The 2024 Asia-Pacific Economic and Business History Conference will be held 16-18 Feb. 2024 at the Shidler College of Business on the campus of the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. Forty-one economic historians and business historians from the world’s leading universities will be presenting their research at the conference. About 75 percent of the papers analyze topics from the Asia-Pacific region, with eight papers on Chinese economic history and eight papers on Australian economic history. The remaining papers are focused on important issues in Asian, Pacific Islands, European, and North American business and economic history.

At 4:45 pm on Saturday, February 17, Professor Zhiwu Chen will present the 2024 Noel Butlin Lecture at Shidler College of Business, Room BUSAD A101. Professor Chen is Chair and Cheng Yu-Tung Professor in Finance at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), and currently serves as director of both Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS) and Centre for Quantitative History (CQH). His research covers finance theory, the sociology of finance, economic history, quantitative history, emerging markets, as well as China’s economy and capital markets. Professor Chen has successfully led efforts to construct historical financial and social databases from China’s historical archives ranging over hundreds of years. In 2013, he started the annual Summer School for Quantitative History cum International Symposium on Quantitative History at Tsinghua University and continues to organize them at Peking University, with the goal of promoting quantitative historical research in China.

2024 NOEL BUTLIN LECTURE Title and Abstract

War and the Origins of Chinese Civilization*

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 complex societies, i.e., early cradles of civilization. Thus, warfare was a key trigger of the civilizational process. This finding is robust after controlling for irrigation potential, agricultural productivity and threats from the steppe, as well as under alternative specifications.

*Coauthored with Peter Turchin and Wanda Wang

The Butlin Lecture is free and open to the general public!

We welcome attendance at all conference paper presentations by University of Hawai‘i faculty and graduate students. Registration fees for conference sessions are waived for UH faculty and UH graduate students. Participants can register for the conference from 8 November 2023 and must register for the conference by 21 January 2024.

Questions regarding the conference? Email Conference Organizer Sumner La Croix lacroix@hawaii.edu.

Sponsor

The Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand

Co-Sponsors

College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa
Dept of Economics, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa
Center for Chinese Studies, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa