Public Economics and Policy Seminar - Matteo Sestito (University of Lausanne)

Subject to exoduses, internal rebellions and diseases, states have historically developed only under very particular agro-ecological circumstances. This paper advances and empirically validates a new perspective on state formation, helping to understand their paucity and uneven development across the globe throughout the pre-industrial era. I posit that spatially asynchronous agricultural calendars mandated for a scattered productive system that could not be easily taxed and harnessed by centralised governments. Using data from the Ethnographic Atlas, I provide evidence that the heterogeneity of agricultural growing seasons was a crucial barrier to state centralisation. This holds true when controlling for a wide range of alternative determinants of state-building. The use of potential, rather than observed, agro-ecological data, as well as various robustness tests, give credit to an interpretation of the results beyond the mere correlation. Additional evidence on 19th century taxation and military mobilisation in China, India and Russia sheds light on the precise mechanisms whereby crop cycle heterogeneity hindered political centralisation.