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- Title
Political fragmentation, rural-to-urban migration and urban growth patterns in western Eurasia, 800–1800.
- Authors
Cox, Gary W; Figueroa, Valentin
- Abstract
Prominent scholars argue that Europe's political fragmentation improved the security of property rights, thereby promoting growth. We explore a complementary mechanism: urban fragmentation—the proliferation of self-governing cities—helped emancipate labor, and freer labor promoted both faster and more correlated town growth. To test these hypotheses, we first show that polities with more self-governing cities offered more protection to runaway serfs against lordly recapture. We then show that more fragmented areas exhibited both faster and more correlated urban growth. While both the property rights and labor freedom mechanisms predict faster growth, only the latter predicts more highly correlated growth.
- Subjects
EURASIA; EMPLOYEE rights; URBAN growth; PROPERTY rights
- Publication
European Review of Economic History, 2021, Vol 25, Issue 2, p203
- ISSN
1361-4916
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/erehj/heaa008