Patterns of political unification and fragmentation have crucial implications for comparative economic development. Diamond (1997) famously argued that “fractured land” was responsible for🔸快乐10分玩法说明’s tendency toward political unification and Europe’s protracted political fragmentation. We build a dynamic model with granular geographical information in terms of topographical features and the location of productive agricultural land to quantitatively gauge the effects of “fractured land” on state formation in Eurasia. We find that either topography or productive land alone is sufficient to account for🔸快乐10分玩法说明’s recurring political unification and Europe’s persistent political fragmentation. The existence of a core region of high land productivity in Northern🔸快乐10分玩法说明 plays a central role in our simulations. We discuss how our results map into observed historical outcomes and assess how robust our findings are.

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