Socio-Economic Inequalities during the Conjuncture of the Fourteenth Century
Sources and Methods, Dynamics and Representations (Italy and Europe, c. 1270 - c. 1350)
Introduction: at the crossroads of two outstanding debates
Economic inequality, social mobility, and poverty have been at the centre of the research agenda of medievalists, economists and economic historians in the last decade. Relevant research programmes and publications, such as those of Piketty, Milanovic, Alfani, Scheidel, Thoen, Benito, Carocci, Feller and others, have been driven by the desire to go beyond previous scientific paradigms and – perhaps even more – to address (directly or indirectly) problems and concerns of the present, especially in the Western world, such as the growth of inequality, the blockage of social mobility, the rising number of super-rich or even the increasing downward shift of middling and poor social groups, often linked to the impact of globalization, pandemics, wars and migration. As far as preindustrial economic inequality is concerned, an increasing number of sources – tax registers, land registers, probate inventories, dowry and marriage contracts, etc. – have been mobilized and analyzed by scholars in a standardized way, resulting in a large dataset of Gini and/or Theil index measures of wealth concentration in cities, regions and states for the period c. 1350-1800. The main result of this massive research effort is to show an almost monotonic concentration of wealth across Europe in the long run, challenging the Kuznets paradigm that links rising inequality to economic growth. In fact, rising inequality can be observed almost everywhere in early modern Europe where the economy was stagnating or growing. As a result, van Bavel has rightly defined some regions and periods of European (and global) history as “islands of equality in a sea of inequality”. Moreover, this now consolidated wave of studies raises many questions about the deeper causes of changes in inequality: consistent lower concentrations of wealth in the pre-industrial era have only been observed in the case of major pandemics, such as the Black Death of 1347-52, or prolonged wars and particularly the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). At the same time, scholars have discussed the role played in increasing inequality by economic or demographic growth, urbanization as well as by institutions such as regressive taxation, inheritance systems, access to commons, and labour regulations. In addition, poverty and changes in social mobility have been studied by medievalists as part of the medieval economic growth that Western Europe experienced between the eleventh and late thirteenth centuries, as well as a complex outcome of social hierarchies and marginalization processes. Before all these studies, the so-called crisis of the fourteenth century was revisited in the years 2004- by the extensive research campaign led by Bourin, Carocci, Menant, Drendel and To Figueras, which deconstructed the Postan-Duby paradigm in favour of a complex mosaic of regional socio-economic transformations, both in the North Sea area and, especially, in the north-western Mediterranean. The commercialization of the rural economy, far from being beneficial only to those who have access to the market, turned out to be a relevant factor in shaping production and access to resources, without necessarily leading to economic recession during the first half of the fourteenth century. In this respect, these authors introduced the more balanced term of ‘conjuncture’. In fact, there were areas, social groups and economic activities that were able to benefit from the new economic changes, while others were more or less severely damaged and previous structures transformed.