Casey Petroff

Casey Petroff, PhD candidate from Harvard University, will present the paper jointly written with Michael-David Mangini * Conflict Technology As a Catalyst of State Formation*.

Abstract:
The rise of the modern European state coincided with the arrival of a new technology, artillery, that rendered previous urban fortifications obsolete. We examine the role that this shift in offensive-defensive technological capabilities played in reshaping the political landscape of Europe using detailed data on city-level urban defensive investment, the locations of artillery manufacturers, changing locations of national borders, and battle sites. We propose that the gunpowder revolution created a threat of conquest that could only be mitigated at extreme cost. This incentivized the agglomeration of territory into national states with unprecedented political authority in order to better finance the newly necessary expenses of defense and coordinate inter-city security cooperation. We find that after the development of gunpowder technology, new defensive investments were more likely to be located in areas where borders disappeared, closer to politically relevant national borders, and were more likely to be the targets of conflict. These findings highlight the changing strategic significance of cities in an era characterized by the formation of modern nation-states.