According to the consensus view it was physical capital accumulation that primarily drove economic growth during the early socialist period. Growth models incorporating both human and physical capital accumulation (Caballe and Santos 1993, Barro and Sala-i-Martin 2004) lead to the conclusion...

On the basis of a newly constructed dataset of the national accounts of the province of Holland in the period between 1347 and 1800, we analyze the pattern of growth in this region, which was one of the most prosperous and dynamic parts of the pre modern European economy. We demonstrate that...