Three essays on economic history

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three chapters on economic history. It aims to understand why ancient China was able to achieve the social stability. The first chapter addresses this question by analyzing the state-society relationship and examining how local elites were incorporated into the central regime, which laid the foundation of political unity. The second chapter focuses on the internal dynamics of the state and studies how the information system within the state facilitated the provision of government relief in times of distress. The third chapter takes a social-centered perspective and shows how the informal organization of China mitigated natural shocks by sharing resources and pooling risks so as to reduce disaster-induced violence.

How to soften resistance to state-building efforts by reform losers? The first chapter highlights a strategy of compensation via the bureaucracy, in which the ruler offers meaningful government offices in exchange for elites’ acceptance of state-building initiatives. I empirically explore this strategy in a reform of the Northern Wei Dynasty (386 - 534 AD) and find that the reform led to a sustained increase in the total number of powerful aristocrats from localities with strongholds recruited into the imperial bureaucracy. Subsequent estimates provide evidence for three mechanisms by which compensation facilitates state-building: 1) the offices taken by these elites came with direct benefits of prestige and power, 2) by transforming these aristocrats from local powerfuls into national stakeholders, these offices potentially induced the realignment of their interests toward those of the dynasty, and 3) the bureaucratic system provided the regime with institutional tools of power-sharing to mitigate credible commitment problems.

The second chapter studies a communication reform in the imperial bureaucracy of Qing China, which allowed certain local officials (functioning as informants) to report to the emperor directly. Leveraging on a fact that the direct communication channel was unevenly introduced, I find government disaster assistance, a critical public good in pre-industrial societies, of prefectures where at least one informant was assigned was significantly increased compared with that of prefectures without an informant after the reform. In addition, I find that the increase of government assistance was mainly attributed to the improvement in information transmission and competitive information supply triggered by direct communication within the bureaucracy. This research contributes to the literature by demonstrating that a flattening and competitive information structure could have a conducive bearing on state capacity development.

Survival cannibalism persisted across human societies until recently. But what drove the decline in cannibalism and other forms of violence? The third chapter documents that in historical China, the Confucian clan, an institutionalized kinship network, acted as an internal market to facilitate intra-clan resource pooling and risk-sharing, thus reducing the need for cannibalism during times of drought-related famine. The risk mitigation role of the clan remains robust after controlling for economic development and other factors and ruling out alternative channels. Thus, kinship networks and their associated culture contributed to human civilizational development before the advent of formal finance.