“…The argument of a (urban)-demand-driven agricultural development, which stressed the role of the cities' growth in agricultural progress, has been used by several other scholars to explain why Northwestern Europe was the world's most productive region in agriculture until 1800 (see e.g. de Vries, 1974;Boserup, 1981;Wrigley, 1987Wrigley, , 1988Grantham 1989Grantham , 1999Kussmaul, 1990;Hoffman, 1996;van Zanden, 1999;Allen, 1998Allen, , 2000Allen, and 2008bWeisdorf, 2006;Campbell, 2010) (Kopsidis and Wolf, 2012).…”