Long-Term Persistence: The Free and Imperial City Experience in Germany

Abstract

Inspired by scholarship on the free city-state experience in North Italy at the turn of the first millennium, I analyze whether present-day levels of social capital and economic performance in German cities are also explicable by reference to social patterns that emerged during a period of independence several hundred years ago. My findings suggest that the medieval experience of independence as a Free or Imperial city has a positive long-term effect via social capital on economic performance in German cities, but that this effect is statistically less significant than the effect obtained for Italy. I show that the comparably weaker effect of the independence experience in Germany is explicable with reference to two historical phenomena: a) an almost simultaneous historical experience of a transformative impact on the return to cooperation and social capital formation in the first half of the second millennium in towns and cities of the Hanseatic League, of which the large majority never became independent, and b) East Germany's oppressive regime experience in the 20th century, which proved a shock strong enough to 'reformat' the social capital landscape in East Germany that distant history had originally shaped.