(^36) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
No private undertaking nor any aspect of public life could escape official
regulation. In the first place there was a whole series of state monopolies.
... But the tentacles of the Moloch state, the omnipotence of the bureau
cracy, extended far beyond that.... This welfare state superintended, to the
minutest detail, every step its subjects took from the cradle to the grave.^6
Despotisms abounded in Europe, too, but they were mitigated by
law, by territorial partition, and within states, by the division of power
between the center (the crown) and local seigneurial authority.^7 Frag
mentation gave rise to competition, and competition favored good
care of good subjects. Treat them badly, and they might go elsewhere.
Ecumenical empires did not fear flight, especially when, like China,
they defined themselves as the center of the universe, the hearth and
home of civilization, and everything outside as barbarian darkness.
There was no other place to go, so that symbolic boundaries were
enough, like the "willow palisade," a low wall that ran from the Great
Wall to the sea and separated China from the Mongol-Tartar lands to
the north. In a poem on the subject, the Qian Long emperor makes
this point: "In our erection of boundaries and regulation of people, an
cient ways are preserved, / As it is enough simply to tie a rope to in
dicate prohibition.... Building it is the same as not having built
it: / Insofar as the idea exists and the framework is there, there is no
need to elaborate."^8The contest for power in European societies (note the plural) also gave
rise to the specifically European phenomenon of the semi-autonomous
city, organized and known as commune. Cities of course were to be
found around the world—wherever agriculture produced sufficient
surplus to sustain a population of rulers, soldiers, craftsmen, and other
nonfood producers. Many of these urban nodes came to acquire great
importance as markets, to say nothing of their role as administrative
centers. But nothing like the commune appeared outside western Eu
rope.^9
The essence of the commune lay, first, in its economic function:
these units were "governments of the merchants, by the merchants,
and for the merchants";^10 and second, in its exceptional civil power: its
ability to confer social status and political rights on its residents—rights
crucial to the conduct of business and to freedom from outside inter
ference. This meant everything in a hierarchical, agrarian society that
held most of the population in thrall, either by personal dependence on
local lords or ties to place. It made the cities gateways to freedom,