OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, 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
