Wealth inequality in pre-industrial England: a long-term view (late thirteenth to sixteenth centuries)
Fecha
2022Versión
Acceso abierto / Sarbide irekia
Tipo
Artículo / Artikulua
Versión
Versión publicada / Argitaratu den bertsioa
Impacto
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10.1111/ehr.13158
Resumen
This article provides an overview of wealth inequality in England from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century, based on a novel database of distributions of taxable household wealth across 17 counties plus London. To account for high thresholds of fiscal exemption, a new method is introduced to reconstruct complete distributions from left-censored observations. First, we analyse inequality ...
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This article provides an overview of wealth inequality in England from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century, based on a novel database of distributions of taxable household wealth across 17 counties plus London. To account for high thresholds of fiscal exemption, a new method is introduced to reconstruct complete distributions from left-censored observations. First, we analyse inequality at the county level, finding an impressive stability across time in the relative position of the English counties, perturbed only by the tendency of the South and South-East to become relatively more inegalitarian. Then, we produce an aggregate distribution representative of England as a whole, and we detect an overall tendency for inequality to grow from medieval to early modern times due largely to North-South divergence in average household wealth. We discuss our results in the light of the recent literature on historical inequality. [--]
Materias
Black Death,
Early modern period,
Economic inequality,
England,
Middle Ages,
Plague,
Wealth concentration
Editor
Economic History Society
Publicado en
The Economic History Review, 2022, pp. 1-35
Departamento
Universidad Pública de Navarra. Departamento de Economía /
Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa. Ekonomia Saila /
Universidad Pública de Navarra/Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa. Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE
Versión del editor
Entidades Financiadoras
We are grateful for the support received from the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. In particular, the Cambridge-based project 'The occupational structure of Britain 1379-1911', funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, and the British Academy, provided us with the GIS layers of historical county and hundred boundaries. The research leading to this article has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 283802, EINITE-Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300-1800, as well as under European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Program/ERC grant agreement no. 725687, SMITE-Social Mobility and Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300-1800.