Thammasat University students interested in history, political science, China, international relations, economics, archaeology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 11 April webinar on War and the Origins of Chinese Civilization.

The event, on Thursday, 11 April 2024 at 3pm Bangkok time, is organized by the Centre for Quantitative History and Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes some books about different aspects of Chinese civilization.

The speaker will be Professor Zhiwu Chen, who is Chair and Cheng Yu-Tung Professor in Finance at HKU.

The event website explains:

Archaeological discoveries since 1921 have established that complex societies, as represented by densely-populated walled cities, first arose in North China, not in the South, triggering the development of Chinese civilization. But it remains an open question as to what made the early cradles of civilization emerge. To answer this, Zhiwu Chen of HKU Business School and his team divide China’s landmass into 1,004 grid-cells of 100×100 km, containing 32,946 archaeological sites, 838 walled cities, 157,050 excavated graves and 53,780 military burial goods from both the Neolithic (8000 – 1700 BCE) and the Eastern Zhou (770 – 221 BCE). First, using their large archaeological database, they find that during both the Neolithic and the Late Neolithic (3000 – 1700 BCE), cells with lower terrain ruggedness had both more weaponry objects buried in the excavated graves and more walled cities. To the extent that warfare must have figured heavily in human lives in order for the locals to care so much as to carrying weapons into their graves, war threats and the early cradles of civilization must have been linked as weaponry grave goods have mostly been discovered in flatter regions along the Yellow and the Yangtze River valleys. Since no historical data on military conflicts is available for the periods prior to 770 BCE, their analysis then focuses on the Eastern Zhou, for which they find cells with flatter terrains to have had significantly more wars, which caused these cells to form more fortified cities. During this Quantitative History Webinar, Zhiwu Chen will explain how their quantitative evidence indicates that warfare played a significant role in the formation of Chinese civilization. The process began in the North, particularly in the alluvial plains, where the flat terrain made the local populations more vulnerable to war threats. Consequently, they engaged in extensive defensive fortification.

Zhiwu’s co-authors: Peter Turchin (Complexity Science Hub Vienna) and Wanda Wang (HKU Business School)

Discussant: Frank Shuo Chen, Professor of Economics, Fudan University.

Students are invited to register for the event at this link:

https://hku.zoom.us/webinar/register/5917014007444/WN_-XAnLknuSlGaGXSVxz5SGQ

With any questions or for further information, please write to

cqhmail@hku.hk

In his coauthored article War and the origins of Chinese civilization, Professor Chen’s abstract follows:

Why did complex societies, characterized by densely-populated walled cities, first arise in northern China, jump-starting early Chinese civilization? We explore this question in three steps.

First, the North, especially the alluvial plains along the Yellow and the Yangtze Rivers, had generally flatter terrains than the South. Second, by dividing China’s landmass into 100 km ×100 km grid-cells and using our archaeological database, we demonstrate that cells with flatter terrains faced higher war threats in prehistoric and early historic times, where war threats are respectively proxied by each cell’s number of excavated military grave goods for the Neolithic period (8000−1700 BCE) and by its number of recorded conflicts for the Eastern Zhou (770−221 BCE, the earliest period for which war data are available). Third, we establish that during both the Neolithic and the Eastern Zhou, higher war threats led to the construction of more settlements with defensive walls and moats, resulting in more walled cities (i.e., early cradles of civilization).

Thus, warfare was a key driver of the evolution of complex societies. This finding is robust after controlling for irrigation potential, agricultural productivity and threats from the steppe, as well as under alternative specifications.

The article’s Introduction begins:

The emergence of cities, especially walled cities, is generally viewed as the start of the civilizational process that gave rise to complex societies (e.g., Durant, 1935; Mumford, 1961; Kriwaczek, 2010). However, what made cities emerge in the first place? Was it just a result of natural population growth after humans adopted sedentary agriculture? When Wittfogel (1957) coined the term “hydraulic civilizations”, he was referring to the need for irrigation control as the cause for the rise of the state, rather than of the city or civilization. The state, a large territorial polity, arose centuries or even millennia later than the city and its associated early civilization.

Turchin et al (2013) finds war and military technology to be significant drivers of the growth of large-scale complex societies, based on the experience of Afroeurasian state polities, not cities, that occupied a territory of at least 100,000 square kilometers during 1500 BCE−1500 CE. The “war made the state” literature is even more focused on state formation, with data mostly drawn from Medieval and modern Europe (Tilly, 1975:42). Turchin (2015) argues that it is the last ten thousand years of war that made humans ultrasocial cooperatives on earth, creating and maintaining ultra-complex organizations.

The article’s Concluding Remarks:

Due to the availability of our large archaeological database on excavated graves, sites and

fortified settlements across most of China’s landmass and covering the periods since 8000 BCE, this paper is able to investigate the key drivers of early town formation and conduct causality tests on what led to the emergence of early Chinese civilization in the Neolithic. From our two-stage exercise, it is clear that once all the effects of terrain ruggedness, population size, distance to the steppe, irrigation potential and millet suitability are captured in the predicted war threat level (as proxied by military grave goods), only the predicted war threat level has significant explanatory power of each cell’s walled-city density during the Neolithic. That is, each factor’s impact on early civilizational development was through the war channel in prehistoric times.

Thus, warfare is the single important direct driver of Neolithic complex-society formation, a conclusion different from the findings based on later samples of large ultra-complex societies in that warfare is a significant but not the only direct driver (e.g., Currie et al, 2020; Dincecco and and Onorato, 2016; Tilly, 1975; Turchin, 2015; Turchin et al, 2017).

When we shifted our analysis from the Neolithic to the Iron Age (the Eastern Zhou), our two-stage regressions indicate that the predicted value of each cell’s number of conflicts from the first-stage regression is no longer the only significant explanatory variable of walled-city density: threats from the steppe nomads are now independently important in determining each cell’s complex-society formation. This finding is more consistent with those in Currie et al (2020), Turchin (2015) and Turchin et al (2017). But, for the Eastern Zhou, while irrigation potential is sometimes statistically significant in explaining the developmental outcome, its effect is of the wrong sign relative to what Wittfogel (1957) hypothesized.

Given what we have done in this paper, one can presumably extend the analysis to the Neolithic experience of other parts of the world, especially Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India. One difficulty in such extensions lies in the availability of enough archaeological data on military grave goods. We have been able to collect such a large dataset for China mainly due to China’s infrastructure boom in recent decades, which led to the accidental discoveries of numerous archaeological sites and graves by construction workers.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)