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Protection pricing on the steppe
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Claim (verbatim)
Protection pricing on the steppe. Joins the economics of protection rackets to Han-Xiongnu diplomacy. A racketeer prices extraction to the victim's outside option: what matters is not how hard the racketeer can hit but how badly the victim needs quiet, so payments ratchet up when the victim is internally weak, not when the racketeer wins a fight. The heqin treaties, under which the early Han bought peace from the Xiongnu with silk, grain, and marriage alliances, were exactly such a protection arrangement, renegotiated roughly ten times with quantities recorded in the Shiji and Hanshu. The conjecture predicts that tribute schedules jump — by a fifth or more in real terms — at renegotiations following Han internal shocks such as imperial successions or the Rebellion of the Seven States, while renegotiations that merely follow major Xiongnu battlefield successes leave tribute flat or falling. Han weakness, not Xiongnu victory, sets the price of peace.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Across the roughly ten renegotiated heqin schedules recorded in the Shiji and Hanshu (198-135 BCE; silk floss and cloth in catties and bolts, grain in shi, plus marriage clauses), tribute quantities rise by at least 20% in real terms at every renegotiation that follows a Han internal shock (an imperial succession within 3 years, or the 154 BCE Rebellion of the Seven States) and are flat or falling after renegotiations that follow major Xiongnu raids without Han internal turmoil; a regression of log tribute growth on a victim-instability dummy is positive while the coefficient on a raider-victory dummy is non-positive.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the tabulated tribute schedules and event chronology compiled from Shiji 110 and Hanshu 94. Tribute tracking Xiongnu military success rather than Han instability kills it.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-05)
The heqin renegotiation record is documented (22 agreements; the 198 BCE founding terms; the 89 BCE escalation) and protection-racket pricing economics is an established general framework, but no source was located regressing tribute growth on Han-internal instability versus Xiongnu battlefield success; the one adjacent documented dynamic runs the other direction (Xiongnu-side succession crisis coinciding with Han gains). No prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-05).
- Heqin historiography overview (22 recorded agreements) — The renegotiation record
- 'Resisting Protection: Rackets, Resistance, and State Building' — The borrowed pricing framework
Predictions
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