BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//University of Hawaii//UH Events Calendar//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:Pacific/Honolulu
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-1000
TZOFFSETTO:-1000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
CREATED:20260905T233632Z
DESCRIPTION:Professor Zhiwu Chen will present the 2024 Noel Butlin Lecture. He 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, archaeological and social databases from China’s historical archives and has written on economic/social history topics. 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 and beyond. \n\nTITLE AND ABSTRACT\n\nWAR AND THE ORIGINS OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION\n\nWhy 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.\n
DTEND;TZID=Pacific/Honolulu:20240218T040000Z
DTSTAMP:20260905T233632Z
DTSTART;TZID=Pacific/Honolulu:20240218T024500Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260905T233632Z
LOCATION:Shidler A101
PRIORITY:5
SEQUENCE:0
SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en-us:Noel Butlin Lecture
TRANSP:OPAQUE
UID:178868739241701web-support-l@lists.hawaii.edu
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR