Productive Pacifists: The Rise of Production and the Decline of Conquest

• In Event: New Research on Territorial Conquest, Expansion, and Empire

Abstract

Why do some states have a stronger interest in seeking wealth by taking territory that others? We argue that regime type and land-rent dependence influence a regime’s preference for territory. The more autocratic the regime, and the more it depends on rents extracted from land (i.e. the more land-oriented the state’s economy), the greater a regime’s willingness to invest in territorial conquest. We develop a novel measure of land orientation, with 200 years of data coverage, to evaluate the empirical linkages between land orientation, regime type, and conquest. We evaluate a wide range of alternative specifications and find robust evidence that land-oriented states and autocratic states are more likely to project power to take territory, and to take economically valuable territory in particular. These results hold controlling for the level of economic development and a range of other factors. The global reduction in land-oriented economies offers a plausible explanation for the decline in the frequency of large-scale territorial conquest since the end of World War II, while also explaining why some states continue to use military force to seek territory in the 21st century.

Authors

• Jonathan Markowitz, University of Southern California

• Suzie Mulesky, University of Southern California

• Benjamin A.T. Graham, University of Southern California

• Christopher J. Fariss, University of Michigan