Filippo Manfredini*, Charles de Pierpont de Burnot**

*England’s demographic pressure in the late 1200s and early 1600s was strikingly similar, yet the outcomes diverged sharply: the former produced famine and Malthusian checks, while the latter inaugurated the Agricultural Revolution and the path to industrialization. This paper rationalizes this puzzle through a general equilibrium model of preindustrial England estimated on novel microdata on scholars affiliated with Oxford, Cambridge, and Gresham College. Agents are heterogeneous in land and human capital — positively correlated within the landlord class — linking the land and human capital markets through differential fertility: higher land rents raise landlord fertility,
channeling non-heir children into the scholar class and replenishing the knowledge stock. Before the printing press, knowledge depreciates rapidly and must be re-accumulated each generation, making scholarly investment countercyclically dependent on land scarcity. The printing press, modeled as a permanent reduction in knowledge depreciation, transforms knowledge into a durable stock, severs this dependence, and shifts the economy toward a self-reinforcing Boserupian regime in which knowledge accumulation raises the return to scholarly activity procyclically — resolving why identical demographic conditions produced opposite historical trajectories. Estimation via simulated method of moments will match historical series on wages, land rents, urbanization, and academic output.

**This chapter examines the persistent legacy of Roman integration in current trade linkages across Western Europe. Using a sample of 16,256 region pairs, it provides evidence that regions jointly integrated for a longer period within the Roman states trade significantly more with each other today. Part of this influence reflects subsequent political history, the current transport networks, which sometimes follow past Roman roads, as well as geographic features that may have induced trade without the Roman intervention, such as resource differences and geographic connectivity. However, a remaining sizable part of the estimated net effect of the Roman rule is attributable to cultural convergence measured by preference and linguistic similarities. These findings highlight a long-lasting influence of past political and network (infra)structures on the European market integration.