How Social Cleavages Facilitate State Revenue Extraction: Evidence from Qing China

Abstract

We analyze the conditions under which a country’s social structure facilitates or impedes the state’s mobilization of financial resources during civil conflict. Our argument emphasizes the ways in which the central state can divide and conquer social groups in order to empower the state. When social groups cannot solve their coordination problems, they are more likely to rely on the state to protect themselves. We test our theory in the context of the Taiping Rebellion – one of the largest and bloodiest internal conflicts documented in history – using fine-grained, archival data from late imperial China. We show that counties with more clans were more likely to donate to the central state rather than to private militia. Our findings highlight the importance of social structure in facilitating state war mobilization and help understand the Chinese state – a useful, yet understudied, counterpoint to the Euro-centric literature.