Preliminary Programme

Based on new evidence mostly coming from the property tax records (estimi) of the Republic of Venice, this paper explored long-term trends in economic inequality (mostly of wealth). The distributive effects of the rise of the fiscal-military state are analyzed as a possible cause or co-cause of the increase in economic inequality which occurred during the early modern period. (Show less)

Current literature on patterns of inequality in the early modern world points to considerable diversity or divergence within and between the continents, with a wide array of factors invoked as causes and components thereof, and implications for long-term growth. Still highly understudied, empires of the central Eurasian land mass should be expected to be no less diverse internally by virtue of their territorial expanse and limited technologies of control –no matter where aggregated inequality findings might position them among cases already better known. With this diversity in mind, this paper pursues a regional approach to inequality in the Ottoman Empire. We explore inequality of wealth in European territories of the Empire through a study of probate inventories from five districts in the Balkans. These are Bitola in Macedonia, Thessaloniki in Greece and Ruse, Vidin and Sofia in Bulgaria, which were, at the time, geographically and functionally part of the imperial core lands. During the period examined, this region had a shared experience of commercialization and change in property relations and distribution of the surplus between the center and the local elites while being increasingly drawn into the world market, all of which are expected to have influenced patterns of inequality. In this paper, we present descriptive statistics for changes in inequality, examine its components, and compare them within the region and with western Anatolia, which shared similar trajectories of economic change, and with Ottoman lands further to the East, which did not. (Show less)