent the smaller nodes from falling into isolation. Thus, the behavior of the system, even under extreme stress, is not entirely random, lending resilience to the system as a whole.

Like the CEOs of large corporations, Europe's royal families bridged the various subunits to unify the many discrete functionalities. This network structure of decentralized yet interconnected hubs enabled Europe to adapt to a changing environment, survive disruptive events, and accommodate evolutionary changes across local systems.

Europe had experienced its first catastrophic breakdown after the highly centralized Roman Imperium broke apart in the 5th century. The end of the imperial system led to the evolution of a new form of government across the continent. Based on feudalism, it eventually gave rise to the consolidation of states into disparate sovereign units. No center remained; instead, the continent's dynamism shifted from one region to another. Regimes came and went, and advantage shifted from one royal house to another, without any one hub strong enough to secure a monopoly on victory. A shift of power from one dynastic lineage to another did not entail catastrophic, continent-wide demographic outcomes.

This kind of scale-free structure protected the system from random failure, and because the ecology they inhabited survived, Europe's interconnected monarchies remained intact as a governing class, exhibiting both continuity and change over a millennium. This small-world network of princely and royal houses governed continuously—and the hypernetwork generated by this system of dynastic succession maintained its stationarity, despite a wide spectrum of observed micro-equilibria at agent levels, where profound variations in outlook existed, technologies changed, and formal institutions came and went. An innovation by one dynasty was parried by a counterthrust from another. Although intermarried, the Hapsburgs, Bourbons, and Hohenzollerns continually competed to contain each other's ambitions. The smaller networks created by each hub were not necessarily highly stable, but the small-world network of the great families outlived these variations.

Moreover, what this kind of hypernetwork loses in stability, it gains in resilience, the capacity to accommodate and absorb great intermittent stresses. With its distributed, mesh-like ‛architecture’, enough redundancy exists to enable communication between remaining hubs, so that actions and ideas can spread ‛horizontally’. Thus, even when intermittent and episodic transformations occur at the agent level, the macro-stability of the system is not disabled.

The composite and timeless representation of European dynastic marriages (see Figure 1) from the 14th to the 20th centuries helps explain why describing Europe solely in terms of decentralization gives short shrift to the patterns of hub-based communication that enable lateral communication across the network. The diagram depicts the organization of European dynastic marriages from the 12th to the 20th centuries as a scale-free network, in which a few highly connected hubs connect the smaller nodes with one another. With every node linked to every other through a hub, connectivity (and redundancy) expands explosively. For the system to collapse, all the central hubs must be destroyed, otherwise the traffic will reroute among the surviving hubs.

Figure 1.

The European network of dynastic marriages.

Source: DBpedia, using Gephi software (Comer and Palmer, 2012). Note: The timeless, scale-free character of the network shows 3,972 dynastic marriages beginning in the 12th century. The dynasties include royalty, as well as nobility, popes, bishops, and electors. Bishops and popes are expected to be celibate, but some had children for the express purpose of establishing alliances, and these are included. Node size is based on connectivity, determined by centrality and ‛betweenness’. For an overview of these measures, a good source is Wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality. Neither time nor nationality is taken into account. The diagram depicts the underlying graph structure of the network.

The hypernetwork structure and stability: the Chinese example

China's regime structure, with an emperor at the center of a hub-and-spoke structure of governance, produced a hypernetwork of a different kind; its strength resided in the great efficiency with which information circulated from one end of a far-flung empire to another. However, the hypernetwork structure also made the state more vulnerable to massive shocks. In times of great disruption, only the links that were connected with other links could hold the empire together, and China had a few of these.

Dynastic collapse had extensive social and economic consequences, and the rebuilding process was exhaustive. Nevertheless, the institutions of China's dynastic system invariably reappeared. In this sense, the Chinese dynastic system exhibited stability rather than resilience. (Resilience depends on the redundancy of hubs, and China had just one central hub.) Yuri Pines explains that ‛the peculiar historical trajectory of the Chinese empire is not its indestructability—it witnessed several spectacular collapses—but rather its repeated resurrection in more or less the same territory, and with a functional structure similar to that of the pre-turmoil period’ (Pines, Reference Pines2012: 3).

Ecologists Holling and Gunderson (Reference Holling and Gunderson2002: 25–62) establish a significant distinction between resilience and stability with applications to the institutional dynamics of complex systems. ‛Resilience determines the persistence of relationships within a system’, writes Holling, ‛and is a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes in state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist’ (Holling, Reference Holling1973: 17). In this sense, the hypernetwork resilience is a gauge of the maximum perturbation that a regime can withstand, and its capacity, afterward, to make adaptations that foster the next wave of transition. ‛Stability, on the other hand, notes Holling, is the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium state after a temporary disturbance' (Holling, Reference Holling1973: 17).Footnote ⁹

The definition of resilience in common use by ecologists and others who study complex adaptive systems applies here. Resilience is the ability of the macro-system to absorb subsystem disturbances occurring, while retaining its own system of rules and procedures. However, resilience at the hypernetwork level also shapes the capacity of the micro-system, the regime. This stability made China similar to Europe at macro-levels—but even at the micro-levels, China experienced far less variation. What made the European system more resilient was that its hypernetwork survived dramatic local transitions intact.

Resilience and stability trade-offs in China and Europe

There were trade-offs between stability and resilience in both Europe's and China's hypernetworks. As noted previously, in the case of Europe, one such trade-off was redundancy, found both in the replication of communication channels among the multitudes of political jurisdictions, and in considerable institutional replication. The resilience of the state system generally resided in the adaptive capacity of its distributed network structure to survive drastic events. Yet, in a paradox of small-world network structure, Europe proved to be both highly unstable and highly resilient.Footnote ¹⁰ This is because a decentralized network comprising many dense connections is difficult to manage, and thus may be prone to disruptive large events that could eliminate one or more hubs.

By contrast, China's hub-and-spoke system of rule exhibited great efficiency in maintaining communication and continuity among the government structures of a far-flung empire, which helps explain the recurrence of this system of rule by each successive dynasty. A study of social networks by Burt (Reference Burt1992) explains how centralized (hub-and-spoke) networks outperform decentralized networks. They support effective decision making, Burt argues, by strengthening the leadership's decision-making capacities. They provide greater opportunities for information access, timing, and monitoring, making management less costly in terms of energy, time, and resources.

In China, the hub-and-spoke system reduced the amount of time that information had to travel from the center to the provinces and back again. Fewer redundant contacts increased the efficient flow of information to the center and required less effort to maintain clusters of influence. Instead of maintaining relations with the entire network of spoke contacts, the central decision-maker could preserve resources to reward the primary contacts delegated to the task of maintaining the total network, and could utilize the conserved resources to expand the network to include new clusters of influence.

Whatever trade-offs arose between the properties of stability and resilience in Europe's and China's respective hypernetworks, they were ultimately made according to widely different adaptive values, i.e., according to the properties that most ensured the hypernetwork's perpetuation. Thus, redundancies in the European's scale-free network system absorbed considerable scarce resources but lent resilience. China utilized a far more efficient system of communication, but with the attendant risks of a central hub and its reliance on imperial bureaucracy.

In China, the dynasties themselves lasted generations, if not centuries. Yet should the throne fail, the ‛transitions’ were not peaceful. The disrupted communication channels would render the entire polity more susceptible to collapse; the remaining nodes, much like isolated islands, were unable to communicate. This made imperial China vulnerable to intervals of extreme disorder since subsidiary systems of governance had to be rebuilt and replaced.

Each dynasty's collapse disabled the center. Rebellion from within and invasion from without produced cycles of decay of long duration, in which the institutions of central rule retreated or disappeared entirely. During these transitions, the underlying economic and social situations of the population suffered on a massive scale. Nearly a century of intense warfare accompanied the transition from the Yuan to Ming dynasties (1350−1450). The fall of the Ming to the Qing dynasty spanned the period 1550−1683, with warfare continuing into the early 18th century.

Europe as a small-world network

The industrialization of Great Britain exemplifies the remarkable small-world continuity, balancing aristocratic entitlements with the ambitions of the rising industrial elites. Even after systems of production were transformed, no such equally dramatic events or clearly decisive changes to the social structure of authority occurred (Southern, Reference Southern1953: 13). ‛[T]he aristocracy successfully maintained its power during all the vicissitudes of three-quarters of a millennium’, notes historian Jack Hexter, ‛during which almost everything else changed, quite drastically’ (Hexter, Reference Hexter1961: 19). The knightly aristocracy, along with the monarchy, surrendered its primacy in Britain's social ordering only after World War II (Cannadine, Reference Cannadine1999).

The evolution of royal families fanning out across Europe allowed for multiple connections among regions and systems, and serves as a prime example of hypernetwork activity. When World War I broke out in 1914, monarchs ruled most European states, and almost all the royals were related to one another in a kind of small-world network; Queen Victoria's direct descendants sat on the thrones of Britain, Denmark, Greece, Germany, Norway, Russia, and Spain, earning her the sobriquet ‛Grandmother of Europe’. The social and economic effects of industrialization did not deter the crowned heads of Europe from consolidating their national powers and alliances.Footnote ¹¹

Of the major European nations, only France and Switzerland were outliers. Switzerland did not fight in World War I, and France entered the war as a republic. ‛Except in France the kings remained the divinely ordained ‘centerpieces’ of Europe's authority systems’, writes historian Arno Mayer in his magisterial study of the end of the old order in Europe (Mayer, Reference Mayer1981: 11). He notes that ‛[e]ven in France, where the ancient regime was pronounced legally dead between 1789 and 1793, it kept resurfacing violently and lived on in many ways for more than a century’ (Mayer, Reference Mayer1981: 6). Four failed efforts to restore monarchical government occurred during the 19th century, and royalist sympathizers in France were abetted by supporters across the continent.

The collection of royal dynasties, spread out across Europe as a hypernetwork, shaped the territorial evolution of European states and gave order into the whole system. Describing the system as decentralized without considering the patterns of communication among the nodes of various sizes illuminates an incomplete framework. Yet most scholarship of European state building maintains primarily a national level, emphasizing competitive state-level fragmentation rather than a system-level focus.

Intermarriages among noble houses

It is remarkable that during the late medieval period, circa 1500, Europe contained more than 500 distinct dominions—sovereign or quasi-sovereign jurisdictions that were largely independent political units. Yet, no matter how fragmented feudal Europe was to become, no town or village could ever legally claim to be the subject of more than one kingdom. A testimony to the strength of the monarchical tradition is that although many independent powers arose, only to fall into decay, even at the peak of power, none ever dared to claim a royal title or to deny the bonds of fealty to a king. Despite the intensive selective pressures on European societies to compete by constantly updating their political, economic, and. military structures, at no time until Napoleon did a usurper ever claim the status of royalty. Marc Bloch underscores ‛no great feudatory, however powerful he might be, ever dared to demand the most sacred part of the ceremony of being the ‘lords anointed’, a status found only among kings and priests’ (Bloch, Reference Bloch2014: 400). The belief in the hereditary vocation of a dynasty over an individual prevailed, ensuring that when a king died, the kingdom remained.

The 8th-century Germanic kingdoms laid the basis of Western Europe's political evolution, which would establish the borders of both medieval and modern Europe.Footnote ¹² Bloch notes, ‛thus the feudal era witnessed the emergence of the first lineaments of a political map of Europe. . . . [It] also saw debated those problems of frontier zones which were destined till our own day to be responsible for the spilling of both ink and blood. . . . [T]the most characteristic feature of this geography of kingdoms was that though their territorial limits were so fluctuating, their number varied remarkably little’ (Bloch, Reference Bloch2014: 399).

This phenomenon found among the crowned heads of Europe—in which every royal house was connected in some way, if only remotely, to every other—is not merely a curiosity in the history of the continent. Via their elaborate protocols of intermarriage, the small-world hypernetwork that developed formed a strategic ecology and it lent stability to society, enabling state formation (Bloch, Reference Bloch2014: 155).

Over time, and in large measure due to the effort of the Church and its support of the combined practice of primogeniture and female inheritance, the various political entities and principalities were concentrated into the hands of a few royal families. The logic of dynastic succession was the primary driver of the territorial consolidation of these fragmented units. War was an instrument used to accelerate or decelerate the progress, but the big gains, such as the unification of France and Spain, were achieved through the logic of dynastic accumulation.Footnote ¹³ The Germanic territories of the Holy Roman Empire adopted primogeniture later in the 18th century, and this was the reason they suffered continual fragmentation. Contrary to the often-repeated remark of sociologist Charles Tilly that ‛war made states and states made war’, the major states of Europe were born of dynastic accumulation. The map of modern Europe is roughly the product of dynastic marriage (Brenner et al., Reference Brenner, Jessop, Jones and Macleod2003).Footnote ¹⁴

The legal framework of dynastic marriage was established with the blending of property rights and political power. The same laws, norms, and customs that governed the transmission of landed property also held and transmitted political power. This intertwining of public authority and property allowed for the orderly transmission of the office of the head of state from one generation to the next. Most important, these laws, behaviors, and customs transcended regional, sectarian, and political boundaries. They were prevalent throughout the European continent, extending from Britain to Russia.

The papacy played a central role in the cultural and ideological cohesion of Europe. In one sense, the hypernetwork formation of the papacy is much like the structure of imperial China, being the central hub of a hub-and-spoke system that controlled much of the political competition in Europe, including control of dynastic marriages. It held the essential power to anoint and therefore legitimize secular power, but it did not exercise that power in its own name. Nor did it control civil administration. The Chinese emperor played both roles; thus, as concentrator of authority, the Chinese throne far exceeded the power of the pope.

The Church hierarchy is best understood as a parallel hypernetwork within the larger European ecology. The Church's independent stature ensured that the right to justice became part of the value system of Western Europe, for the Church insisted that no king could deny the right to justice of even the humblest servant.

Neither Norbert Elias and nor Sharma use the term hypernetwork, but both nonetheless emphasize how royal marriages were the pivot upon which the European system of international relations rotated, and that ‛each shift of power directly or indirectly involved every unit, every country’ (Elias, Reference Elias1983: 300). The higher-degree linkages and rivalries between royal houses propelled the formation and inter-relations among states—and the ‛institution of dynastic succession, driven by the contingency of birth, marriage, and death in the leading princely families of Europe, determined the distribution of power in Europe’ (Sharma, Reference Sharma2015: 169). Intermarriage was the prevailing means to secure, maintain, and extend power among reigning families from the medieval era until the outbreak of World War I.

European persistence: the paradox of maladaptive institutional resilience

Dynastic succession is not a hypernetwork. It is an institution through which the hypernetwork of royal families perpetuated itself. The network of royal houses can be interpreted along three dimensions: first, a rule-based dimension (or house rules), albeit more customary than formal, which describes how dynastic property is to be transferred; second, an equilibria dimension, of strategic games created with self-reinforcing behavior; and third, a system of symbolic representation in which status is itself an institution, regulated by society's symbolic order.

Stable systems can generate unintended long-term consequences—feedback loops and path dependencies are often overlooked—but the resilience of a system can also be maladaptive. For example, although dynastic succession facilitated the territorial and administrative consolidation of continental Europe, it also incited continuous warfare.

‛Consider the consequences if a system were highly resilient’, note Holling and Gunderson (Reference Holling and Gunderson2002). ‛Is that entirely a desired condition?’ Remember, resilience in complex adaptive systems is the capacity to absorb and recover from perturbation; in the face of large disturbances, variables would shift and move, but the system would maintain its control and structures. In the case of Europe, the resilience of the monarchy as the source of political authority on the eve of the Great War jarred with the structure of a society changed by a century of increased regional and global industrialization and capitalism. The efforts to preserve dynastic lordship at the opening of the 20th century exemplify how the resilience of a particular social order can prevail without possessing a welfare-enhancing property.

The European ruling elite and the status-bestowing function of militarism

When war broke out between Germany and Britain in 1914, Germany's Kaiser and Great Britain's King were not merely cousins, they were first cousins. Considering these shared genealogical connections among the princely dynasties of Europe, why was war unavoidable?

Although not the primary instrument toward territorial consolidation, war defined rank, title, and status, making prowess a foundation of legitimacy and stability. The military role of Europe's royal elite had a constitutive character, with its own rules and protocol. Prowess in the conduct of warfare assigned status, as well as functionality, to the traditional society of orders, with the monarchy's symbolic power as the source of justice and leader of the army. Thus, Josef Schumpeter in Imperialism and Capitalism explains that a perennial belligerence was instinctive for the monarchy. Imperialism developed on the continent because its heritage included a ‛war machine, together with its socio-psychological aura and aggressive bent, and because a class oriented toward war maintained itself in a ruling position’ (Schumpeter, Reference Schumpeter and Sweezy1951: 129).

In Schumpeter's contextually rich understanding of European militarism, war and imperialism are embedded in the European state system because the legacy of prowess in warfare was how Europe's crowned cousins exerted their superiority over lineages of common stock and justified the honors of their office. Even when at war, they followed codes of honor to respect the esteem of their office, avoided taking each other hostage, and did not impose changes or dictate the internal institutional structures of a defeated rival.

Schumpeter's observations echo those of US President Woodrow Wilson, who posited the same explanation for the Europeans’ perpetual tendency to be at war with each other and who further believed that this propensity would not end until the ‛pretensions’ of the elite genealogies that sustained it were ‛checked and nullified’ (Wilson, Reference Wilson1917).

Mayer, an admirer of Schumpeter, interprets the events leading up to World War I as efforts by European royalty to preempt their loss of status (Mayer, Reference Mayer1981). A militarist revival was under way, in which the Kaiser, the Austrian Hapsburgs, and Russia's Romanovs sought to form alliances to restore the Church and the army as the bastions of social order. The great families of Europe, Mayer speculates, feared class mobilization more than war; the latter, they imagined, would restore the natural hierarchy of society to their favor. At the risk of shedding a few royal thrones, the crowned heads of Europe envisioned a revival of the primordial values of the Old Regime and a remobilization of its civil and political institutions.Footnote ¹⁵

Europe's old regime in the context of the changed international system

To explain the origin of the Great War, historians weigh the domestic issues of militarism and nationalism against external pressures, i.e., the system of alliances, war plans, the accumulation of crises prior to 1914. But to explain why a small perturbation like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, would have been enough to push the entire state system into a crisis, we do not need the deep, context-rich knowledge Meyer and Schumpeter bring to the subject.

If one considers only the way the European hypernetwork was structured, it is possible to construct a plausible explanation without a detailed understanding of the history. Network theory tells us that in a highly interconnected network of interrelated royal families, a small, localized event can trigger a cascade of military responses that sweep across national boundaries. In highly connected networks, what happens to some well-selected nodes can set off a wave of interactive responses.

Yet being prone to contagion does not explain why a small perturbation could have caused the sudden demise of the entire system. Another factor becomes paramount: The structure of the hypernetwork was transformed.

The peace repositioned the United States, transforming it into a principal hub of the system. From having been a peripheral player, the United States sought to redesign the system around a new strategy for global order premised on its preference for democratic universalism. America's role in peace transformed the landscape for those surviving royal houses because US foreign policy leaders challenged the constitutive and symbolic order of European society that supported militancy and imperialism.

Wilson was not content with merely redistributing the spoils of victory among the surviving lineages; he persuaded the allies to refuse to negotiate with any German government that had ties to the monarchy or the army.Footnote ¹⁶ He insisted that new nations, carved out of the fallen empires of Turkey, Germany, Austria–Hungary, and Russia, were to be representative democracies. This demand to reframe the basis of regime legitimacy clashed with Westphalian ideals that recognized the primacy of sovereignty. The peace redefined the basis of regime legitimacy in terms of the universality of democratic values and aspirations.

The subsequent congressional failure to ratify the League of Nations treaty and the country's retreat into isolationism contributed to the inability to institutionalize the Wilsonian ideal of a liberal world order. Instead of strengthening international law and organization under the auspices of liberal institutions, the victors at the Paris Peace Conference had self-interests that had less to do with Wilsonian ideals than with ensuring their own interests. With the unilateral abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany's hub of social organization gone, and a decapitated German nation descended into lawlessness that spread across Europe. Another world war ensued before Europe's full integration into the liberal world order.

One might debate Wilson's role, but this essay is not the place. The key insight from the persistence of Europe's royal Old Regime elites and values before World War I, and their sudden disappearance after the war, is that national institutions and elite social behaviors are embedded in a much larger environment and do not exist in isolation from it.

As noted, when the 20th century began, only France and Switzerland, and the short-lived San Marco, were republics. Yet within a single generation, in both China and Europe, dynastic succession ceased to be the institution underpinning the orderly transmission of power. By the end of World War II, the surviving royal houses of Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom were vestiges of their former selves. In China, the postwar restoration of central power spanned several decades, during which its people experienced warlords, a nationalist revolution, and eight years of Japanese invasion, followed by four years of civil war.

Despite their important respective strengths and vulnerabilities, the demise and re-formation of the hypernetwork of both systems in the early 20th century came from changes in the structure of the global network caused by the changing relationships among the principal hubs that created new sets of interconnections within the international system.

China as a hub-and-spoke network

The longevity of China's dynasties is one of the wonders of history. So too is the continuity of Chinese culture. The continuous feedback between culture and institutional structure is the subject of a sophisticated literature that combines the insights of sociologists, economists, and historians. Insights from network theory allow us to explore new possibilities for understanding this puzzle.

China, like Europe, entered the 20th century with its ancient protocols of dynastic succession the pivot of social order; but the administrative continuum that carried China through the centuries was a structural apex, with a single dynasty at the top, supported by an imperial bureaucracy as the mechanism of coordination and national integration. The combination of a meritocratic officialdom and a standing army under civil authority, writes Sidney Finer in The History of Government, distinguishes China's palace-style governance from that of other empires in recorded history (Finer, Reference Finer1999: 756).

The Roman imperial traditions were never to be reconstituted in Europe, but in China, the Han dynasty (206 BC−221 AD) became the prototype of all subsequent regimes. The Han dynasty introduced an imperial university for official appointees in 124 BC; by 1 AD, official scholars began to administer examinations for entrants to government service, and justice was vested in organs of the central administration rather than local judiciaries. After 350 years of division and disorder that followed the Han dynasty's collapse, the Tang dynasty (618–907) reconstituted what the Han had initiated, strengthening many of the characteristic institutions, notably the central officialdom that enabled the subordination of the military to civil leadership. The civil service system attained its pinnacle under the Sung dynasty (979–1279), which perfected the examination system developed during the Tang. As a further refinement of rule by officialdom, the Sung prohibited relatives of officials to conduct business with one another, and relatives of the empress or other imperial consorts were barred from becoming high-ranking officials.

The protocols of dynastic succession also took definitive form during Sung rule and persisted until the downfall of the imperial system in 1912.Footnote ¹⁷ In earlier periods, usurpation of the throne by generals, empresses, and even civil officials was common, but as Reischauer and Fairbank (Reference Reischauer and Fairbank1958) note, never again after 960, when the Sung instituted the system of dynastic succession.Footnote ¹⁸ Dynasties might fall by invasion, and members of the royal family could murder each other, but a ‛non-royal’ usurper could never again could capture the imperial throne.

In China, the hub-and-spoke system, with its reliance on imperial bureaucracy, continued to reappear. Even after prolonged and violent transitions, each successive dynasty rediscovered in the Confucian officialdom a means to integrate the bureaucracy and restore stability, establish the homogeneity of values, and ensure that officialdom, not privately accumulated wealth or military prowess, was the channel for social mobility. Ruling dynasties that failed to adopt it, such as the Mongol-led Yuan (1271−1368), which deviated toward a more explicitly tribal order, were relatively short-lived. The Ming (1368−1662) and the Qing (1662−1911) dynasties reverted to and strengthened officialdom.

China's cycles of decay and renewal

Chinese history is often told as a sequence of dynastic cycles of decay and renewal. Popular accounts carry a moral lesson: Successive dynasties rose from the ashes of their predecessors to attain peaks of cultural and engineering excellence, followed by corruption, factional quarrels, blind ambition, and moral decay that caused them to lose the Mandate of Heaven. A period of disorder results, and the Mandate of Heaven descends to a new dynasty.

More sophisticated accounts of Chinese history do not reject the idea of dynastic cyclicality but add an assessment of attendant economic and administrative failings. Reischauer and Fairbank (Reference Reischauer and Fairbank1958: 117–118) explain that at the upper bounds, where affluent central governments engaged in costly projects—palaces, roads, canals, and walls—the nobility and bureaucracy prospered and grew in numbers. Defending the larger empire also became costlier. The peasant farmers supported elites who paid a few taxes, causing expenditures to increase against declining revenues.

Revenue from the land tax, the chief source of government revenue, became progressively smaller over time as land was increasingly shielded from taxation by various means of falsification (Fairbank, Reference Fairbank1948: 96). The peasants were left to bear a heavier burden triggering endemic revolts often led by fanatical religious leadership; lower-level resistance multiplied, despite efforts from the center at repression. Eventually, frontier defenses crumbled, armies defected, and the center weakened and collapsed.

The disorder that resulted from each breakdown set the empire back to a prior level of social complexity. Finer describes how the demise of the Han dynasty in 220 ushered in 350 years of disunion. Order was reconstituted by the Tang dynasty, which itself lasted some 300 years (618−907), only to collapse like the Han dynasty (Finer, Reference Finer1999: 744).

Like many scholars of Chinese history, Finer observes that ‛the collapse of each of the great imperial structures ushered in similar dismal periods of disunion, carnage, warlordism, and court dissension, followed by the predictable barbarian invasion and conquest’ (744). The violence of the Ming dynastic transition spanned a century (1350–1450). The chaos caused by the Manchu conquest and defeat of the Ming that erupted in 1610 continued until 1683 and cost an estimated eighty million deaths. The wars associated with dynastic succession were of a length and intensity that had no parallel in the dynastic wars in Europe.

China's dynastic transitions can be observed in its nationwide demographic patterns, which follow political variability. Population numbers blossomed during the Sung dynasty (979–1279), only to decline dramatically to about half of its peak during the Sung collapse and Mongol conquest. The numbers did not recover during the Yuan (1271–1368), which coincided with the Black Death. Population numbers reached a new peak during the Ming period, increasing threefold over the 1291 level. Again, a drastic decline occurred when the Ming collapsed and the violent Qing conquest overtook it.

Xu et al. conclude that Western European population patterns are more consistent, that ‛we see a much more gradual growth, only once interrupted between 1300 and 1400—by the Black Death. . . . Steep declines in Chinese population levels are linked to transitions from one dynasty to another. . . . Comparable declines in European populations did occur—during the Thirty Years War (1618−1648), for example, large parts of Germany and Poland were depopulated—but on a much more limited scale, due to the smaller size of European political entities. . . . In China warfare was . . . linked to changes in dynasties, but it seems to have had much greater consequences for the demographic development of the region’ (Xu et al., Reference Xu, van Leeuwen and van Zanden2015: 6). Although Europe's population trends exhibit primarily ecological or biological Malthusian dynamics—rather than political dynamics as in China—its economic and social development was able to travel further from its starting point than did China's.

Stability and replication of dynastic China

Identification of the properties that reside in the hypernetwork—and of the trade-offs between stability and resilience—can help to describe one the peculiarities of the trajectory of Chinese history: the entire hub-and-spoke system of governance was ‛resurrected in more or less the same territory and with a functional structure similar to that of the preturmoil period’ (Pines, Reference Pines2012: 3). Institutional replication occurred even when the new dynasty was a led by a foreigner.

Why was there such persistent reversion to the same system, with its authoritative bureaucracy, articulated social hierarchy, and an uninterrupted educational curriculum, despite, as Pines (Reference Pines2012: 2) writes, the ‛tremendous changes in demography and topography, in ethnic composition of the ruling elites and socioeconomic structure, in religion and means of artistic expressions’? China scholars offer many answers. A widely accepted explanation places the question in its sociological context and emphasizes the emperor's need to weaken clan loyalties; the essential role of officialdom established governance via an impersonal institutional form. The exam system that permitted entry into mandarinate inculcated loyalty to the prince as supreme within the state. A meritocracy was more likely be loyal than were the landed gentry.

A centralized officialdom also enabled the emperors to maintain, provision, and conscript a standing professional army. Rather than depend on a nobility with an independent landed base in the form of fiefs (as was the case in Europe), the Chinese emperor, through his government, used conscription as the predominate means of recruitment. This further established the supremacy of the emperor, diverting local loyalty from local clans to the state.

The endurance of Chinese culture (in its broadest definition) and the limited value it allocates toward defending political freedom are puzzles that continue to intrigue China scholars. Is the tenacity of Chinese culture what predisposed generations of Chinese to restore the imperial order with similar governing structures? China's cultural and linguistic continuity survived invasions, such as the Mongols and the Manchus. Did this endurance makes the imperial order seem to be the ‛normal and normative way of sociopolitical conduct’, as Pines argues (Reference Pines2012: 3)? Does political culture have a self-organizing capacity? If so, what are the mechanisms of its persistence? Which comes first, culture or political institutions?

The concept of path dependency offers a way to answer this question and to think about the seemingly irreversible Chinese cultural forbearance of authoritarian rule. In complex systems, initial conditions matter. Once a network succumbs to a common state of dependence on a central authority, no successor form of that network will develop the capacity to administer itself. Once the component parts grow sufficiently isolated through estrangement from one another, they lose the capacity to act in concert—until a unifying agent steps in. Thus, De Tocqueville in the Old Regime and the Revolution concludes that it is ‛far easier to estrange than to reunite a social order reduced to the status of isolated units’ (De Tocqueville, Reference De Tocqueville and Gilbert1955: 97–107).

This assessment of network dynamics makes it possible to go further than traditional perspectives and to advance the claim that Europe's network design made it far more capable of emergent complex behavior than China's. Even in the absence of a central or exogenous coordinator or control agent, Europe could undertake ambitious leaps in the development of new social structures and activities. Due to mesh-like network structure of the system, interactions among nearest neighbors could extend across the shared connectors and the wider system. Thus, all members of the system could influence one another without having to share information passed through a single unifying center.

The ease of organizing lateral communication may have been a long-term contributor to Europe's economic take-off. Co-evolutionary change that produced the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution could start in one part of Europe and attain continent-wide significance. Such events altered the traffic flow, eliminating some nodes while adding others; nevertheless, the surviving hubs could self-organize and reconstruct the system. The greater resilience of Europe's hypernetwork enabled local institutions of governance, of technology diffusion, and ideological adaptation to evolve far beyond their starting points. This is the conclusion that network theory permits us to draw for the Great Divergence.Footnote ¹⁹