Charting the “Rise of the West” 425

FIGURE 2
BOOK PRODUCTION PER CAPITA IN WESTERN EUROPE, 501–600 TO 1701–1800

Sources: Tables 3 and 4.

facilitated reading. Finally, around 800, modern punctuation, uniform

script, and division into paragraphs were introduced, all also greatly
helping the reader to understand the text quickly.33 In sum, a new
information technology was created, which, as Ulrich Blum and
Leonard Dudley argued, helped launch the European economy in the
period that followed. The growth of book production shown in Tables 1
and 3 is generally consistent with such a view: initially growth rates are
spectacular, especially during the eighth and ninth centuries, a growth
that is accompanied by the spread of book production from a small core
region in Italy to Western Europe as a whole. Moreover, thanks to other
innovations in the high Middle Ages (in particular, the substitution of
paper for parchment, but also the spread of more efficient ways of hand
copying manuscripts, such as the pecia system) and the fifteenth century
(the printing press), the price of books was greatly reduced, providing
additional impulse to the growth process.34 What is striking in Figure 2,

33
See Blum and Dudley, “Standardized Latin,” who argued that these innovations—and in
their view in particular the standardization of Latin in 800—launched not only the book but a
new, uniform, and more efficient form of writing, helping to promote European economy in the
centuries after ca. 950.
34
Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers. With the pecia system, university
stationers in high medieval Paris and Bologna hired out for a short period a loose quire
containing texts of books to those who wanted to copy a manuscript; this system greatly sped up
the process of copying, as more people could now be working on the same manuscript at one
time.

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 426 Buringh and Van Zanden

which shows the long-term trends in per capita book production in

three different regions and in Western Europe as a whole, is how
synchronized the long-term changes in these different parts were, at
least from the seventh century on. The spectacular growth of book
production occurred in all regions (with only one or two exceptions,
such as Ireland after 1000) at approximately the same pace, testifying to
the unity of the Western European experience.
A closer look reveals, however, that the process was more complex.
Supply and demand changed fundamentally in the millennium from 500
to 1500. During a large part of the Middle Ages, a close link existed
between the monastic movement and book production: monasteries
were not only the most important sources of supply, but also of demand.
Performing their religious duties and studying the word of God were the
core business of these powerhouses of prayer. Because, from early
Christian times, even minor deviations from official formulae were
believed to render a religious service ineffective, written instructions for
the correct wording were essential, and hence the permanent monastic
and ecclesiastical emphasis on written texts. In the early Middle Ages,
when markets were scarce, books had to be made in-house from the
monastic surplus of agricultural products. These links are illustrated by
Michael Gorman, whose writing on the production of manuscripts in
Monte Amiata, one of the most important monasteries in eleventh-
century Tuscany, Italy, describes the close interconnection between the
financial position of a monastery and its library:
“It is worthwhile to highlight the abbey’s economic history because manuscript
production coincides with favorable economic factors. An active scriptorium
depends upon a great library, full of exemplars, and both require significant
financial resources. Many peasants must work hard to raise the sheep, make the
parchment and produce the wealth to be consumed by the monks toiling away in
the abbey’s library and scriptorium.”35

We may therefore hypothesize that during the early Middle Ages book
production was to a large extent driven by the number and size of
monasteries, which was in turn determined by the share of the
agricultural surplus that regions and countries directed to this part of the
economy.
To test this hypothesis, we derived estimates of the numbers of
monasteries in the different regions and centuries from several sources
(Table 5), which can be plotted against book production in the same

35
Gorman, “Manuscript Books at Monte Amiata,” p. 229.

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 Charting the “Rise of the West” 427
TABLE 5
ESTIMATED NUMBERS OF MONASTERIES IN WESTERN EUROPE
(sixth to fifteenth centuries)
Area Sixth Seventh Eighth Ninth Tenth

Central Europea 0 0 0 0 16
Bohemia 0 0 0 0 17
British Islesb 236 460 463 437 437
France 586 988 1,240 1,636 2,091
Belgium 0 53 68 70 88
Netherlands 0 2 4 7 13
Germany 0 138 622 824 1,129
Switzerland 10 19 37 71 104
Austria 12 11 70 99 113
Italy 291 306 495 704 995
Iberiac 58 117 170 537 1,340
Western Europe 1,193 2,094 3,168 4,385 6,343
New foundations (1,193) 1,021 1,284 1,533 2,397
Increase in percent 86 58 44 48

Eleventh Twelfth Thirteenth Fourteenth Fifteenth

Central Europea 79 458 718 695 690

Bohemia 32 113 119 107 113
British Islesb 526 1,325 1,530 1,447 1,333
France 5,051 8,104 8,564 8,189 7,554
Belgium 175 313 364 361 335
Netherlands 20 68 189 336 679
Germany 1,652 2,873 3,110 2,967 2,752
Switzerland 144 247 321 337 333
Austria 186 344 406 413 372
Italy 2,072 2,990 3,405 3,416 3,333
Iberiac 2,549 3,290 3,223 3,003 2,876
Western Europe 12,485 20,125 21,948 21,270 20,369
New foundations 6,776 8,888 3,836 1,516 1,226
Increase in percent 91 63 17 6 4
a
Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Scandinavian countries.
b
England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
c
Spain and Portugal.
Sources: For the Netherlands, see Schoengen, Monasticon Batavum (i), (ii), and (iii); for the
Iberian Peninsula, adapted from Vaquero, Martinez, and Gatell, Diccionario; and for the other
areas, based on Cottineau, Répertoire, though adapted for Germany, Austria, Switzerland,
Bohemia, and central Europe; all countries with a decay rate of 10 percent per century; for more
information, see Buringh, Medieval Manuscript.

time and place (see Figure 3).36 The correlation between the two
variables is fairly consistent, stressing the important role monasteries
played in this period.

36
Zero values for either the number of monasteries or book production have not been
included in Figure 3.

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 428 Buringh and Van Zanden

FIGURE 3
BOOK PRODUCTION AND THE NUMBER OF MONASTERIES SIXTH TO FIFTEENTH
CENTURIES
(log-scale)

Sources: Tables 1 and 5.

The development of monasteries in the Middle Ages shows a pattern of

continuous growth during the first half of the period, when more than a
thousand were added to the stock each century, followed by a boom in the
tenth to twelfth centuries. The boom is partially explained by the reform
movement begun by Cluny in the early tenth century, which gradually
spread to other parts of the Latin West. Apparently, these reforms
enhanced trust in monasteries and in the services they supplied, such as
prayers for the souls of the deceased, resulting in increased investment in
this form of religious overhead. In addition, after the demise of the
Carolingian Empire, parts of Western Europe went through a political
crisis, with states collapsing and law and order vanishing; to some extent
the church and its institutions (such as the monasteries) became an
alternative center of power, which tried to pacify the countryside.37 This
may also have enhanced the status of monasteries and drawn funds to their
activities. Increased powers of local lords (such as monasteries) vis-à-vis
the rural population may have also played a role, by allowing monasteries
37
See Van Zanden, “Economic Growth,” for a number of hypotheses about these links
between the religious revival of the tenth to twelfth centuries and institutional and economic
change.

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 Charting the “Rise of the West” 429

to claim a greater share of the agricultural surplus. The tenth and eleventh
centuries witnessed the rise of the local lords who were increasingly able
to control the countryside around their castle and who used their power to
impose new taxes and duties or to reimpose old ones.38 Monasteries often
acted as local lords. The combination of these changes caused a dramatic
growth in the monastic movement from 900 to 1300, which greatly
increased the production of books. After about 1300 this rapid growth
came to a halt, and thereafter the number of monasteries in the Latin West
stabilized at some 21,000 until 1500.39
During the height of the Middle Ages other sources of demand—the
cities, universities, and more generally, the growth of literacy among the
lay population—were becoming increasingly important.40 To test the ideas
that book production before the eleventh to twelfth centuries was driven
by the monastic movement and that afterwards urban factors took over,
we have tried to perform a regression for book production on the
following explanatory variables: the number of monasteries (as shown in
Table 5), estimated urbanization ratios from Paul Bairoch, Jean Batou, and
Pierre Chèvre (Table 6) and the number of universities (Table 7).41 One of
the problems with these regressions is that some observations are zero,
making it difficult to use logs. On the other hand, the growth of book
production is so spectacular that it would normally be preferable to
specify the model in log terms so that observations about the later period
do not dominate the regressions. Two different sets of regressions were
carried out: panel data regressions using only the nonzero observations,
and a procedure that makes it possible to integrate the zeros, Tobit
regressions.42 Moreover, two different versions of the hypothesis were

38
Fossier, “Rural Economy,” pp. 50–53; see also the discussion on the feudal revolution in
this period: Bisson, “Feudal Revolution”; and Wickham, “Debate.”
39
Only the Netherlands was an exception to this trend, as its numbers continue to grow; the
rapid expansion of relatively small and mainly urban monasteries during the fifteenth century is
probably related to the Devotio Moderna of that period, which was concentrated in the northern
Netherlands.
40
Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers.
41
Bairoch, Batou, and Chèvre, La population, estimates show many gaps, which were
intrapolated by us; when no estimates were available at all, we assumed that the city was below
the 10,000 inhabitant threshold; all estimates for the period before 1000 are extremely tentative.
We are aware that these estimates are not as definitive as they might be, especially for Spain.
We estimated two sets of urbanization: for the Christian part of Spain and for the country as a
whole. Our data set does not really cover manuscript production in the Muslim part of the
country, which was more urbanized and developed; for that reason, we also included a dummy
variable for Spain in the regressions, which also helps to neutralize possible biases in the
estimates of urbanization ratio.
42
The Tobit regressions also use logs (for monasteries and book production per capita), and
the logs of the zero-values are artificially set at zero, which may create a small bias (but the
number of zero observations is small). Because Tobit regressions with fixed effects are

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 430 Buringh and Van Zanden
TABLE 6
ESTIMATES OF URBANIZATION RATIO, SIXTH TO FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
(percentage of population living in cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants)
Area Sixth Seventh Eighth Ninth Tenth

Central Europe 0.0 0.0

Bohemia 0.0 0.0
British Isles 0.4 2.4
France 0.5a 2.1 a 2.9 3.6
Belgium 0.0 3.0
Netherlands 0.0 0.0
Germany 0.9 a 2.5 a 3.5 4.8
Switzerland 0.0 0.0
Austria 0.0 0.0
Italy 3a 1.8 a 3.0 a 4.3 9.9
Iberia b 0.0/4.5 a 0.6/10.0 2.4/13.5
European average c 0.6 a 1.8 a 3.5 4.8

Eleventh Twelfth Thirteenth Fourteenth Fifteenth

Central Europe 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.6 1.6

Bohemia 0.6 0.9 2.0 4.3 5.9
British Isles 3.1 2.2 2.2 2.5 2.1
France 4.9 5.7 5.5 6.1 6.7
Belgium 9.9 12.5 15.0 26.2 29.6
Netherlands 1.0 2.2 4.1 4.7 10.4
Germany 5.8 5.3 4.7 5.0 5.0
Switzerland 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.7 2.4
Austria 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.3 1.3
Italy 14.3 13.0 13.2 13.6 13.1
Iberia b 3.5/16.4 3.2/13.2 5.6/36.2 7.6/23.3 9.6/13.8
European average c 5.4 5.6 6.1 6.7 6.9
a
Own tentative estimates extrapolated from Bairoch, Batou, and Chèvre, La population; these
figures should be seen as indicating some value close to zero; for Spain before 1200, see Glick,
Islamic and Christian Spain.
b
First figure for Iberia is based on urbanization in Christian part of Spain only; during
reconquista urbanization rapidly rises as Muslim cities are included.
c
European average including Muslim Spain.
Source: Bairoch, Batou, and Chèvre, La population.

tested: the first model estimated all coefficients for the period 500–1500
as a whole, the second tested for changes in the coefficients of
monasteries and the urbanization ratio before and after 1000 (Table 8).43

problematic, we present the results of the random effects only; cf. Wooldridge, Econometric
Analysis, chaps. 15 and 16; the OLS-estimates were without fixed effects; including century
effects would in both cases reduce the coefficient of universities, because this variable also
captures the time trend; including country fixed effects only marginally changes the estimated
coefficients.
43
Because there were no universities before 1000, the coefficient of that variable could not be
tested for the first period.

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 Charting the “Rise of the West” 431
TABLE 7
CUMULATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF FOUNDATION DATES OF UNIVERSITIES IN
WESTERN EUROPE, TWELFTH TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
Fifteenth Fifteenth
Area <Twelfth Twelfth Thirteenth Fourteenth (i) (ii)

Central Europe 0 0 0 3 3 5
Bohemia 0 0 0 1 1 1
British Isles 0 1 2 2 3 5
France 0 1 4 10 13 15
Belgium 0 0 0 0 1 1
Netherlands 0 0 0 0 0 0
Germany 0 0 0 3 6 11
Switzerland 0 0 0 0 0 1
Austria 0 0 0 1 1 1
Italy 1a 4 10 17 17 17
Iberia 0 0 4 7 7 9
Latin West 1 6 20 44 52 66

Sixteenth Sixteenth Seventeenth Seventeenth Eighteenth Eighteenth

(i) (ii) (i) (ii) (i) (ii)

Central Europe 6 6 8 9 10 11
Bohemia 1 2 2 2 2 2
British Isles 5 7 7 7 7 7
France 15 15 16 16 16 16
Belgium 1 1 1 1 1 1
Netherlands 0 3 5 5 5 5
Germany 14 17 20 22 24 24
Switzerland 1 1 1 1 1 1
Austria 1 2 3 4 4 4
Italy 17 17 17 17 17 17
Iberia 9 9 9 9 9 9
Latin West 70 80 89 93 96 97
a
The University in Italy prior to the twelfth century is Salerno (medicine), presumed date of
foundation in ninth century.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 23, p. 858.

Table 8 shows the results of these regressions, which explain the log
of per capita book production in country x in period y by the log of the
number of monasteries (per capita), the number of universities (again
per capita), the urbanization ratio, and a dummy for Spain. If we take
the Middle Ages as a whole, the three factors we have data for—
universities, monasteries, and urbanization—together explain almost 60
percent of the variation in per capita book production (first two
columns). All coefficients show the expected signs, independent of the
specification. Dividing the period in two shows the changes in the
determinants for book production: the link to monasteries is very
strong in the first half of the period but less so during the Late

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 432 Buringh and Van Zanden
TABLE 8
PANEL DATA REGRESSION ON PER CAPITA PRODUCTION OF MANUSCRIPT
BOOKS
Only Non-Zeros Tobit, Random Effects

Method (1) (2) (1) (2)

Lmonasteries 0.77*** — 2.07*** —

Lmonasteries (before 1000) — 1.00*** — 2.20***
Lmonasteries (from 1000 onwards) — 0.51** — 0.51
Universities 1.21** 0.93** 1.19** 0.93*
Urbanizationa 0.11** — 0.10*** —
Urbanization (before 1000) — 0.15* — 0.32**
Urbanization (from 1000 onwards) — 0.09*** — 0.09**
Iberia 0.07 — 0.83 —
Iberia (before 1000) — 1.01* — 3.40***
Iberia (from1000 onwards) — –0.14 — –0.14
R^2 0.56 0.63 — —
N 92 92 110 110
* significant at 5 percent level.
** significant at 1 percent level.
*** significant at 0.1 percent level.
Sources: Tables 3 (book production), 5 (monasteries), 6 (urbanization), and 7 (universities);
book production and monasteries are in logs (in all specifications), the other variables are not in
logs; the number of observations for the Tobit regressions are larger because it enables us to
include the observations with zero book production; we included a dummy for Spain because
we only capture book production in the Christian part of the country.

Middle Ages. In both periods the coefficient of the urbanization index is

positive; it is somewhat surprising that this coefficient is larger for the
early period than for the second half of the Middle Ages (but levels of
urbanization are much lower in the first half of the period). The
regressions confirm the hypotheses found in the literature about the
importance of monasteries during the early Middle Ages and of
universities and cities from 1000 to 1500, but they also show that even
before 1000 urbanization mattered for book production.

BOOK PRODUCTION AND LITERACY: FROM 1450 TO 1800

How to explain the significant increase in book production and

consumption in the centuries following the invention of moveable type
printing in the 1450s? The effect of the new technology (and important
technological changes in the production of paper) was that
from the 1470s on, book prices declined very rapidly. This had a
number of effects: consumption per literate individual increased, but
it also became more desirable and less costly to become literate.
Moreover, economies of scale in the printing industry led to further
price reductions stimulating even more growth in book consumption.

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 Charting the “Rise of the West” 433

Given these interactions between supply and demand, it is difficult

to separate the different factors involved. One way to at least partially
circumvent the problem is by using the figures of book consumption
to estimate the development of literacy. The rapid growth of book
consumption can be explained by the increase of literacy and the change
in the number of books consumed per literate person. Data for
development of literacy in the period before 1800 and quite weak, as the
recent set of estimates produced by Robert Allen demonstrate; for 1500,
for example, his estimates are based on the urbanization rate of the
various countries, in combination with the assumption that literacy in
the countryside was 5 percent and in the cities 23 percent.44 His literacy
rate for 1500 is therefore a direct function of the urbanization rate,
which may help to explain why it does not add to the explanation of
economic performance in the early modern period. Joerg Baten and Jan
Luiten van Zanden have argued that more sophisticated measures of
human capital formation, such as book consumption, do a much better
job in explaining growth in this period.45 Because literacy will probably
continue to play an important role in this debate, we aim to convert the
figures of per capita book consumption into estimates of the literacy
rate in this period. We used the demand equation b = Į * ȕ * p İ to
translate the figures for b—book consumption per capita in different
countries and periods—into estimates of ȕ, the rate of literacy. The
other variables were: estimates of the development of p, the relative
book prices (book prices deflated by a cost of living index, taken from
van Zanden and Gregory Clark;46) and an estimate of the price elasticity
of demand for books (of 1.4) taken from contemporary literature;47 Į is
a constant derived for the Netherlands in the eighteenth century,
because we have independent estimates of the level of literacy there.48
A into limitation of this approach is that income effects are not taken
account. In large parts of Europe, real wages did decline in the long run,

44
Allen, “Progress and Poverty,” p. 415.
45
Baten and Van Zanden, “Book Production.”
46
Van Zanden, “Common Workmen”; and Clark, “Lifestyles.”
47
The elasticity of demand for books is from Ringstad, “Demand for Books,” which has a
discussion of the different estimates for the price elasticity of demand; the value of –1.4 was
suggested by a number of studies cited.
48
It is of course possible that the relationship between literacy and book consumption differs
between countries, because there is a higher propensity to buy books per literate individual in
for example the Protestant countries than in the Catholic countries; the fact that in 1800 the
estimates presented here for the Catholic countries are generally somewhat lower than those of
Allen (Italy being the exception here), suggests that this may have played a role and that the
actual level of literacy in those countries may have been somewhat higher than presented in
Table 9.

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 434 Buringh and Van Zanden
TABLE 9
ESTIMATES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RATE OF LITERACY COMPARED
WITH THOSE OF ALLEN, 1451–1500 TO 1751–1800
Allen Allen
Area 1500 1451–1500 1501–1600 1601–1700 1701–1800 1800
Great Britain 6 5 16 53 54 53
Ireland — 0 0 3 21 —
France 7 6 19 29 29 37
Belgium 10 10 17 25 13 49
Netherlands 10 17 12 53 85 68
Germany 6 9 16 31 38 35
Italy 9 15 18 23 23 22
Spain 9 3 4 5 8 20
Sweden — 1 1 23 48 —
Poland 6 0 0 3 5 21
Western Europe — 12 18 25 31 —
Sources: Table 4 and Allen, “Progress and Poverty.”

the exceptions being the Low Countries and England where the decline
was limited and per capita real incomes probably increased. Ignoring
this effect means that we perhaps overestimate the growth of literacy in
the North Sea area, or alternatively underestimate its increase in the rest
of Europe.
The long-term trends also identified by Allen—a rise of literacy
from about 10 percent in 1500 to one-third three centuries later—
is also evident from these estimates, but there are a differences between
the two sets of estimates. The comparison suggests that Allen may
have overestimated literacy in Spain and Poland at about 1500, and
probably underestimated it in the Low Countries and Italy in the same
period.49 Other long-term trends known from the literature, such as the
significant rise of literacy in Great Britain during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, followed by stagnation during the eighteenth
century, are also clearly found in the estimates in Table 9.50 Perhaps
most worrying is the estimated decline of literacy in Belgium in the
eighteenth century, which may be due to the underestimation of
consumption per capita; because of the growing importance of the
international trade in books, the consumption estimates for the small
countries are weaker than the estimates of production there. The overall
pattern shows a strong increase in the North Sea area (including
Sweden), stagnation on the southern periphery (Spain), and slow

49
In fact, the estimates published here are probably still too low for the Low Countries; see
Van Zanden, “Common Workmen.”
50
Stephens, “Literacy in England.”

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 Charting the “Rise of the West” 435

increases in Italy and Poland.51 A related conclusion that can be derived

from this is that the thirtyfold increase in European per capita
production from 1450–1500 to 1700–1800 can be decomposed in two
elements: a tenfold increase caused by falling book prices and a
(slightly less than) threefold increase in literacy.
Falling book prices dominated the growth of book production, but
the pattern of increased divergence within Western Europe cannot be
explained by this, because book prices declined everywhere. In the
working paper version of this article, we have attempted to explain this
“little divergence” within Europe, but due to the limitations of the
data set and problems of endogeneity of the independent variables (is
income growth leading to higher levels of literacy, or is literacy leading
to income growth?), the results are difficult to interpret. One variable
that correlated very strongly with literacy and book consumption was
Protestantism, which in itself was able to explain almost all of the
difference in literacy between northwestern Europe (England, the
Netherlands, and Sweden) and the rest of the subcontinent. The question
remains to what extent the growth of book production and consumption
was driven by cultural or by economic factors. This was the period of
the “Little Divergence,” during which the economies of the Low
Countries and Great Britain continued to expand, whereas the rest of
Western Europe more or less stagnated. These diverging trends are in
particular clear from the estimates of real wages constructed by Allen.52
The “Little Divergence” is clearly present in the estimates of book
consumption, but Catholic Belgium more or less falls out of the region
of high demand for books, whereas in economically “backward” but
Protestant Sweden book production expands very strongly. On the other
hand, Switzerland, another (partially) Protestant nation, is a leading
publisher only during the sixteenth century, but falls back dramatically
during the next two centuries. This also leaves open the question if the
Reformation was an external factor—an exogenous shock—or should
be considered endogenous, the result of, for example, growing literacy
at the grass roots level during the late medieval period, creating
favorable conditions for the message of Luther and Calvin.53

51
Applying the same procedure to the period before 1450, using the estimates of book prices
that can be derived from Bozzolo and Ornato, Pour une histoire du livre, and assuming that
before 1200 real book prices remained constant, yields the following estimates of the level of
literacy in Europe (per century): eleventh: 1.3 percent, twelfth: 3.4 percent, thirteenth: 5.7
percent, fourteenth: 6.8 percent, and first half of the fifteenth: 8.6 percent.
52
Allen, “Great Divergence,” to distinguish these changes within Europe from the “Great
Divergence” that occurred after 1800, Epstein suggested to use the term “Little Divergence” for
the former.
53
Cf. Derville, “L’alphabétisation du people.”

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 436 Buringh and Van Zanden

BOOK PRODUCTION OUTSIDE EUROPE

So far we have seen that a number of processes led to a very

rapid growth in book production in Western Europe: first there was
the flowering of the monastic movement; second, the growth of urban
demand and related institutions (such as the universities) during the
twelfth to fifteenth centuries, and third, the invention of the printing
press, leading to a dramatic decline in book prices that further
stimulated the growth of the market. Were these changes—and the
corresponding levels of book production and consumption—unique to
Europe, or do we find a similar expansion of the printing industry
elsewhere?54
During the Middle Ages, the level of literacy and book production in
the Middle East may easily have equaled and possibly surpassed that in
Western Europe, but the region did not make the transition to mass
production of books using the printing press—nor did India, another
highly developed and literate society. Toby Huff, in his comparative
study of “the rise of early modern science,” analyzed resistance to the
printing press in Islamic countries, which was ultimately based on a
“distrust in the common man” and “to prevent his gaining access to
printed materials.”55 The sultan of the Ottoman Empire, for example,
banned the possession of printed material after he discovered what the
invention of the printing press meant for Western Europe.56 The fact
that the new technology could so easily be suppressed probably also
suggests that the demand for books was rather limited in the Ottoman
Empire.57
The two candidates for a level of book production similar to Western
Europe are China and Japan, both of which developed a commercial
printing industry during the centuries before 1800. Recently, the
literature on the Chinese printing industry has been growing rapidly,
which makes detailed comparisons with Western Europe possible. What
emerges from this literature is that during the late Ming and the Qing
Dynasties, book production in China expanded rapidly; it was during
the sixteenth century in particular, that printed books largely replaced
manuscripts; the growth of the commercial printing industry in the
54
We do not include the Western offshoots in Northern America in our comparison, but it is
clear that book production as well as literacy and universities flourished there in the eighteenth
century.
55
Huff, Rise of Early Modern Science, p. 232.
56
Pedersen, Arabic Book, p. 133.
57
Already in the early sixteenth century, Italian printers tried to get access to the Ottoman
market by printing specialized books for it, but these ventures were not very successful from a
commercial point of view, which also points to a limited demand for (printed) books (Pedersen,
Arabic Book, p. 134).

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 Charting the “Rise of the West” 437

Yangtze delta played an important role in this transformation.58 The

best evidence collected recently about the volume of output of the
Chinese book industry is for the second half of the Ming Dynasty
(1522–1644), which was probably the most dynamic period. The two
main centers of production, Jianyang (in Fujian) and Nanjing (in
Jiangsu) produced about 1,000 and 700 editions, respectively.59 The
estimates for the other cities and provinces are much lower; according
to Zhang Xiumin's estimates, discussed by Brokaw, not more than 1600
titles were published in the rest of China, of which about half was also
concentrated in the Yangtze delta. Combining these figures yields a
total of about 3,300 new titles, or 27 titles annually.60 Other recent
estimates by Lucille Chia for the whole of China during the 1505–1644
period indicate a level that is almost double this figure, 47 titles
annually.61 As with the European estimates, these figures are based on
books still available in libraries, and therefore underestimate real
output. But even if we multiply these figures by a factor of 10, they are
low compared to the estimates for Western Europe, which had a similar
population size; the average annual book production in Western Europe
from 1522 to 1644 can be estimated at about 3,750 titles, or about 40
times higher than the highest estimates for China in the same period.
For Qing China, much less recent work has been done; the only
estimate available is that a total of about 126,000 new editions were
published from 1644 to 1911, which means that the average annual
output was 474.62 Again, this was much lower than output in Europe
(which produced close to 6,000 titles in 1644 alone), even lower than
the output for a small country like the Netherlands during much of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The difference is all the more
striking given the efficiency of the Chinese, which turned out books
with relatively low prices (although perhaps not as low as in Europe); it
may indicate that the demand for books was much more limited than in
Western Europe.63
58
Chow, Publishing, p. 22; and McDermott, “Ascendancy.”
59
Chia, “Mashaben,” p. 128.
60
Brokaw, “On the History,” p. 27; during the Wanli period (1573–1610), when book
production in Nanjing and Jianyang peaked, the average per year may have been double this
figure, 50 to 60 per year (based on Chia, “Mashaben,” p. 128); Chow, Publishing, p. 22, gives
much lower estimates: 19.1 on average per year for the 1573–1644 period.
61
Chia, “Mashaben,” gives a total of 7,325 editions for the Ming Dynasty, 707 before 1505,
and therefore 6,618 from 1505 to 1644.
62
Tsien, Paper and Printing, p. 190, note f; in view of the significant growth in book
publishing in the nineteenth century (see Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai), the average for the
period before 1800 must have been even lower than 474.
63
For a discussion of Chinese book prices compared to those in Western Europe, see Rawski,
Education, p. 119; Chow, Publishing, p. 40ff; and Van Zanden, “Common Workmen”; the
different technologies used by European and Chinese printers—movable type and woodblock

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 438 Buringh and Van Zanden

For Japan, the best estimates are that book production in “the three
cities of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto” was about 400 new titles between
1727–1731 and almost 600 between 1750–1754.64 Again, these
estimates are low by European standards. France, which had a slightly
smaller population, produced more than 1,500 books annually between
1727 and 1731 and 2,350 per year between 1750 and 1754. These cities
produced the bulk of the Japanese books in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.65 The Japanese level of book production was
considerably below that of France and of most other European
countries, but it exceeded the level in China or anywhere else in the
world.

CONCLUSION

The estimates of book production presented in this article show a

remarkable and consistent rate of growth during the long period studied
here, a strong testimony of the dynamic development of the European
economy during these 13 centuries. In our view, book production is one
of the few more or less reliable guides to the long-term development of
the European economy in this period, since it matches not only periods
of growth and decline, but also regional patterns of economic
performance. Book production reveals how dynamic the Middle Ages
were; rates of growth during the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth
and ninth centuries, during the High Middle Ages (eleventh to thirteenth
centuries), and during the “crisis of the late medieval period” (1350–
1500) are very high. After 1454 the invention of movable type caused
output growth to accelerate even more. Whereas during the sixth and
seventh centuries on average only about 120 books were produced
annually in Western Europe, in the peak year of 1790 total production
was more than 20 million books.
This spectacular growth occurred on a pan-European scale, but some
regions were more dynamic than others, reflecting both economic and
sociocultural changes. In the sixth century, Italy was still the dominant

printing—points in the same direction: movable type printing is characterized by large

economies of scale, and is therefore efficient when the market is large; the scale economies of
woodblock printing were limited, and therefore this technology suited the more limited Chinese
(and Japanese) market better; this also suggests that the low number of new titles produced in
China was not compensated for by larger print runs; in fact, print runs in China were probably
smaller than in Western Europe.
64
Hayami and Kitô, “Demography and Living Standards,” p. 241.
65
Cf. Kornicki, Book in Japan, pp. 192–206, who gives numbers of publishers in these cities
and outside them; he also suggests that during the boom in Japanese printing between 1597 and
1650, when the industry became established, “at least .500 newly printed titles” were published
(p. 175), which also suggests a rather low level of output of “at least” one title per year.

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 Charting the “Rise of the West” 439

producer of manuscripts, but during the Carolingian Renaissance

the center of production shifted to the region of northern France,
western Germany, and Belgium, which remained the center of book
production until the fourteenth century, although other countries—
Ireland, Britain, and Spain—did contribute to manuscript production.
During the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
core again shifted to the south, to Italy, and it was only during the
seventeenth century that the “decisive” shift to the North Sea region, to
the Low Countries, and England occurred. During the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the Dutch Republic dominated per capita
production, Great Britain became the largest producer of books, and
Sweden also emerged as a country with high levels of book production
and consumption.
Sociocultural factors—the spread of Christianity and the growth of
the monastic movement—have had a major impact on growth during
the first half of the Middle Ages; these processes lead to a cultural
homogenization of Western Europe, with relatively low regional
differences in per capita consumption and production of books from the
tenth century onwards. Once this process of homogenization was
complete—say by 1200—the estimates of book production reflect rather
accurately levels of economic development and rates of economic
growth within Europe in the years 1200 to 1500 (if we take into account
the gradual decline of book prices). When we find, for example, that the
Netherlands develops from a region with a very low level of book
production during the eleventh and twelfth centuries into one of the
leading nations in the fifteenth century, this clearly reflects its relative
development as an economy.66 In the early modern period, however, a
new process of divergence begins, both in the economic sphere (the
North Sea area moves ahead of the rest of Western Europe) and in the
sociocultural and religious sphere, with the spread of Protestantism.
It appears therefore book production and consumption—and the
accumulation of knowledge that was linked to it—during large parts of
the period understudy, in the early Middle Ages and in the early modern
period, was affected by sociocultural and religious changes such as the
expansion of Christianity in the Middle Ages and the spread of the
Reformation after 1517.
Books and manuscripts were a “luxury,” purchased after the first
essentials of life; they also required a minimal level of education. Who
was buying and who was producing the books changed radically
between 500 and 1800. In the earliest period, the church and its

66
Cf. Van Bavel and Van Zanden, “Jump-Start.”

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 440 Buringh and Van Zanden

institutions shaped manuscript production; its expansion was probably

related to the increase of landed wealth of the church.67 Monasteries
dominated manuscript production, and only in Spain and perhaps in
Italy was urban demand important. Market forces played a limited role:
Carolingian production was based on the orders of ecclesiastical and
worldly dignitaries and had a primarily spiritual function.
From the eleventh to twelfth centuries on, however, the market took
over the role of the monasteries. Demand from cities and universities
drove the continuous growth of the book industry in the late medieval
and early modern periods. The universities are indicators of a complex
interplay of factors. On the one hand they provide an index of higher
levels of schooling, and on the other hand they also mark the emergence
of education not directly controlled by the authorities, since universities
were often relatively free from state or ecclesiastical interference. The
growing literacy of the urban population, the long-term increase in their
incomes, and, in particular after 1454, rapid technological change in the
production of books, dominated the process in the early modern period.
The regional variation in these patterns seem to be linked to regional
differences in income levels and the level of urbanization, but they were
to a large extent also dominated by the rise of Protestantism, which had
a strong positive impact on literacy.
The long-term increase in book consumption also reflected the
significant decline in book prices, particularly after 1454. Already
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the use of paper (transferred
to the Latin West from Muslim countries via Italy and Spain) led to
lower production costs and increased production. The price of
manuscripts was also reduced by other medieval developments, such as
smaller letters, abbreviations, and double columns. When universities
introduced the academic pecia system of manuscript production in the
Middle Ages, it too made it possible for students and scribes to copy
manuscripts at lower cost. But the most radical change occurred during
the fifteenth century, when Gutenberg’s inventions revolutionized the
industry. It is striking how fast the new technology spread across
Europe; within one generation printing presses appeared in the most
distant corners of Western Europe, and the cost of books had been cut
by two-thirds or more. Demand reacted strongly. More subtle and
indirect was the long-term change in literacy. The net effect was the
growth of a mass market for books, especially in Protestant countries
like Switzerland, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Sweden. The result
was a level of book consumption that seems to have been much higher

67
Cf. Herlihy, “Church Property.”

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 Charting the “Rise of the West” 441

than anywhere else in the world, including the two other main centers of
printing, China and Japan. One possible implication is that levels of
human capital formation were higher in Western Europe than in East
Asia (or in the rest of the world economy), which may conceivably help
to explain the “Great Divergence.”68
One final question is: Why did book consumption increase so
spectacularly despite the fact that at its height the standard of living of
the majority of the population did not increase at all?69 During most
of this period, books were luxury products consumed by the elite—
the religious elite at first, but after 1100 increasingly the urban and
academic elites. They were, apparently, able to mobilize a growing
portion of total income to spend on such items of luxury consumption.
Urbanization probably led to a significant increase in income inequality,
favoring the class of merchants and professionals who became the main
consumers of the product.70 Increased income inequality may therefore
be part of the explanation. Moreover, books are another example of a
luxury of which the prices declined much more than the consumer price
index, favoring the development of the real purchasing power of the
rich.71 At the same time, in the early modern period books came within
the reach of the lower middle classes. This development began with the
rise of “mass” literacy in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
when new religious movements (such as the Devotio Moderna) began to
encourage all believers to read the Bible. European citizens in 1800 may
not have been better fed than in 600, but their access to books and their
capabilities for reading them had changed fundamentally.
69
Baten and Van Zanden, “Book Production,” where we explain divergent patterns of
economic growth within Europe (between 1500 and 1800) and in the world economy (during
the nineteenth century) from levels of book consumption.
70
Koepke and Baten, “Biological Standard of Living.”
71
Van Zanden, “Tracing the Beginning.”
72
Hoffman et al., “Real Inequality.”

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