Looking for the islands of equality in a sea of inequality. Why did some societies in pre-industrial Europe have relatively low levels of wealth inequality?

Abstract

This paper scrutinizes the insights won by recent studies in wealth inequality in pre-industrial Europe. It focuses on the regions and periods where levels of inequality were relatively low, trying to arrive at an inventory of causes of these exceptions. It discusses catastrophic events, colonization and revolution as possible causes, but argues that these only occasionally had a leveling effect, depending on the social and institutional context in which they occurred. Most clearly wealth accumulation was restricted, even by maximums on ownership, where associative organizations held a solid position, and market and state played lesser roles as coordination systems.

Epidemics, Inequality, and Poverty in Preindustrial and Early Industrial Times

“…The second is that truly, as far as we know today, only major pandemics like the Black Death and more generally, catastrophes on an exceptional scale seem to have left a dent in what was, otherwise, a very stable distribution of income and economic assets (Alfani 2017;2020a;Milanovic 2016;Scheidel 2017) 1 . And yet, for the epochs when we have enough information to analyze changes across the entire distribution, some studies, while reporting very limited reduction in inequality for even the worst episodes, have explored the circumstances that prevented pandemic leveling from happening time and again, focusing in particular on the institutional framework in place at the onset of the crisis (Alfani 2010;2020a;Alfani and Di Tullio 2019;Van Bavel 2020). By highlighting the factors that have shaped how pandemics and major epidemics could lead to radically different distributive consequences, these studies are maybe of greater help for understanding how the current crisis caused by Covid-19 can be expected to affect inequality.…”