The Roman Empire would eventually decay and fall apart. Under Byzantine Emperor Justinian, a short-lived attempt to re-constitute the Roman Empire was briefly successful but that was the last time. From that point forward Europe would be fragmented except for very brief periods of a single dominant political entity such as the Carolingian Empire but this would be the exception.
Roughly around the same time that the Roman Empire was falling apart, the Han Dynasty Empire also started to fall apart. But in Eastern Asia, it seems that while there were periods of disunity (such as three kingdoms, etc), there were the exception and for the most part, Eastern Asia was mostly unified under as one large political entity based on Chinese culture.
Someone would eventually unify the Chinese peoples into mainly one political entity. But when the Roman Empire fell, no one was able to do it. Why is it that Europe was mostly fragemented while China was mostly unified?
Some possible reasons:
1) Geography - Chinese geography was simply more conducive to unity than European geography. This is a very plausible possibility. Note that I include in geography also "political geography" in the sense of the situation of the Romans vis-a-vis neighboring cultures that were never part of the Roman Empire (such as Germanic peoples, Arabs/Muslims, Ottomans, etc). Perhaps the "barbarians" surrounding the Roman peoples were just more powerful than the Chinese "barbarians" surrounding the Chinese peoples and the situation made unifying Europe much more difficult?
2) Culture - Chinese culture (including language, religion, etc) was simply more conducive to unity than Latin culture. This is possibly but I don't see how. The core Latin culture was about as unified as the core Chinese culture, I think. Perhaps aspects of Latin culture, especially Christianity, made disunity more likely?
3) Luck - Its just the luck of the draw. Changes in certain key moments in history could have led to very different outcomes. If we could replay history from 1CE forward a thousand times, we would see that many times China would have fragmented like real-life Europe while Europe might have more or less consistently reunified itself like real-life China.
What do some experts here think?
Edited by AmateurHistorian, 14 September 2010 - 08:53 PM.