Starting in Spain in the twelfth century, parliaments gradually spread over the Latin West. The paper quantifies the activity of medieval and early-modern parliaments, which also makes it possible to analyse the influence of this institutional innovation. In the early-modern period parliaments...

On the basis of a large (new) dataset of cities in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in the millennium between 800 and 1800, we try to provide an answer to the question why, during this millennium, the urban center of gravity moved from Iraq (or more generally the Arab world) to Western...