Preliminary Programme

The terrible Black Death epidemic which affected Tuscany in 1348 caused a large-scale shock to the pre-existing social and economic structures. The aim of this paper is to explore its consequences for society and distribution. We provide a systematic analysis of both the immediate effects of the shock, and of its medium-term effects until the early 15th century. Based on data from the Florentine “contado” (the rural areas subject to the immediate control of Florence) and the city of Prato coming from the surviving property tax records or estimi, we reconstruct the pre- and post-Black Deaths trends in both wealth inequality and social-economic mobility. (Show less)

In this paper, we present a detailed study of wealth and its distribution on the West coast of Sweden in 1715, using the taxation lists from a one-off wealth tax imposed in this year. The great advantage of this tax is that it – unlike other taxes in Sweden at this time – was imposed equally (with a 1, then 2 per cent rate) on citizens of all social classes, from the nobility down to servants and workers. The dataset covers all household in the county of Bohuslän, of which 9,368 are rural, distributed among 79 parishes with different economic and ownership characteristics. Of the urban observations, 2,318 are from the important harbour and trading city of Gothenburg, and 866 from the four smaller towns in the county. Each observation states the name and residence of the household head, and the value of his or her assets, real estate and movables in separate columns. The complete and detailed nature of the dataset allows us to study distribution of wealth from geographical and social class perspective, adding new and scarcely explored dimensions to the historical inequality literature.
The studied area offers a variety of socio-economic characteristics and degrees of market integration. Some parishes were dominated by subsistence farmers while others by more or less commercialized agriculture. Some towns were hubs for Sweden’s booming iron exports, while others had no exports at all, depending on local economies and their nearest hinterland. We explore the distribution of wealth between and within social classes – peasant farmers, fishermen, workers and crofters, urban and rural nobility and tradesmen – in terms of both real estate and movables. (Show less)

Mediterranean Spain was a very open and dynamic society at the end of the Middle Ages. In part, due to its condition as a frontier society after the great colonisation processes that followed the conquest of al-Andalus in the thirteenth century. And, in part, due to its situation in the increasingly integrated economic space of the western Mediterranean. Large cities such as Barcelona, Valencia and Mallorca, which were big productive, commercial and financial centres, offered great opportunities not only for work or to do business but also for social promotion, attracting the most affluent sectors and also the poorest of the peasantry. This paper examines social mobilization, through the study of some families who rose from the peasantry or crafts to the urban patrician and even the gentry, on the background of the long-term evolution of inequality, before and after the Black Death. (Show less)

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct long-term trends in intragenerational income mobility levels in the Southern Low Countries during the early modern period. It uses new archival information for a sample of urban and rural communities in Flanders covering the period ca. 1400-1800. The paper provides some elements of comparison with the northern Low Countries (Dutch Republic), also based on new archival research. (Show less)

This paper uses new archival data to study the long-term tendencies in economic inequality in the Kingdom of Naples in southern Italy. The paper reconstructs long-term trends in wealth inequality for the period ca. 1500-1800 based on the property tax records (catasti onciari), with particular focus on the region Apulia where the best sources are to be found. The paper also introduces a new method to reconstruct income inequality. Indeed, the Kingdom of Naples (Apulia) is the first area of Europe for which it is possible to compare trends in both income and wealth inequality. The paper discusses the implications of the new findings about southern Italy for the debate on the roots of the North/South divide in the Italian Peninsula, as well as for the general debate on the nature and the causes of inequality change in preindustrial times. (Show less)