Bridging the gap: agrarian roots of economic divergence in Eurasia up to the late middle ages

Recently there is a revived interest in national accounts for pre-industrial cultures, especially in the late-medieval period. There is one conclusion that can already be drawn from this new stream of research: per capita income turns out to have been higher than what had been assumed before. This revision of income estimates for the late medieval Eurasia has serious implications for research on ancient economies as well. Either the income estimates for the ancient world had to be updated and modified upwards, or, if the present numbers still turn out to be correct, we have to face the inevitable conclusion that, however unlikely it is, significant economic growth must have occurred during the early middle ages. Based on recent research on the field, however, we can safely argue that it is the estimates that need to be revised rather than it is a pre-industrial economic revolution that has to be invented. In this paper our main objective is to give a review of the present state of the issue. We compare a set of recent estimates of medieval and ancient income levels and find that until about the 11th century, ancient economies had remarkably similar per capita income paired with strong similarities in terms of economic structure, more specifically a dominant position of agriculture. It is therefore hardly surprising that agricultural development was an important indicator of per capita income in those economies and agricultural crises played an important role in the fluctuations of per capita income. In the period of our research two crises stand out, i.e. in the 6th century (the Justinian plague) and the economic crisis of the 11th century. However, whereas all countries seem to have suffered to a more or less similar degree in the 6th century without experiencing permanent deviations in terms of the level of per capita income, this homogeneity seems to have changed in the 11th century. In the latter period, the economies of Northwestern Europe increased their per capita income growth, while the Middle East and Eastern Asia began to decline or at best remained stable, which, according to many present studies, seems to be the start of the Great Divergence. Two factors may have contributed to this agricultural divergence in the 11 th as compared to the 6 th century. First, a relatively low wage to land rent ratio in China and the Middle East. This was already in existence …