Productive Pacifists: The Rise of Production-Oriented States and Decline of Profit-Motivated Conquest

Abstract

Scholarship suggests the profits from conquest have decreased over time. Given this, why were some states faster to abandon profit-motivated conquest, and why are some still seeking wealth from territorial control? We argue that land-rent dependence influences a regime’s economic preference for territory. While autocracies exhibit a stronger preference for territorial conquest, we argue that land-orientation affects the behavior of both autocratic and democratic states. The more a state depends on rents extracted from land (i.e. the more land-oriented the economy), the greater its willingness to invest in securing control of territory. We develop a novel measure of land-orientation, with 200 years of data, to evaluate the linkages between land-orientation, regime type, and military competition over territory. Across 160 regression models, we find robust evidence that land-orientation predicts territorial competition. These results hold in both democracies and autocracies. The global reduction in land-oriented states offers a plausible explanation for the decline in the number of large-scale territorial conquests. Our findings also explain why some states retain strong economic motivations for conquest.

Keywords: territorial conflict, resource dependence, regime type