Military Conflict and the Economic Rise of Urban Europe
Military Conflict and the Economic Rise of Urban Europe∗ Mark Dincecco† Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato‡ December 5, 2013 Abstract We present new city-level evidence about the military origins of Europe’s economic “backbone,” the prosperous urban belt that runs from the Low Countries to northern Italy. Military conflict was a defining feature of pre-industrial Europe. The destructive effects of conflict were worse in the countryside, leading rural inhabitants to relocate behind urban fortifications. Conflict-related city population growth in turn had long- run economic consequences. Using GIS software, we construct a novel conflict exposure measure that computes city distances from nearly 300 major conflicts from 1000 to 1799. We find a significant, positive, and robust relationship between conflict exposure and historical city population growth. Next, we use luminosity data to construct a novel measure of current city-level economic activity. We show evidence that the economic legacy of historical conflict exposure endures to the present day. Keywords: conflict, city populations, historical legacy, economic development, GIS JEL codes: C20, O10, N40, N90, P48, R11 ∗We thank Johannes Buggle, Eltjo Buringh, William Clark, Philip Hoffman, James Morrow, Tommaso Nan- nicini, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Ugo Troiano, Jan Luiten van Zanden, and seminar participants at Birmingham, LSE, Michigan, Nottingham, UCL, the 2013 EHES Meeting, the 2013 IPES Meeting, the 2013 ISNIE Meeting, the 2013 Petralia Sottana Workshop, the 2013 PRIN Workshop at Bologna, and SMYE 2013 for valuable com- ments. We thank Jan Luiten van Zanden, Eltjo Buringh, and Maarten Bosker for generous data-sharing, and Giovanni Marin and Michael Rochlitz for excellent research assistance.
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