States and Wars: China’s Long March towards Unity and its Consequences, 221 BC – 1911 AD

Debin Ma and Shuo Chen

No 15187, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We examine the long-term pattern of state formation and the mythical historical Chinese unity under one single political regime based on the compilation of a large geocoded annual data series of political regimes and incidences of warfare between 221 BC and 1911 AD. By classifying our data sets into two types of regimes - agrarian and nomadic – and three types of warfare– agrarian/nomadic, agrarian/agrarian and internal rebellions – and applying an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model, we find that nomadic-agrarian warfare and internal rebellion strengthens unification but agrarian/agrarian warfare entrenches fragmentation. Our research highlights the combination of China’s precocious ideology of a single unified ruler, environmental circumscription on the easternmost end of Eurasia and persistent agrarian-nomadic warfare as the driving force behind China’s eventual unity. We further discuss the long-run implications of Chinese unity on economic performance in a global context.

Keywords: Agrarian-nomadic warfare; China; Country size; State formation; Warfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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