![]() ![]() Furthermore, Wikipedia ( 2012–2019) has made existing (but previously often obscure) local historical information electronically accessible. As always in historical demography, these estimates are of course less accurate when going back further in time and when they are not based on actual census data.Īn update of Bairoch’s dataset has now become feasible because urban archaeological, historical and demographic research published in the past decades has considerably enlarged our knowledge base. ![]() The population size estimates in the database are given in whole numbers of thousands of inhabitants. Figure 2 shows how the more than two thousand current towns are located on the map of Europe. Figure 1 presents the distribution of settlements in the year 700 that met the inclusion criteria. The final database comprises 2,262 European settlements, most of which have become cities. I also included, together with data about their previous demographic development, all European cities with over 100,000 inhabitants in the year 2000, and similarly all capital cities in that year. In this updated dataset of city sizes, I collected additional population data at several time windows not covered in Bairoch et al. After the fall of the ‘iron curtain’ in 1989 with the later ensuing changes in the political landscape of Eastern Europe and all the new historical information that has become available since, a thorough revision of their work seems more than necessary. More than three decades after the seminal publication The population of European cities from 800 to 1850 by Bairoch et al. This new dataset, therefore, has a lot more to offer than currently existing sets. And last but not least, the whole structure of the new dataset allows its future users to easily filter out those population data or other data that do not meet their criteria of inclusion. Furthermore, the medieval first and second nature characteristics of each city (which in the Middle Ages were often quite important for a city’s long-run economic development) have been characterized at the city level. Missing population data have, for the first time, been imputed in a systematic and city-specific way. New too, is its incorporation of up to now unused historical proxy information serving as a basis for very early population estimates. This new dataset comprises a longer time series than any currently existing. Therefore, there will be a wide interest in an improved and expanded dataset of historical urban populations in Europe. Historical data of city populations have been extensively used in the past by large numbers of scholars of diverse disciplines to speak on issues of long-term (economic) development, regional divergence, and even to quantify the influence of religious and political changes. ![]()
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