Climate shocks and sino-Nomadic conflict

Abstract

Employing droughts and floods to proxy for changes in precipitation, this paper shows nomadic incursions into settled Han Chinese regions over a period of more than two thousand years-the most enduring clash of civilizations in history-to be positively correlated with less rainfall and negatively correlated with more rainfall. Consistent with findings that economic shocks are positively correlated with conflicts in modern sub-Saharan Africa when instrumented by rainfall, our reduced-form results extend this relationship to a very different temporal and geographical context, the Asian continent, and long historical period. © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.