This article provides an overview of the research done in recent years by the ERC-funded projects EINITE-Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe 1300-1800, and SMITE-Social Mobility and Inequality across Italy and Europe 1300-1800. It begins by discussing the sources available for reconstructing preindustrial economic inequality, especially in Italy, then it provides an overview of the meth…
The chapter reviews existing evidence regarding four aspects of economic inequality: relative factor rents, which relate to the factorial distribution of income and also underlie the so-called Williamson index (y/wus), which is correlated with the Gini index of household income; real inequality in terms of opposite movements of the price of consumer baskets consumed by different strata of socie…
This essay aims to present the first results of an ongoing research project devoted to study the evolution of the economic inequality in Catalonia based on different documentary sources and parameters. Here we focus on the strengths and limits of the rich fiscal sources preserved between the 14th and 18th century allowing us an analysis of inequality. This study is limited to the period before …
This chapter seeks to explore local and regional variation in levels of inequality in different types of rural localities and regions within the late medieval County of Flanders. Our research indicates that fiscal sources for the County of Flanders can produce reliable data on the distribution of income during the late medieval period. The analysis of these data shows that important local and r…