Twelve Thousand Years

TWELVE THOUSAND YEARS

We started the discussion of the state with the example of Switzerland. Now let us go a little bit farther east.

The northern Levant, roughly today’s northern part of Syria and Lebanon, stayed perhaps the most prosperous province in the history of mankind, over the long, very long stretch of time from the pre-pottery Neolithic until very modern history, the middle of the twentieth century. That’s twelve thousand years—compared to, say, England, which has been prosperous for about five hundred years, or Scandinavia, now only prosperous for less than three hundred years. Few areas on the planet have managed to thrive with so much continuity over any protracted stretch of time, what historians call longue durée. Other cities came and went; Aleppo, Emesa (today Homs), and Laodicea (Lattakia) stayed relatively affluent.

The northern Levant was since ancient times dominated by traders, largely owing to its position as a central spot on the Silk Road, and by agricultural lords, as the province supplied wheat to much of the Mediterranean world, particularly Rome. The area supplied a few Roman emperors, a few Catholic popes before the schisms, and more than thirty Greek language writers and philosophers (which includes many of the heads of Plato’s academy), in addition to the ancestors of the American visionary and computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs, who brought us the Apple computer, on one of which I am recopying these lines (and the iPad tablet, on which you may be reading them). We know of the autonomy of the province from the records during Roman days, as it was then managed by the local elites, a decentralized method of ruling through locals that the Ottoman retained. Cities minted their own coins.

Then two events took place. First, after the Great War, one part of the northern Levant was integrated into the newly created nation of Syria, separated from its other section, now part of Lebanon. The entire area had been until then part of the Ottoman Empire, but functioned as somewhat autonomous regions—Ottomans, like the Romans before them, let local elites run the place so long as sufficient tax was paid, while they focused on their business of war. The Ottoman type of imperial peace, the pax Ottomana, like its predecessor the pax Romana, was good for commerce. Contracts were enforced, and that is what governments are needed for the most. In the recent nostalgic book Levant, Philip Mansel documents how the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean operated as city-states separated from the hinterland.

Then, a few decades into the life of Syria, the modernist Baath Party came to further enforce utopias. As soon as the Baathists centralized the place and enforced their statist laws, Aleppo and Emesa went into instant decline.

What the Baath Party did, in its “modernization” program, was to remove the archaic mess of the souks and replace them with the crisp modernism of the office building.

The effect was immediately visible: overnight the trading families moved to places such as New York and New Jersey (for the Jews), California (for the Armenians), and Beirut (for the Christians). Beirut offered a commerce-friendly atmosphere, and Lebanon was a benign, smaller, disorganized state without any real central government. Lebanon was small enough to be a municipality on its own: it was smaller than a medium-size metropolitan area.