On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Patterns of political unification and fragmentation have important implications for economic development. Diamond (1997a) famously argued that fractured land was responsible for China’s tendency towards political unification and Europe’s persistent political fragmentation. We build a model to explore the effects of geography on political fragmentation in Eurasia. We find that topography, or fractured land, is necessary but not sufficient to account for China’s early political centralization and Europe’s persistent political fragmentation. The existence, or lack thereof, of a dominant core region of high land productivity also plays a critical role in explaining the political divergence at the two ends of Eurasia.
Please sign up for meetings here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XJOSHywCIKfSQ2nIJ92bsYS15n_OJgATKDbjRxgQ-zo/edit#gid=0