Title: Wars and States: China’s long March towards Unification 750 BC-1910 AD

Speaker:

Debin Ma

Associate Professor

Department of Economic History, LSE

时间：2017年3月16日 16：00-17：30

地点：半岛·体育bob官方网站614会议室

Abstract: For near two millennia until the fall of Qing in 1911, the Chinese remained as world’s single largest and most populous political unit with an extremely high degree of political and cultural integration. The unitary nature of the Chinese empire, particularly in contrast to Europe’s multi-state system, was known to have exerted profound influence on China’s long-term economic trajectory and her Great Divergence from Western Europe. By constructing a two millennia data set on incidences of warfare, number of political regimes, locations of capitals, natural disasters, our paper provides the first comprehensive and statistical analysis of China’s two millennia process of political unification. We differentiate our data sets into sub-types by political, geographic and other relevant criteria and apply time series econometric analysis to reveal strong influence of agrarian-nomadic conflict, internal infrastructure improvements such as Grand Canals and Imperial bureaucracy, significantly on the trend towards unification. We discuss our findings in light of the recent literature on the size of nation and state capacity.