Espaces privilégiés : productivité agraire et zones d'approvisionnement des villes dans l'Europe préindustrielle

Privileged Spaces: Agricultural Productivity and Urban Provisioning Zones in Pre-industrial Europe. G. Grantham. Urbanized regions constituted the privileged economic space of pre-industrial societies. It was here that the gains from the division of labour were most fully realized. This paper investigates the question whether agricultural productivity set an effective limit to the extent of such gains of constraining the size of pre-industrial cities. Simulations of the provisioning regions for cities of different sizes using contemporary input coefficients indicate that zones defined by direct marketing of produce by farmers could readily support cities up to 250,000. The binding constraint on cities below this size was demographic; above this size it was the cost of organizing a stable long-distance trade in foodstuffs. Productivity was highest within the zone of direct marketing. These findings suggest that pre-industrial agricultural productivity was determined more by commercial opportunity than autonomous technological change.Grantham George W., Sarget Marie-Noëlle. Espaces privilégiés : productivité agraire et zones d'approvisionnement des villes dans l'Europe préindustrielle. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 52ᵉ année, N. 3, 1997. pp. 695-725