Great Wall and Great Divergence: Historical Legacy of the Pastoral Society

This paper utilizes the Ming Great Wall as a quasi-experiment to study the historical legacy of pastoral society on contemporary development. The Ming Great Wall was the boundary of pastoral and agrarian society, and as a military defense, its location did not dependent on economic factors in a small bandwidth. With the spatial regression discontinuity design, I find that historical pastoralism leads to significant discontinuity in economic development. The mechanism of persistence is more likely to be cultural. In particular, people from the historical pastoral areas have a lower level of trust and weaker moral universalism, which leads to weaker industrialization. The evidence shows that historical society can persist as a form of culture, and influences economic development through social preferences.