4 - Preparation for War and Mobilization

Summary

Did the threat of war trigger the extraction-coercion cycle? In this chapter I use a panel of Latin America from 1830 to 1913 to test the effects of looming international threats on domestic taxation and internal conflict. It is believed that due to the availability of foreign loans and taxable imports, states in the region did not have to engage in extraction from the local population, nor did they have to coerce individuals to comply with such policies. I summarize this argument in the form of testable hypotheses and point to factors—naval blockades and sovereign debt defaults—that might have hindered access to such external resources. I then focus on militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and how they affected revenues, tariff levels, foreign loans, civil wars, coups, etc. My analyses show MIDs had a negative effect on tariffs and revenue and diminished the likelihood of a new loan—all results that contest the established conventional wisdom. Conversely, MIDs are associated to currency depreciation—a domestic-oriented inflationary tax—and domestic conflict—in particular, civil wars and coups. The chapter shows war did trigger the extraction-coercion cycle.