Matteo Sestito

Matteo Sestito, PhD Candidate from the Aix-Marseille School of Economics will present his paper "Crop cycles and hierarchy: the agro-ecological origins of the state"

Abstract:

Subject to popular flee, 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 the dissimilarity of the agricultural calendar was one of the fundamental constraints for the emergence and persistence of 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.