States and wars: China’s long march towards unity and its consequences, 221 BC – 1911 AD

Working paper

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.

Authors: Chen, S; Ma, D

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: University of Oxford
• Series: Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers
• Publication date: 2022-08-30
• Paper number: 199
• Language: English