Oriental Despotism 179Roads were a serious concern of India’s vigorous Maurya kings.^73 A ‘royal road’
of 10,000 stadia, which is said to have led from the capital to the north-western bor-
der, had a system of marking distances which, in a modified form, was again employed
by the Mogul emperors.^74 In Southern India, where Hindu civilization was perpetu-
ated for centuries after the north had been conquered, government-made roads are
mentioned in the inscriptions; and ‘some of them are called king’s highways’.^75 The
Muslim rulers of India continued the Indian rather than the West Asian pattern in
their effort to maintain a network of state roads.^76 Sher Shāh (d. 1545) built four
great roads, one of which ran from Bengal to Agra, Delhi and Lahore.^77 Akbar is said
to have been inspired by Sher Shāh when he built a new ‘king’s highway’, called the
Long Walk, which for 400 miles was ‘shaded by great trees on both sides’.^78
In China, a gigantic network of highways was constructed immediately after
the establishment of the empire in 221 BC. But in this case, as in the cases of the
irrigation and navigation canals or the long defence walls, the imperial engineers
systematized and elaborated only what their territorial predecessors had initiated.
Long before the 3rd century BC an efficient territorial state was expected to have
well kept overland highways, supervised by central and local officials, lined with
trees, and provided with stations and guest houses.^79 Under the empire, great state
roads connected all the important centres of the northern core area with the capi-
tal. According to the official History of the Han Dynasty, the First Emperor
built the Imperial Road throughout the empire. To the east it stretched to Yen and Ch’i
and to the south it reached Wu and Ch’u. The banks and the shore of the Chiang [the
Yangtze River] and the lakes and the littoral along the sea coast were all made accessible.
The highway was fifty paces wide. A space three chang [approximately twenty-two feet]
wide in the center was set apart by trees. The two sides were firmly built, and metal bars
were used to reinforce them. Green pine trees were planted along it. He constructed the
Imperial Highway with such a degree of elegance that later generations were even unable
to find a crooked path upon which to place their feet.^80In the subsequent dynasties the building and maintenance of the great trunk roads
and their many regional branches remained a standard task of China’s central and
local administration.
The rugged terrain of Meso-America and the absence of fully coordinated
empires seems to have discouraged the construction of highways during the pre-
Columbian period, at least on the high plateau. But the Andean area was the scene
of extraordinary road building. The Spanish conquerors described in detail the fine
highways which crossed both the coastal plain and the highlands and which formed
connecting links between them.^81 Commenting on the Andean roads, Hernando
Pizarro writes he never saw their like in similar terrain ‘within the entire Christian
world’.^82 In fact the only parallel he could think of was the system of highways
built by the Romans. The similarity is telling. As we shall discuss below, the exten-
sive Roman roads were the fruits of a fateful transformation that made the Roman
Empire a Hellenistically (Orientally) despotic state.