Prior to the rise of the West and European seaborne empires, the world witnessed the Mongolian Empire's meteoric rise in the thirteenth century. At its apex, the Central Asian empire stretched its territories across Eurasia to form the largest contiguous land empire in history. Our study explores the geographic extent to which the Mongols spread their territories, and their subsequent impact on local development. Specifically, we use historical climatic anomalies as exogenous contingencies that could drive their expansion and identify which regions were more likely to have been invaded by the Mongols. Overall we find that the Mongols negatively impacted local urbanization over the subsequent centuries. The stabilizing effect of Pax Mongolica, while beneficial for trading partners outside the reach of the Empire, was insufficient to overcome the destruction of the Empire's invasion in cities across Eurasia.

Christopher Paik is an associate professor of political science in the Division of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi and an affiliated faculty in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University. His research focuses on political geography, political economy and economic history. He is  interested in the role of geography in explaining long-term outcomes related to political and economic development; the origins of states and state stability; the causes and effects of historical global encounters, including colonialism; and the politics of ethnic identification. Together, his research brings a global, comparative and historical perspective to the study of fundamental questions in the social sciences related to states and governance.