Why do leading actors invest in costly projects that they expect will not yield appreciable
military or economic benefits? We identify a causal process in which concerns about
legitimacy produce attempts to secure dominance in arenas of high symbolic value by
investing wealth and labor into unproductive (in direct military and economic terms) goods
and performances. We provide evidence for our claims through a comparative study of the
American Project Apollo and the Ming Dynasty's treasure fleets. We locate our argument …

In the course of preparing this article, we researched numerous alternative explanations and
tracked down detail to a more granular level than space constraints allow us to demonstrate
in the main text. Consequently, we have relegated many of these details to this Appendix,
much as quantitative scholars often put descriptive data, coding decisions, and robustness
checks in appendices and supplemental information. We first provide additional information
about our Case Methodology, including more detail on our secondary (and primary) source …