Can removing internal trade barriers expand finance? The answer is not obvious: barrier removal may enlarge the commercial base on which bank offices depend, or reduce demand for working capital. I study China's 1931 abolition of likin, a system of internal checkpoint taxes, exploiting variation in prereform station exposure across 272 prefectures. Chinese bank offices and industrial entrants grew most where both local relief and external market-access gains were high, a pattern confirmed by an instrument based on distance to a minimum spanning tree of mid-nineteenth-century military suppression nodes. Expansion concentrated in branches of existing banks and transport-intensive sectors. Foreign banks showed no response. The reform gradient accounts for roughly 29 percent of the net increase in bank offices by 1936, and borrowing-rate gaps narrowed along intensively taxed corridors. Removing internal trade barriers can deepen finance by enlarging the economic base that intermediation serves.

Combining over 90,000 geocoded archaeological sites with population benchmarks, we trace China's economic geography across seven millennia since the Neolithic Revolution. A north- and inland-centered Neolithic pattern continued to predict later population, weakening under maritime expansion and warfare yet repeatedly recovering before 1840. This resilience reflected agricultural advantages and accumulated old-core assets, including administrative capacity, hydraulic investment, and transport infrastructure. After 1840, treaty-port regions accumulated a reinforcing bundle of trade, industry, finance, transport, and human capital, and the Neolithic pattern no longer recovered. Durable reordering emerged when coastal advantages became broader and more complementary than in earlier episodes.

Steamships were the first Western transport technology to diffuse widely in China, entering through treaty ports but later spreading beyond them. Using a prefecture-decade panel of 284 prefectures from 1840 to 1927, I find that prefectures gaining steamship connections saw substantially more modern industrial entry, concentrated in trade-intensive sectors. The results are robust to pre-steamship economic fundamentals and competing technologies, and are supported by a shift-share instrument based on hypothetical steamship-navigable access to early treaty ports. Foreign trade responded almost immediately, while native banking and industrial entry expanded gradually over subsequent decades, consistent with commercial deepening accompanying industrial entry.

Bioarchaeological analysis of human remains provides evidence on health and nutrition that is rarely available from written records alone. This study assembles the largest Eurasian stature dataset to date, covering 18,457 observations over roughly 7,000 years, and links it to long-run demographic and historical indicators. We show that stature varied substantially across regions and over time. Historical indicators of technology are clearly associated with higher population density, but not with lasting gains in stature before the modern era. The results offer a more thorough understanding of health, technology and population relationships across pre-modern Eurasia.

Institutional legacies are associated not only with the scale of finance but also with the organizational forms that emerge. Using prefecture-level data from early twentieth-century China, where indigenous money houses based on relational contracting coexisted with modern banks operating under codified law, we document that prefectures more deeply embedded in the imperial administrative system had more money houses and lower private borrowing costs, consistent with lower information and enforcement costs in relational finance. Treaty-port prefectures instead had more modern banks, with this concentration widening from 1910 to 1935. The analysis is descriptive and does not establish causality.

We investigate how a financial crisis can escalate from financial panic to political grievance, ultimately catalyzing regime change. Our setting is the 1910 Financial Crisis in China, triggered by the collapse of rubber stock prices and the subsequent failure of native banking institutions nationwide. Using over 60,000 newspaper articles across 287 prefectures from 1908 to 1911, we construct high-frequency measures of financial panic, government-directed grievance, and anti-government contention. Prefectures more severely affected by the Crisis experienced more intense panic, sharper and more persistent grievances toward the Qing government, and higher anti-government incident rates, following a sequential pattern from merchant and elite mobilization to revolutionary activity culminating in the Republican Revolution of 1911. These findings suggest that financial crises can destabilize autocratic regimes by generating the micro-foundations for revolutionary mobilization.

This study examines the role of patriotism in the rise of modern banks when they emerged as a new form of financial institution. In China, the loss of Western financial support during WWI (1914) prompted the Republican government to issue patriotic domestic bonds to address fiscal shortfalls. Modern banks underwrote these bonds and expanded into regions with stronger patriotic sentiment to attract subscriptions. These banks thus established themselves by achieving strong profitability and gaining long-term public familiarity and trust. Historical evidence suggests that patriotism similarly fueled early banking development in other countries.