Chapter 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?

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

Wealth Inequality in the Netherlands, c. 1950-2015 : The paradox of a Northern European welfare state

This paper reviews the available evidence on post-war trends in Dutch private wealth inequality using a range of scattered sources. Wealth tax records suggest a substantial decline in inequality to the 1970s and, more tentatively, a gradual rise thereafter. In the post-1990 years, Gini-coefficients of private wealth inequality range from 0.8 to 0.9, which is at the high end of the international comparison. Such high levels of private wealth inequality contrast with relatively low levels of net income inequality; a paradox that the Netherlands share with other Northern European welfare states. We hypothesise that publicly funded life-time income security limits the wealth-formation by ordinary Dutch households, while the redistributive taxes required to finance this system are targeting income rather than wealth.</p

Wealth inequality in pre-industrial Europe: What role did associational organizations have?

A host of studies on wealth inequality in pre-industrial Europe has recently been published. Out of these, a narrative emerges of rising inequality in a context of emerging markets and growing state taxation, punctuated by calamities. By surveying the available material, this article highlights an element that is less systematically discussed in this literature: the role of associational organizations. They developed less regressive forms of taxation and redistribution, embedded the transfer and use of land and capital in coordination systems that curtailed accumulation, and sometimes even imposed maximums of wealth ownership. The article tentatively argues that the resulting downward effect on wealth inequality was found most conspicuously in societies where associations of middling groups of owners-producers held strong positions in economic and political life, even despite the exclusive character of their organizations. Such societies were gradually eroded in the early modern period, most notably as a result of the emergence of factor markets and state centralization, and the associated processes of proletarianization and scale enlargement. This did not happen without opposition and conflict, however, as the process was sometimes halted and showed distinct geographical patterns, which in turn influenced patterns of wealth inequality

Better Understanding Disasters by Better Using History

This paper argues that the understanding of causes and effects of hazards and shocks could be furthered by making more explicit and systematic use of the historical record, that is, by using ‘the past’ as a laboratory to test hypotheses in a careful way. History lends itself towards this end because of the opportunity it offers to identify distinct and divergent social structures existing very close to one another on a regional level and the possibility this creates of making comparisons between societal responses to shocks spatially and chronologically. Furthermore, the basic richness of the historical record itself enables us to make a long-term reconstruction of the social, economic and cultural impact of hazards and shocks simply not possible in contemporary disaster studies material

Early Proto-industrialization in the Low Countries? The Importance and Nature of Market-oriented Non-agricultural Activities on the Countryside in Flanders and Holland

Next to the local craftsmen and the non-agrarian activities that families undertook for their own use or local consumption, which had always existed in the countryside, in some places rural industries aimed at non-local markets developed as early as in the late 14th century. In some parts of the Low Countries, these early stages of rural industry gained a considerable importance during the late medieval period. In most regions in Western-Europe, however, there was hardly or no industrialization in the countryside at all during this period. In this respect, therefore, there were striking regional differences, sometimes even between regions situated close to each other. This article focuses on these regional differences, by investigating and comparing late medieval developments in two different parts of the Low Countries where rural industries did blossom in the late medieval period, but each with their own specific pattern: Inland Flanders and Holland. In order to explain these regional differences, the article links the proto-industrial development to the social and economic structures in the regions in question

History and the Social Sciences

Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record is one “laboratory” in which hypotheses developed by sociologists, economists, and even natural scientists can be explicitly tested, especially using dual forms of geographical and chronological comparison. As one example to demonstrate this, a case is made for the stimulating effect of “disaster studies.” Historians have failed to interact with ideas from disaster studies, not only because of the general drift away from the social sciences by the historical discipline, but also because of a twin conception that medieval disaster study bears no relation to the modern

The economics of violence in natural states

Violence is key to understanding human interaction and societal development. The natural state of societal organization is that a subset of the population, capable of mustering organized large-scale violence, forms an elite coalition that restrains both violence and coercive appropriation. We highlight key mechanisms underlying such natural states using insights from the economic literature on conflict and appropriation. Our results show large variations in elite size, appropriation, production levels, and welfare across natural states due to only minor variations in exogenous model parameters. Specifically, unproductive societies tend to have a large elite coalition and a high tax rate. Only when the elite coalition is small (which occurs in societies with high productivity) but still able to control a sizeable share of production, can societies prosper in a natural state