In The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), Scott revises the state generated narratives of the hill people of Zomia which describes them as an aboriginal population that have simply failed to become more civilized. As an alternative, Scott views hill peoples as state-repelling societies or even...

This paper provides the first estimates of housing price movements for Beijing in late pre-modern China. We hand-collect from archival sources transaction prices and other house attribute information from the 498 surviving house sale contracts for Beijing during the first two centuries of the...

This is the third in a series of papers concerned with the intellectual history of the 'informal economy' and its relevance to current concerns in Papua New Guinea (PNG; the eastern half of the island of New Guinea). Proceeding from the observation that monetized informal economic activity in...

L'analyse positive ne permet pas d'appréhender le processus d'urbanisation. Celui-ci renvoie aux contextes institutionnels et historiques qui caractérisent un pays ou une région. En outre, la libéralisation internationale du compte de capital a contribué à amplifier les phénomènes de...

High-speed rail (HSR) is not a “sufficient condition” but a “necessary condition” for regional development. Understanding how to use HSR for regional development is essential. Japan's Shinkansen (bullet train) has a 50-year history, and Japan has long attempted to utilize Shinkansen for...

This study explores the impact on Java's economic geography of railways built by the Dutch colonial government. Pre-1940 Dutch railway construction affords an historical experiment on the spatial distribution of economic activities across urban Java both before and after 1940.Using city data for...

In the literature, there are few studies on the impacts of the railroad construction in the Middle Eastern countries as well mixed findings. Using the data on the population of judicial districts in the Ottoman Empire between 1893 and 1914, we examine the relationship between railroad access and...

Understanding the causality of vulnerability is difficult to do and consequently has received insufficient attention. Root causes of vulnerability needs to be understood and addressed to support adaptation that addresses climate risk and inequality. This paper contributes to this by examining...

Throughout the imperial era, defensive walls surrounded Chinese cities. Although most city walls have vanished, the cities have survived. We analyze a sample of nearly 300 prefectural-level cities in China, among which about half historically had city walls. We document that cities that had...