Email: R.Cheng4@lse.ac.uk
CV
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, supervised by Joan Rosés.
My research lies at the intersection of historical GIS, economic history, economic geography, and development.
My research focuses on two main areas: (1) the impact of trade on economic geography and long run growth; and (2) the origins of cities and the logic of their long-term evolution.
According to economic geography literature, the location and size of cities are influenced by natural endowments and human endowments. This study examines the role of natural endowments and their interaction with human endowments in the pre-industrial era. By examining the location of cities in China over the past two millennia and linking natural endowments to historical transportation networks, my analysis reveals that natural endowments on routes generally had a positive and statistically significant influence on urban location. However, the magnitude of this effect was not constant over time but fluctuated across different dynastic cycles. This suggests that the value attributed to natural features shifted in response to changing institutional contexts. Mechanism tests indicate that governance strategies and taxation structures were key institutional factors influencing the varying impact of natural endowments. Specifically, dynasties that relied primarily on indirect taxes, as opposed to direct taxes, saw a significantly higher marginal effect of natural endowments to waterways—representing domestic market forces—on city locations. In dynasties where the national capital was closer to the population centroid, natural endowments to land routes—representing central government control— had a higher marginal effect compared to other eras. Additionally, the arrival of Arab and European traders spurred the development of the maritime Silk Road and international trade, leading to a long-term, stable shift of cities towards coastal port areas.
The Great Divergence has arguably been one of the most important debates in the field of economic history over the past two decades. This article contributes to this ongoing discussion from a novel perspective, specifically focusing on transportation conditions. Utilizing travel route books published since 16th century China, I reconstructed the national trade transport network of China during the Ming and Qing dynasties (14th to 19th centuries) and estimated transport costs and speeds in the Yangtze region during the late 17th and 18th centuries. These estimates were then compared with those of England for the same period. The findings reveal that, in the late 17th century, transport costs and speeds in the Yangtze region of China were comparable to those in England. However, a divergence emerged after 1700. This timing of divergence in transportation between the Yangtze region and England supports the strand of literature proposing that The Great Divergence began around 1700.
Large enclosure settlements are widely regarded as proto-cities and key indicators of early civilization. Here we show that Neolithic enclosures in China exhibit both concentrated and dispersed spatial patterns, reflecting divergent pathways of social complexity. This spatial divergence suggests that early urbanism in China did not follow a single trajectory, but instead emerged through multiple, regionally distinct routes to civilization.
This study examines the relationship between trade potential and local economic activity in Neolithic China. Using a terrain-based road suitability index as a proxy for trade potential and the spatial distribution of archaeological settlements as an indicator of economic activity, the analysis reveals a statistically significant and progressively strengthening correlation during the early, middle, and early late Neolithic periods. However, this correlation disappears in the later late Neolithic. A two-stage least squares (2SLS) approach corroborates these findings, suggesting that trade-related spatial advantages played an important role in shaping economic activity during the early phases of sedentary development but lost relevance in subsequent periods. We propose that this structural break was triggered by Holocene Event 3—a period of severe climatic instability during the later late Neolithic—which disrupted trade-based coordination. Unlike in Mesopotamia, where political centralization helped mitigate the shock, Neolithic China experienced systemic collapse, likely due to the absence of state structures capable of buffering such disruptions.
Teaching Assistance:
Transportation Network in Late Imperial China: I have georeferenced all courier stations in Ming China, which is the official transportation network covering 14th to 19th century. A more advanced version could be found at Pastway by Thorben Pelzer.