At the end of the Second World War, the French machine-tool stock was very obsolete. Its restoration will allow the development of a well known French machine tool industry for quality of its machines and a discreet presence on the international market. The rise of the Soviet, Japanese, Italian, Swiss and Eastern European industries caused a decline in France. The revival of the French machine tool industry involved a conversion to special machines.

During the Renaissance numerous discoveries and inventions significantly bolstered European development. This paper examines the role played by Greek migrants in this process. While the vast majority of works by ancient Greek scholars such as Galen, Hippocrates, and Euclid were unknown in Western Europe during the middle ages, such knowledge had been preserved in the Byzantine Empire. The revival of ancient Greek knowledge within Western Europe coincided with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453 and the subsequent surge in Greek migration to Western Europe. Using a newly constructed dataset on Greek migrants in Europe, I show that a Greek presence around the year 1500 is positively associated with city growth in the sixteenth century. This finding is corroborated by a difference-in-differences analysis as well as an instrumental variable approach that exploits distance to Constantinople as an exogenous source of variation in Greek presence in European cities. In terms of mechanisms, I find that a Greek presence is associated with larger numbers of published book editions in astronomy, mathematics, and medicine -- fields in which ancient Greek and Byzantine scholars were especially advanced -- as well as larger levels of upper-tail human capital. Finally, the results show that destination places for Greek migration became centers of innovation during the sixteenth century. Together, these results emphasize the importance of Greeks in the dissemination and application of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe and suggest that a Greek presence was one of the major growth drivers during the early modern period.

Notice that Marcin Wronski will only be present in Session 2