Introduction: During the period spanning 1000 to 1800, the Western world ascended to global dominance through a series of transformative revolutions: the "Urban Revolution", the "Commercial Revolution", the "Humanistic Revolution," the "Scientific Revolution," the "Enlightenment", and, finally, the "Industrial Revolution." This project seeks to explore the pivotal role of knowledge institutions, such as universities and academies, as well as the contributions of scholars and literati in this historical ascent. We aim to determine whether the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual advancement were essential drivers of this global primacy or if they were merely a consequence of economic enrichment.
Research Question: Our central question is: Were knowledge institutions like universities and academies indispensable for the rise of the West during this period? What are the features of these institutions which paved the way to growth? How were scholars and literati pivotal in shaping this development? Alternatively, could the enthusiasm for knowledge be seen as a mere byproduct of economic prosperity?
Database and Methodology: To address these critical questions, we will assemble a comprehensive database of individuals associated with universities and scientific societies across Europe during the specified timeframe. Our emphasis on a European perspective is deliberate, as it enables us to uncover mobility and network patterns that are crucial for understanding the broader global context.
Funding:
This ambitious research program has been made possible by generous funding from the European Union. Since 2021, we have received an ERC Advanced Grant, which supports the in-depth exploration of this fascinating period in history.
Mr. Filippo Manfredini 
, Prof. David de la Croix,
Dr. Mara Vitale , Dr. Matthew Curtis ,
Ms. Rossana Scebba ,
Ms. Chiara Zanardello .
by Laeticia Theunis by Lauranne Garitte |
Catholic Censorship and the Demise of Knowledge Production. Censorship makes new ideas less available to others, but also reduces the number of people choosing to develop non-compliant ideas. We propose a new method to measure the effect of censorship on knowledge growth, accounting for the agents' choice between compliant and non-compliant occupations. We apply our method to the Catholic Church's censorship of books written by members of Italian universities and academies over the period 1400-1750. We highlight new facts: once censorship was introduced, censored authors were of better quality than the non-censored authors, but this gap shrank over time, and the intensity of censorship decreased over time. We use these facts to identify the deep parameters of a novel endogenous growth model that links censorship to knowledge diffusion and occupational choice. We conclude that the average log publication per scholar in Italy would have been 43% higher if censorship had not been present, while the effect of adverse macroeconomic processes is almost four times smaller. The induced reallocation of talents towards compliant activities explains half the effect of censorship. Catholic Censorship and the Demise of Knowledge Production in Early Modern Italy, The Economic Journal 133(656), 2899-2924 [with F. Blasutto]
Right panel: Distribution of published authors by quality. Red: censored. Green: non-censored |
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Agglomeration and sorting patterns among medieval and early modern scholars testify to a functioning academic market in Europe. Such market forces shaped the geographic distribution of upper-tail human capital, and contributed to bolstering European universities at the dawn of the Humanistic and Scientific Revolutions. The video on the right maps the university-scholar dyads over time. Red dots correspond to universities. Blue dots represent scholars' birthplaces. Size of blue dots are function of publications. The dashed lines link academic scholars' birth place to the university for which they taught through the least costly path, using the human mobility index of Ömer Özak. The Academic Market and the Rise of Universities in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1000-1800) Journal of the European Economic Association 22(4), 1541–1589 [with F. Docquier, A. Fabre and R. Stelter]
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In a related paper, Chiara Zanardello proposes a comparison of market forces between the past and today in the case of Italy. She estimates the strength of different factors: gravity (distance), agglomeration (scholars are attracted to higher quality universities), selection (better scholars travel longer distances), and sorting (the better the scholar, the more the quality of universities is weighted). She finds that all of these factors have an effect, although sorting was stronger during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance than today. She also find a greater expected utility for scholars in choosing private universities over public ones, through a consistent nesting procedure. Zanardello, Chiara, Market forces in Italian Academia today (and yesterday) Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04579-0
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Human capital transmission and Nepotism. From the Bernoullis to the Eulers, families of scholars have been common in academia since the foundation of the first medieval universities. In this paper, we have shown that this was the result of two factors: First, scholar's sons benefited from their fathers' connections to be nominated to academic positions in their father's university. Before 1800, one in ten scholars' sons were nepotic scholars. They became academics even when their underlying human capital was 2.4 standard deviations lower than that of marginal outsider scholars. Second, scholars transmitted their sons a set of underlying endowments, i.e., human capital and abilities, that were crucial for the production of scientific knowledge. Our estimates suggest a large intergenerational elasticity of such endowments, as high as 0.6.
Nepotism vs. Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in Academia (1088-1800) Journal of Economic Growth 29, 469–514
[with M. Goñi]
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One theory for the rise of the West argues that universities and academics played a central role. However, there have be no quantitative studies of historical academia and growth for Europe as a whole. This paper develops a methodology to measure academic productivity using a large novel database of scholars 1000--1800. We find that the output of academics predicts 19th century economic growth. We provide European-wide evidence that the science paved the way for the Industrial Revolution, and that theological values and legal systems mattered for economic development. |
Seeds of Knowledge: Premodern Scholarship, Academic Fields, and European Growth, CEPR Working Paper 18321 [with M. Curtis]
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We examine the relationship between family size and human capital among academics in Northern Europe over the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution. To measure scholars' human capital, we develop a novel and consistent approach based on their publications. We nd that scholars with a high number of publications shifted from having more siblings to having fewer than others during the rst half of the 18th century. This shift is consistent with an evolutionary growth model in which the initial Malthusian constraint leads the high human capital families to reproduce more, before being endogenously substituted by a Beckerian constraint with a child qualityquantity tradeo. Our results support a reinterpretation of the Galor and Moav (2002)'s approach, in which the decline of Malthusian constraints is linked to human capital accumulation during the 18th century. |
The Emergence of the Child Quantity-Quality Tradeoff
- insights from early modern academics, LIDAM/IRES Discussion Paper 2023 / 15
[with T. Baudin]
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The Network of Universities and the Protestant Reformation. For a long time, the European academic world was an interconnected network with scholars moving positions at will. With the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the academic world became divided. Few people held positions in both worlds. We show in this paper that this religious divide had asymmetric consequences. The Catholic South lost centrality in the network of universities, and this was not fully compensated by the creation of new universities by the very dynamic Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Publications in the Catholic world peaked at their pre-reform level. On the Protestant side, the converted universities tended to gain centrality, while newly created universities quickly came to enjoy a central position, in particular in the Lutheran and Calvinist worlds. This ascension to primacy goes together with higher and rising publication levels. Winners and Losers from the Protestant Reformation: An Analysis of the Network of European Universities IRES Discussion Paper 2020-029 [with P. Morault]
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I think it can be useful for potential applicants to the ERC to show the various stages of my project with a summary evaluation by the panel. By sharing the summary evaluations, I do not want expectations of uniform treatment to be formed: one should know that the discussion in the panel contributes a lot to the final grade and decision to fund, and all this dynamic cannot always be transferred in written comments. A different panel can take a different view (as you will see), and what helped the proposal get funded might not be what will help some other proposal.
Part B1 in 2016
Part B2 in 2016
Part B1 in 2017
Part B2 in 2017
Part B1 in 2018
Part B2 in 2018
Part B1 in 2019
Part B2 in 2019
Is it feasible to build a database of members of knowledge institutions before 1800 in Europe ? Two "pilot" studies have been carried out, testing the best case (well documented universities and academies in Germany and The Netherlands), and the worst case (university with little existing information in France, Aix-en-Provence). In the first study we collected vital dates and activity periods for 10k scholars using the information offered by Dutch and German universities. In the second study, we consider a university that has neither a ready-to-use website nor published biographies of their professors. Here, we combine knowledge from books written on their history and published cartularia with local biographical dictionaries. Starting from none, we identified 476 scholars at this university, attesting to the feasibility of the data collection effort.
These two studies also carry a message on their own.
Leaders and Laggards in Life Expectancy among European Scholars from the Sixteenth to the Early Twentieth Century, Demography 58, 111–135 [with R. Stelter and M. Myrskylä]
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A la découverte des professeurs de l’ancienne université d’Aix, depuis ses origines à 1793, Annales du Midi, 131(307-308), 379-402 [avec A. Fabre]
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Fabre
The first one looks at apprenticeship, how it is related to knowledge diffusion in a Malthusian growth model, and why Europe developed specific bottom-up apprenticeship institutions. The second paper builds a large sample of famous people, studies their longevity, and defends the view that human capital might have been key in triggering the take-off of the West.
Clans, Guilds, and Markets: Apprenticeship Institutions and Growth in the Pre-Industrial Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133, 1-70, 2018 [with M. Doepke and J. Mokyr]
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The Longevity of Famous People from Hammurabi to Einstein, Journal of Economic Growth, 20, 263–303, 2015 [with O. Licandro]
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Licandro
