The Rise of the City: Adam Smith Versus Henri Pirenne
In recent years a great deal has been written about the problems and processes of economic growth, particularly as they pertain to the econom? ically less developed countries of the world. At the same time, much less attention has been paid to the intellectual legacies of these contemporary theories of economic growth. Consequently, there is some danger of mis? placed emphasis on the contributions of the forerunners in this area of intellectual thought. A good illustration may be the considerable attention given to Henri Pirenne's theory of urban-economic growth,1 while the strikingly similar theory developed by Adam Smith at least a hundred and twenty-five years earlier has been neglected.2 Actually there was little that was new in Pirenne's theory of urban economic development. Not only had Smith presented the same ideas, along with some basic historical analysis in The Wealth of Nations, he also developed his concepts and reasoning in a much more systematic, analytical manner.3 In retrospect, it seems that all Pirenne did was to add a bit of historical evidence to Smith's model of economic-historical growth. Perhaps, had the famous historian been aware of the famous economist's work, he might have taken quite a different approach to the revival of commerce, towns, and general economic growth during the period of the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. The purposes of this paper, therefore, are to place Pirenne's and Smith's respective contribu? tions in a new perspective in this small part of the history of intellectual thought and, in so doing, to state Smith's theory as explicitly as possible.