This edited volume represents the latest research on intersections of war, state formation, and political economy, i.e., how conflicts have affected short- and long-run development of economies and the formation (or destruction) of states and their political economies. The contributors come from different fields of social and human sciencies, all featuring an interdisciplinary approach to the study of societal development. The types of big issues analyzed in this volume include the formation of European and non-European states in the early modern and modern period, the emergence of various forms of states and eventually modern democracies with extensive welfare states, the violent upheavals that influenced these processes, the persistence of dictatorships and non-democratic forms of government, and the arrival of total war and its consequences, especially in the context of twentieth-century world wars. One of the key themes is the dichotomy between democracies and dictatorships; namely, what were the origins of their emergence and evolution, why did some revolutions succeed and other fail, and why did democracies, on the whole, emerge victorious in the twentieth-century age of total wars? The contributions in this book are written with academic and non-academic audiences in mind, and both will find the broad themes discussed in this volume intuitive and useful.

Presents an interdisciplinary study of warfare and economic history and of the formation of states Features top scholars in the field of economic history, economics, and political science Furnishes a multifaceted study of state formations and conflicts, democracies and dictatorships, and twentieth-century total wars

Inhalt
Part I Wars and State Formation in the Short and Long Run.- 1 Paths to Inclusive Political Institutions (Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson) .- 2 States and Development: Early Modern India, China and Great Divergence (Bishnupriya Gupta, Debin Ma and Tirthankar Roy) .- Part II Political Economy of Democracies and Dictatorships.- 3 Decentralization, Fiscal Structure, and Local State Capacity in Late-Imperial Russia (Steven Nafziger) .- 4 Historicizing Divergence: A Comparative Analysis of the Revolutionary Crises in Russia and Finland (Pavel Osinsky and Jari Eloranta) .- 5 Repression and Punishment under Stalin: Evidence from the Soviet Archives (Andrei Markevich) .- Part III Economic History of the World Wars.- 6 Myths of the Great War (Mark Harrison) .- 7 War and Inflation in the United States from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf War (Hugh Rockoff) .- 8 Lessons Learned? British Mobilisation for the Two World Wars (StephenBroadberry and Peter Howlett) .- 9 World War II and US Economic Performance (Price V. Fishback and Taylor Jaworski) .- 10 The Mirage of the German Armament Miracle in World War II (Jonas Scherner and Jochen Streb) .-11 Neutrality in War (Eric Golson). Subject Index