This paper studies how the abolition of an elite recruitment system—China's civil exam system that lasted over 1, 300 years—affects political stability. Employing a panel data set across 262 prefectures and exploring the variations in the quotas on the entry‐level exam candidates, we find that higher quotas per capita were associated with a higher probability of revolution participation after the abolition and a higher incidence of uprisings in 1911 that marked the end of the 2, 000 years of imperial rule. This finding is robust to various checks including using the number of small rivers and short‐run exam performance before the quota system as instruments. The patterns in the data appear most consistent with the interpretation that in regions with higher quotas per capita under the exam system, more would‐be elites were negatively affected by the abolition. In addition, we document that modern human capital in the form of those studying in Japan also contributed to the revolution and that social capital strengthened the effect of quotas on revolution participation.

We study how political hierarchy shapes regional development in China, using variations driven by regime changes during the 1000–2000 C.E. period. We find that changes in the status of the provincial capital led to the rise and decline of different prefectures as measured by population and urbanization. Two other novel findings stand out: (1) the economic advantages of the provincial capitals did not persist if they lost their political status, and (2) political hierarchy shaped economic development not only through public employment but also through the development of important infrastructure, such as transportation networks. Our findings highlight the importance of politics in determining the locations of economic activities.

We study how political hierarchy shapes regional development in China, using variations driven by regime changes during the 1000–2000 period. We find that changes in the status of the provincial capital led to the rise and decline of different prefectures as measured by population and urbanization. Two other novel findings stand out: (1) the economic advantages of the provincial capitals did not persist if they lost their political status, and (2) political hierarchy shaped economic development not only through public employment but also through the development of important infrastructure, such as transportation networks. Our findings highlight the importance of politics in determining the locations of economic activities.

Scholars have argued that powerful individuals can exert influence on the path of a nation’s development. Yet the process through which people can have an effect on macro-level political economy outcomes remains unclear. This study uses the deadliest civil war in modern history, the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), to elucidate how one person—Zeng Guofan—used his personal elite networks to organize an army to suppress the rebellion, and how these networks would affect the nation’s power distribution. Two findings stand out: (i) counties that already had more prewar elites in Zeng’s networks experienced an increase in soldier deaths after he took power; and (ii) postwar political power shifted significantly toward the home counties of these elites, creating a less balanced national-level power distribution. Our findings highlight how micro-level elite networks can influence national politics and societal power distribution, shedding new light on the relationship between elites, war, and the state.

Employing droughts and floods to proxy for changes in precipitation, this paper shows nomadic incursions into settled Han Chinese regions over a period of more than two thousand years—the most enduring clash of civilizations in history—to be positively correlated with less rainfall and negatively correlated with more rainfall. Consistent with findings that economic shocks are positively correlated with conflicts in modern sub-Saharan Africa when instrumented by rainfall, our reduced-form results extend this relationship to a very different temporal and geographical context, the Asian continent, and long historical period.