Fractured-Land and Political Fragmentation

Patterns of political unification and fragmentation have crucial implications for comparative economic development. Diamond (1997) famously argued that “fractured-land” was responsible for China’s tendency towards political unification and Europe’s protracted political fragmentation. Mark Koyama and his co-authors build a model with granular geographical information to quantitatively gauge the effects of “fractured-land” on state formation in Eurasia. They find that a broad version of the “fractured-land” hypothesis that takes into account both topographical features and the location of productive agricultural land is necessary and sufficient, within their model, to account for China’s recurring political unification and Europe’s persistent political fragmentation. In particular, the existence of a core region of high land productivity in Northern China plays a central role in their simulations. In this Quantitative History Webinar, Mark Koyama discusses how their results map into observed historical outcomes and how robust their findings are.

Mark's co-authors are Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (University of Pennsylvania), Youhong Lin (Center for Cliometrics Studies of China, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies), and Tuan-Hwee Sng (NUS Department of Economics).

This Webinar is a joint event with Economic History of Developing Regions Virtual Seminar
hosted by the journal "Economic History of Developing Regions" of the Economic History Society of Southern Africa.