Weather Shocks, Sweet Potatoes and Peasant Revolts in Historical China

Abstract

I use data covering 267 prefectures over four centuries to investigate two questions about historical China. To what extent did weather shocks cause civil conflict? And to what extent did the historical introduction of (drought resistant) sweet potatoes mitigate these effects? I find that before the introduction of sweet potatoes, exceptional droughts increased the probability of peasant revolts by around 0.7 percentage points, which translates into a revolt probability in drought years that is more than twice the average revolt probability. After the introduction of sweet potatoes, exceptional droughts only increased the probability of peasant revolts by around 0.2 percentage points.

The Literary Inquisition: The Persecution of Intellectuals and Human Capital Accumulation in China

“…We do not consider other persecutions or peasant-led protests or rebellions. Kung and Ma (2014) study how Confucian values mitigated peasant rebellions in imperial China while Jia (2014b) examines how the introduction of the sweet potato weakened the relationship between natural disasters and peasant rebellions. 17 The Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722), the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1722-1735), and the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735-1796) adopted a janus faced attitude towards intellectuals.…”

‘Force of Nature’ : climate shocks, food crises and conflict in Colonial Africa and Asia, 1880-1960. THESIS RETRACTED

“…We also employ drought and excessive rainfall dummies, defining 'negative rainfall shock' as a dummy which takes the value of 1 when annual rainfall exceeds more than one standard deviation below, and 'positive rainfall shock' as one standard deviation above the long-run mean. This approach is similar to , Blakeslee and Fishman (2015) and Jia (2014), among other. The summary statistics of the weather indicators are presented in panel (b) of Table 1.…”

“…This suitability index runs from 1 (most suitable) to 8 (least suitable). Similar to other studies that have successfully exploited the exogenous nature of the crop suitability indicators to proxy for adoption or production of various types of crops (Nunn & Qian, 2010;Jia, 2014;Fenske & Kala, 2015), we take the average of the gridded suitability values within the borders of each colonial district. We construct our indicator by combining all relevant export crops, using the average suitability for all export crops for each districts.…”

“…Interestingly, the vast majority of the studies published on the climate-economy nexus has been mostly restricted to limited comparisons in the post-1960 period, mainly due to data availability (see . Only very recently have scholars begun expanding the temporal scope in the pre-1960 period (for example Bai & Kai-sing Kung (2011) and Jia (2014) for premodern China; Anderson et al (2015) and Bignon et al (2016) for premodern Europe; and Papaioannou & de Haas (2015) for colonial Africa). This study thus expands both the geographical as well as temporal scope of studies on the climate-economy nexus.…”

“…Recent contributions have begun to investigate different time periods (Papaioannou, 2016a;Jia, 2014), employ a more fine-grained, sub-national scope (Harari et al, 2013;Raleigh & Urdal, 2007) and use more non-binary indicators as the dependent variable (Papaioannou, 2016a;2016b). Moreover, a number of studies have employed detailed case study analyses to uncover the key mechanisms leading from weather variability to social distress, civil unrest and political upheaval (Adano et al, 2012, Benjaminsen et al, 2012Ember et al, 2012;).…”