线上学术 | 应用经济学系讲座（2021-10-15）

Economics Webinar

（2021-15）

Topic: The Nexus of Elites and War MobilizationG 

Speaker: Ruixue Jia, UCSD and LSE

Time: Friday, October 15, 8:30-10:00 a.m. Beijing Time

Location: Microsoft Teams Online Conference Room Join the meeting

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that elites mobilize war and war mobilization benefits the elites, which consequently shapes the post-war power structure. Our case is the organization of the Hunan Army—an army commanded by one Hunanese scholar-general that suppressed the deadliest civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). We construct comprehensive datasets which describe the elites in the scholar-general’s pre-war network as well as the distribution of political power before and after the war. We examine how pre-war elite connections affected where killed soldiers came from and subsequent shifts in the post-war distribution of political power toward the home counties of these very elites. Two findings stand out: (i) elites used their personal network for war mobilization; and (ii) network-induced mobilization elevated regional elites to the national political stage. Our findings highlight the feedback between elite power and war and shed new light on how war affects the state.

Coauthors: Ying Bai, Jiaojiao Yang

Introduction

Ruixue Jia is a Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE (on leave from UC San Diego). Dr Jia is interested in the interplay of economics, history and politics. One stream of her research focuses on understanding elite formation and elite influence, in both historical and modern contexts. A second focus of her work is the deep historical roots of economic development. More recently, she started following the ongoing transformation of the manufacturing sector in China and expanded her interest to labour and technology issues.

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