This paper empirically investigates why, between 800 and 1800, the urban center of gravity moved from the Islamic world to Europe. Using a large new city-specific data set covering Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, we unravel the role of geography and institutions in determining long-run city development in the two regions. We find that the main reasons for the Islamic world's stagnation and Europe's long-term success are specific to each region: any significant positive interaction between cities in the two regions hampered by their different main religious orientation. Together, the long-term consequences of a different choice of main transport mode (camel versus ship) and the development of forms of local participative government in Europe that made cities less dependent on the state explain why Europe's urban development eventually outpaced that in the Islamic world.

This article quantifies the activities of medieval and early modern parliaments. It traces the long‐term evolution of this European institution, and offers a first pass at analysing its impact on long‐term economic development. Starting in Spain in the twelfth century, parliaments gradually spread over the Latin west between 1200 and 1500. In the early modern period, parliaments declined in influence in southern and central Europe and further gained in importance in the Netherlands and Britain, resulting in an institutional ‘Little Divergence’ between 1500 and 1800. We discuss the background of this phenomenon in detail. Moreover, by analysing the effects of parliamentary activity on city growth we find that these differences in institutional development help to explain the economic divergence between north‐western and southern and central Europe.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The empirical literature on city size distributions has mainly focused on the USA. The first major contribution of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the evolution and structure of the West-German city size distribution. Using a unique annual data set that covers most of the 20th century for 62 of West-Germany's largest cities, we look at the evolution of both the city size distribution as a whole and each city separately. The West-German case is of particular interest as it has undergone major shocks, most notably WWII. Our data set allows us to identify these shocks and provide evidence on the effects of these `quasi-natural experiments' on the city size distribution. The second major contribution of this paper is that we perform unit-root tests on individual German city sizes using a substantial number of observations to analyze the evolution of the individual cities that make up the German city size distribution. Our main findings are twofold. First, WWII has had a major and lasting impact on the city size distribution. Second, the overall city size distribution does not adhere to Zipf's Law. This second finding is largely based on the results of unit root tests for individual cities to test for Gibrat's Law, the latter being a requirement for Zipf's Law to hold for the overall city-size distribution. Together these two findings are consistent with theories emphasizing increasing returns to scale in city growth. Terms of use: Documents inJEL Code: R12, O18.