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In this seminar, Prof. Gary Cox (Stanford) will present his joint work with Valentin Figueroa (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile). In their study, the authors use detailed biographical data on thousands of early modern book authors in four European countries (Britain, Iberia, Italy, and the Netherlands) to show that the knowledge economies in southern cities, while similar to their northwestern counterparts before the 17th century, thereafter diverged in three ways: (i) urban interactions became less predictive of output; (ii) clustering of elites in creative cities diminished; and (iii) urban productivity premia — the boost in output that authors exhibited when they moved into leading cities — declined. They argue that this divergence arose in large part because the Counter-Reformation increased censorship of key parts of the knowledge economy in the south but not in the northwest.
This event is organized by the Seminar on European Development in a Historical Perspective. It is co-sponsored by the Democracy and Its Critics Initiative led by CES Director Daniel Ziblatt to focus on both the history and contemporary shape of democracy in Europe.
