 States and wars: China’s long march towards unity and its consequences, 221 BC – 1911 ADShuo Chen and Debin Ma No _199, Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics 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. We complement our econometrics exercise with an in-depth historical narrative by demonstrating that while warfare is a proximate cause for Chinese state formation and unity, the ultimate cause lies in a tripartite synthesis of Chinese ideology, institution and environment. We further discuss the long-run implications of Chinese unity on economic performance in a global context. Date: 2022-08-30 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:esohwp:_199 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.