Military Conflict and the Economic Rise of Urban Europe

Abstract: We present new city-level evidence about the military origins of Europe's economic "backbone," the prosperous urban belt that runs from the Low Countries to northern Italy. Military conflict was a defining feature of pre-industrial Europe. The destructive effects of conflict were worse in the countryside, leading rural inhabitants to relocate behind urban fortifications. Conflict-related urbanization in turn had persistent economic effects. Using GIS software, we construct a novel conflict exposure measure that computes city distances from nearly 300 major conflicts from 1000 to 1799. We find that conflict exposure had significant, positive, and robust impacts on historical urbanization. Next, we use luminosity data to construct a novel measure of current city-level economic activity. We show robust evidence that the economic legacy of historical conflict exposure endures to the present day.