Economic inequality in the rural Southern Low Countries during the Fifteenth century: sources, data and reflection (original) (raw)

In recent years, the growth of interest in inequality has produced a wave of new empirical research on income and wealth disparities in pre-industrial Europe.1 The near general consensus emerging from this research has been that inequality tended to rise almost continuously and almost everywhere in Europe from the late middle ages until the 19th century.2 This remarkable result challenges earlier accounts of long-term patterns in inequality such as the Kuznets curve, and has found its way into recent overviews of historical inequality.3 A number of different explanatory factors have been suggested for this growth in inequality – with most recent literature emphasising the importance of regressive redistribution by emerging fiscal states, demographic growth, and proletarianization.4 Although those are valuable explanations for the Europe-wide tendency for inequality to grow, these broad causal factors do not provide a sufficiently detailed model from which to interpret local and regi...