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2018
The paper aims to present the first results of an in-depth and source-based research about socio-economic inequalities and agricultural growth in the Late Medieval Florentine society. This area has been intensively studied because of its economic relevance and the rise of a peculiar share-cropping system (mezzadria). Mezzadria lease contracts spread broadly in Tuscany at the end of the Middle Ages (13th c.), linked to the building of the regional city-state by the city-commune of Florence and its raising economy. The system developed before the demographic shocks of Late Middle Ages and continued to develop further during the decline of the Florentine economy in 15th-16th centuries. The role of mezzadria in shaping declining economic trends and socio-economic inequalities, as well as the causes of its rise, are still debated among scholars. This research would offer an original contribute on these issues through a new in-depth consultation of the Florentine fiscal surveys of the 15th and 16th centuries (the Catasto of 1427 and the Decima repubblicana of the early 16th century) and the use of a social agro-systemic approach. The information entered from sources will be used to draw a picture of the social and property structure of four different sub-regional study-areas within the Florentine territory (characterized by differences in the importance of institutions, in property distribution, in environmental features), comparing the trends and their causal relations for regional differences. The goal is drawing: 1) a more complete figure of agricultural output of mezzadria – comparing different systems of exploitation and subregions –; 2) an in-depth figure of socio-economic inequalities – property and income distribution, ownership of oxen, access to credit and fiscal incomes. In this way it will be possible to offer a more detailed pattern of explanation of the main dynamics of Late Medieval rural Tuscany.
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2020, Inequality in Rural Europe (Late Middle Ages - 18th Century)
2016, Ricerche Storiche
L’articolo è una sintesi delle tendenze principali della storia rurale e dell’agricoltura in Europa degli ultimi venti anni, in particolare per l’ambito medievistico e modernistico. Dopo una breve introduzione nei primi tre paragrafi sono ricostruiti i recenti percorsi di ricerca della storiografia inglese, francese e belga-olandese, tra i più innovativi su questi temi. Nel quarto sono analizzate le tendenze storiografiche diffuse a livello europeo, osservando i network, le conferenze internazionali e le collane editoriali più attive nel rinnovamento degli studi e nella loro diffusione. The paper aims to concisely present the trends of the rural and agrarian history of Middle Ages and Early Modern period in Europe during the last twenty years. After a brief introduction, the first three paragraphs analyze the recent research paths of the British, French, Belgian and Dutch historiographies, among the most lively on those themes. The fourth paragraph explains the general trends of European research through the analysis of the most active networks, international conferences and book series in refreshing literature and spreading new debates.
The question of how economic inequality changed during the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution has been attracting a growing amount of research effort. Nevertheless, a complete picture of the tendencies in economic inequality throughout pre-industrial Europe has remained out of our grasp. This paper begins to resolve this problem by comparing long-term changes in inequality between Central and Northern Italy on the one hand and the Southern and Northern Low Countries on the other hand. Based on new archival material, we reconstruct regional estimates of economic inequality between 1500 and 1800 and analyze them in the light of the Little Divergence debate, assessing the role of economic growth, urbanization, proletarianization, and political institutions. We argue that different explanations should be invoked to understand the early modern growth of inequality throughout Europe, since several factors conspired to make for a society in which it was much easier for inequality to rise than to fall. We also argue that although there was apparently a ‘Little Convergence’ in inequality, at least some parts of southern and northern Europe diverged in terms of inequality extraction ratios.
It has frequently been shown that after severe floods in the pre-industrial period, property within the afflicted rural society often became redistributed more inequitably. This is often seen to be because small farmers did not have the resources to buffer exceptional losses. This article looks at an episode of crisis that occurred in the region of Northeast Groningen (the Netherlands) close to the Dollard Sea – the breakthrough of a key dike in 1509 and the subsequent desertion of settlements through flooding. Local farmers lost their lands, and moved away onto higher and safer sandy ridges. After this event, the sixteenth century represented a ‘fight-back’ against the water, where some attempts were made to reclaim and drain the newly sodden and marshy land. The questions addressed in this paper are then twofold. Firstly, for those that lost their farms during this episode, were they able to regain their property? In whose hands did the newly reclaimed land fall? Secondly, what impact did this have on future property distribution and levels of equality in the region? Is it necessarily true that smallholders were not able to buffer these kinds of terrible events and lost their lands to more powerful elite groups? This paper shows that while consolidation of land into ‘elite’ or ‘absentee’ social groups often did occur as a consequence of strong exogenous environmental shocks such as flooding, this did not inevitably lead to inequality at the user-level – that is at the local level at which the land was being farmed. In fact, it is even suggested that consolidation of land into the hands of elite groups such as urban burghers and institutions sometimes could put a direct block on the emergence of large farms and the development of ‘agrarian capitalism’.
This paper compares relations between town and countryside in Tuscany and Holland. As a starting point I use two hypotheses about the stagnation of economic growth in Tuscany. Both identify problems arising from the large degree of urbanization as the main obstruction to the rise of a domestic market, which is a prerequisite for economic development. It was either the political domination (following S.R. Epstein) or economic domination (following R.J. Emigh) of towns over the countryside that prevented the rise of a domestic market. The comparison with Holland confirms the economic domination of towns over the countryside in Tuscany – measured a.o. in terms of wealth distribution – was much greater than in Holland. The comparison yields support to Emigh’s claim that the unequal distribution of wealth prevented the emergence of a domestic market and economic development in Tuscany. Such an obstruction to development did not exist in Holland on the verge of its seventeenth-century Golden Age.
2011, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Comparative analysis of the markets for land, labor, and capital in north-central Italy and the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period reveals that urbanization in itself was not the crucial variable in the quality and effect of developing factor markets. More important was the counterweight offered in this process by territorial lords and rural interests to the influence of urban elites. If this counterweight was missing, urban elites could exploit factor markets to their own ends.
Journal of Agrarian Change Early View 2015
The view of the commons as archaic, ‘backward’ and ‘irrational’ institutions for the management of resources has now been revised in favour of a more positive one, for both past and present societies. Indeed, it is clear that the commons had multifarious ecological and economic benefits for both medieval and early modern rural societies in Western Europe. That being the case, many scholars have seen the increasing expropriation of the commons in the transition to the early modern period as a sign of increasing inequality characterizing pre-industrial Europe, and many have lamented the loss of communal grazing privileges connected to processes such as land enclosure – pushing poor peasants into the ‘abyss’ with the removal of their final form of welfare. However, in this paper it is argued that the social distribution of the benefits to the commons were rarely, if ever, entirely equitable. In fact, in many historical contexts the benefits of the commons could also be highly restricted – crystallizing and entrenching stratifications themselves, and even serving as the ‘vehicle’ of further inequality. The expropriation of the commons did not necessarily makeWestern European rural societies any more unequal.
Journal of Medieval History, 28.4 (2012) 472-99.
A key strand of research for social and economic historians of the pre-industrial period is the relationship between city and countryside. Sometimes urban and rural environments enjoyed mutually beneficial relationships, though in other cases cities reduced their rural hinterlands to poverty and decay – the question is, why? By focusing on late-medieval Florence and Tuscany, this paper moves away from approaching this question through an ‘urban bias’, and suggests the answers can be found within the structural configuration of rural societies themselves. Essentially, some rural regions were well set up to repel urban predatory tendencies, while other societies were susceptible to exploitation.
2018, Ecology and Society
To adequately respond to crises, adaptive governance is crucial, but sometimes institutional adaptation is constrained, even when a society is faced with acute hazards. We hypothesize that economic inequality, defined as unequal ownership of wealth and access to resources, crucially interacts with the way institutions function and are adapted or not. Because the time span for societal responses may be lengthy, we use the historical record as a laboratory to test our hypothesis. In doing so, we focus on floods and water management infrastructure. The test area is one where flood hazards were very evident—the Low Countries (present-day Netherlands and Belgium) in the premodern period (1300–1800)—and we employ comparative analysis of three regions within this geographical area. We draw two conclusions: first, both equitable and inequitable societies can demonstrate resilience in the face of floods, but only if the institutions employed to deal with the hazard are suited to the distributive context. Institutions must change parallel to any changes in inequality. Second, we show that institutional adaptation was not inevitable, but also sometimes failed to occur. Institutional adaptation was never inevitably triggered by stimulus of a hazard, but dependent on socio-political context. Even when vital for the community under threat, adaptation only tended to occur when the vested interests of those with wealth, resources, and power were directly hit.
Tine De Moor has developed a bold and robust scholarly framework for explaining the emergence of institutions for ‘corporate collective action’ in her 'Silent Revolution' article of 2008; the significance of which may serve to be the foundation of a research agenda on the commons for years to come. However, as revealed in this review piece, there are some fundamental flaws in the framework, which need to be ironed out first. There remains a problem with causality - in particular, no logical connection in the framework between the 'conditions necessary to make collective action possible' and the 'reasons to opt for collective action'. In summary, this review suggests De Moor's framework is an important step forward for those researching the commons, though it needs to be modified to become more receptive to the socio-political configurations that gave each pre-industrial society its character.
This paper provides an overview of economic inequality in the Florentine State (Tuscany) from the late fourteenth to the late eighteenth century. Regional studies of this kind are rare, and this is only the second-ever attempt at covering such a long period. Consistent with recent research conducted on other European areas, during the Early Modern period we find clear indications of a tendency for economic inequality to grow continually, a finding that for Tuscany cannot be explained as the consequence of economic growth. Furthermore, the exceptionally old sources we use allow us to demonstrate that a phase of declining inequality, lasting about one century, was triggered by the Black Death from 1348 to 1349. This finding challenges earlier scholarship and significantly alters our understanding of the economic consequences of the Black Death. We also take into account other important topics, such as the change over time of the patrimony of the Church and of poverty. Particular attention is paid to the latter, and estimates of the prevalence of the poor in time and space are provided and discussed, also taking into account the definition and perception of the poor. Keywords: Economic inequality; social inequality; wealth concentration; middle ages; early modern period; Tuscany; Florentine State; Italy; plague; Black Death; Church property; poverty; Florence; Prato; Arezzo; San Gimignano Acknowledgements
2008, Continuity and Change
Throughout history natural disasters always seem to hit the weakest groups in society hardest. Compared to middle class and elite groups their adaptation and mitigation strategies often seem more limited. Nevertheless there is nothing ‘natural’ about this situation. Environmental inequalities are always produced by specific social and economic conditions and these conditions can change over time. In this article we try to examine long-term changes in environmental inequalities in three coastal wetland areas that were particularly prone to flooding, focusing on the interaction between coastal towns and their surrounding countryside in the period 1300-1800. In the Flemish Coastal Plain, in Romney Marsh and in the Dutch Peatlands inhabitants had to cope with a permanently high flood risk. Their ability to do so changed over time and so did the social distribution of flood risk among the different groups in society.
Many preconditions for a rapid transition to industrial capitalism existed in Tuscany in the late medieval/early modern period, including relatively efficient agricultural production; a well-developed, commercial manufacturing sector; the absence of a powerful feudal nobility and feudal obligations; a large, precocious urban economy; and the development of a territorial state. No such transition occurred, however. Previous explanations for this are inadequate, because they discount the strength of the Tuscany economy or downplay the presence of these preconditions. To explain the Tuscan outcome, this article draws on sectoral theories (agriculture vs. manufacturing) from the neoclassical and Marxist literature. Since these theories often give the wrong prediction, because they are based on formal attributes of actors, the author combines them with a Weberian conceptualization of substantively specific economic interests.
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, 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, and that medieval coping strategies were hindered by providence, superstition, fear, and panic. We use the medieval disasters context to demonstrate that medieval economic history can contribute to big narratives of our time, including climate change and inequality. This contribution can be in (a) investigating the root causes of vulnerability and resilience, and recovery of societies over the long term (moving disaster studies away from instant impact focus) and (b) providing the social context needed to interpret the massive amount of ‘big data’ produced by historical climatologists, bioarchaeologists, economists, and so on.
From the late Middle Ages onwards, many regions of Western Europe experienced heightened levels of inequality in the distribution of land, caused in many cases by the consolidation of property in the hands of various interest groups.What happened to those unfortunate rural groups (often impoverished) who lost their land to wealthier or more powerful interest groups? The aim of this paper is to explore then the demographic and settlement effects of land consolidation on pre-industrial rural communities.In the literature, a common connection has been drawn between land accumulation and strong population decline or stagnation in the countryside. Features associated with this downward demographic trend include high unemployment and a paucity of opportunity for work, impoverishment, settlement collapse, and a general trend of movement (permanent or temporary) towards the city in search of work. However, this outcome was not always inevitable as demonstrated in this paper. In that sense, while land consolidation may in many cases have been the motor which set in motion outward migration towards the cities, depopulation could have been avoided or limited within certain pre-industrial societies; as some societies may have been inherently more resilient than others. Thus, in this paper, a basic hypothesis is tested that land consolidation may have had a divergent impact on population trends in the countryside, which was closely dependant on the arrangement of rural societies themselves. Here two cases of peasant expropriation, land consolidation and a transition to a rural economy dominated by large farms are contrasted, and the divergent impact on population trends is analysed. In other words, this paper considers the capacity of different rural economies to maintain and retain its labouring (and now landless) population – a test performed by comparing two historical cases in the Northern part of the Low Countries.
One problem with scholarly research into land reclamation has been the tendency to overly focus on two questions - how and why did it happen? It has led to an over-emphasis on technological innovation and demographic and commercial pressures. Furthermore, it has obscured a far more fascinating and significant question – what were the social consequences of pre-industrial land reclamation? What kinds of societies emerged as a result of land reclamation? These questions are addressed through a comparative historical analysis of two cases of land reclamation in the medieval period: the peat lands of Holland (the Netherlands) and the Po Valley plains (Northern Italy). In the paper it is shown that medieval land reclamation led to the emergence of two very divergent societies, characterised by a number of different configurations; (a) power and property structure, (b) modes of exploitation, (c) economic portfolios, and (d) commodity markets. In the final section, a further question is considered. To what extent was either of these societies inherently better configured to negate the potentially disastrous effects of land reclamation on the natural environment?
BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review 128.3 (2013) 60-95.
One problem with scholarly research into land reclamation has been the tendency to concentrate on two questions e how and why did it happen leading to an over-emphasis on technological innovation and demographic and commercial pressures. This has obscured far more fascinating and significant questions e what were the social consequences of pre-industrial land reclamation? What kinds of societies emerged as a result of land reclamation? These questions are addressed through a comparative historical analysis of two cases of land reclamation in the medieval period: the peat lands of Holland (the Netherlands) and the Po Valley plains (Northern Italy). In the paper it is shown that medieval land reclamation led to the emergence of two very divergent societies, characterised by a number of different configurations in; (a) power and property structure, (b) modes of exploitation, (c) economic portfolios, and (d) commodity markets. In the final section, a further question is considered. To what extent were either of these societies inherently better configured to negate the potentially disastrous effects of land reclamation on the natural environment? In the conclusion it is argued that more ‘equitable’ and ‘freer’ pre-industrial societies were better placed to deal with the consequences of environmental degradation than those marked by polarisation and repression e even when those polarised societies made recourse to capital investment in technology.
2000, American Historical Review
This paper discusses Bas Van Bavel's manors and markets, especially the way Early Medieval property and land exploitation was organized in Southern Low Countries and the way it preconditions further economic development according to Van Bavel's explanatory model
This article provides an overview of long-term changes in the relative conditions of the rich in preindustrial Europe. It covers four pre-unification Italian states (Sabaudian State, Florentine State, Kingdom of Naples and Republic of Venice) as well as other areas of Europe (Low Countries, Catalonia) during the period 1300-1800. Three different kinds of indicators are measured systematically and combined in the analysis: headcount indexes, the share of the top rich, and richness indexes. Taken together, they suggest that overall, during the entirety of the early modern period the rich tended to become both more prevalent and more distanced from the other strata of society. The only period during which the opposite process took place was the late Middle Ages, following the Black Death epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century. In the period from ca. 1300 to 1800, the prevalence of the rich doubled. In the Sabaudian State, the Florentine State and the Kingdom of Naples, for which reconstructions of regional wealth distributions exist, in about the same period the share of the top 10% grew from 45-55% to 70-80% - reaching almost exactly the same level which has recently been suggested as the European average at 1810. Consequently, the time series presented here might be used to add about five centuries of wealth inequality trends to current debates on very long-term changes in the relative position of the rich.
2010
The Low Countries - an area roughly embracing the present-day Netherlands and Belgium - formed a patchwork of varied economic and social development in the Middle Ages, with some regions displaying a remarkable dynamism. Manors and Markets charts the history of these vibrant economies and societies, and contrasts them with alternative paths of development, from the early medieval period to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Providing a concise overview of social and economic changes over more than a thousand years, Bas van Bavel assesses the impact of the social and institutional organization that saw the Low Countries become the most urbanized and densely populated part of Europe by the end of the Middle Ages. By delving into the early and high medieval history of society, van Bavel uncovers the foundations of the flourishing of the medieval Flemish towns and the forces that propelled Holland towards its Golden Age. Exploring the Low Countries at a regional level, van Bavel highlights the importance of localized structures for determining the nature of social transitions and economic growth. He assesses the role of manorial organization, the emergence of markets, the rise of towns, the quest for self-determination by ordinary people, and the sharp regional differences in development that can be observed in the very long run. In doing so, the book offers a significant contribution to the debate about the causes of economic and social change, both past and present. See the attachment for a synoposis of the book and a debate about the book (special issue of the Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History)
2020, The Journal of European Economic History
This article analyses the increasing socioeconomic segmentation of rural society in Northern Italy in the early modern era. With a synthesis of the historiography on the Italian countryside plus original archival research, we reconstruct the political role and the socioeconomic basis of rural elites in the State of Milan and in the Republic of Venice. We argue that, in general, the growing importance and the establishment of the rural elites were the result of more and more exclusive management of the commons, the concentration of landed property, and a near monopoly in local manufacturing and the local credit market.
This article provides an overview of economic inequality, particularly of wealth, in the Florentine state (Tuscany) from the early fourteenth to the late eighteenth century. Regional studies of this kind are rare, and this is only the second-ever attempt at covering such a long period. Consistent with recent research conducted on other European areas, during the early modern period we find clear indications of a tendency for economic inequality to grow continually, a finding that for Tuscany cannot be explained as the consequence of economic growth. Furthermore, the exceptionally old sources we use allow us to demonstrate that a phase of declining inequality, lasting about one century, was triggered by the Black Death from 1348 to 1349. This finding challenges earlier scholarship and significantly alters our understanding of the economic consequences of the Black Death.
Nowadays consumer behaviour is regarded as an important factor with regard to economic growth and stagnation. But whereas twenty-first-century households can usually decide to reallocate their capital, pre-industrial households often could not, because ancestors had often restricted the mobility of capital for future generations. This paper investigates long-term cycles in the mobility of capital within families and distinguishes several regimes. When these became less strict, they allowed for a high mobility of capital, which favoured investment. But when these regimes became stricter, they created path dependency, because they determined to what degree societies could react to (international) political and economic opportunities.
2014
Since the time of the Grand Tour, the Italian region of Tuscany has sustained a highly visible American and Anglo migrant community. Today American women continue to migrate there, many in order to marry Italian men. Confronted with experiences of social exclusion, unfamiliar family relations, and new cultural terrain, many women struggle to build local lives. In the first ethnographic monograph of Americans in Italy, Catherine Trundle argues that charity and philanthropy are the central means by which many American women negotiate a sense of migrant belonging in Italy. This book traces women’s daily acts of charity as they gave food to the poor, fundraised among the wealthy, monitored untrustworthy recipients, assessed the needy, and reflected on the emotional work that charity required. In exploring the often-ignored role of charitable action in migrant community formation, Trundle contributes to anthropological theories of gift giving, compassion, and reflexivity.
cepr.org
Large parts of the Netherlands saw an early rise in market traffic during the late Middle Ages already. Exchange via the market became the dominant form not only for goods, but also for land, labour and capital, and this during the course of the sixteenth century already. This contribution investigates why it should be that the market form of exchange arose so early here specifically; how markets were organised as institutions and how they functioned. It will be demonstrated that the markets here had a favourable organisation, with low transaction costs, a high level of integration of the markets and a large degree of certainty for parties entering these markets. Nevertheless, the consequences of the rise of the market were not all positive. The rise of a market economy did not lead to any appreciable economic growth, while the social effects were largely negative. Social polarisation, pollution and the need to work ever harder depressed standards of living for most people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The increasing focus on (wealth) inequality in economics today has put redistribution to the forefront again. In his influential work Piketty emphasised the role of redistribution, via taxation and the social safety net of the welfare state in the significant drop in inequality after WWII.1 Redistribution via these channels is also put forward as a solution for the searing inequality levels we witness today.2 Still, there is a growing tendency in the literature to suggest that 'real' redistribution can only come about as a consequence of a large-scale disaster. Scheve and Stasavage for example claim that the increasing taxation of the rich, which was essential for the post WWII drop in inequality only came about as a compensation for sacrifices 'ordinary' people made during this war.3 This link between disaster and inequality was taken back further in time, as for example Scheidel claimed that only disasters such as wars, revolutions and epidemics were historically able to redistribute means to an extent that it influenced the level of (in)equality.4 However, this 'absolute' approach of redistribution, focussing on moments of transition between inequality and equality in a given area, tends to shroud the fact that levels of redistribution could significantly differ between societies even under 'normal' circumstances and often link this to the prevailing (in)equality levels within these societies. For present-day democracies it has for example been suggested that redistributive policies are more supported when the distance between middle income voters and the poor is small relative to the Work in progress – do not quote without permission
Tenth BABESCH Byvanck Lecture, Leiden 2016. ISBN 9789073626362 This is the published English version of "Did Ordinary People own pottery"
2016, BABESCH Byvanck Lectures
The location of Corinth at the Isthmus has ensured that from the Neolithic to the beginnings of the Modern Greek State, the city has had a central role in the commerce of the Eastern Mediterranean. Its location is also responsible for the poverty, in the archaeological record, of the famous wealth of the city with the result that researchers have been forced to concentrate on the mundane. Over the past 20 years we have adopted Northern European methodologies replacing those traditionally used by Classical archaeologists and, as a result, the little things we find have made big differences to the way we think about chronology, material culture and the place of Corinth in the past. Corinth’s cultural “reach”, both ancient and modern, means that these changes have a local regional and even European-wide impact. Tuesday 29 November 2016 at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden
The prevalence of large and extended families among sharecroppers in northern and central Italy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been well documented in the historical demographic literature. Landlords relied on tenants' extended household structure to provide a large labor force that increased their income. In earlier centuries, however, landlords' involvement in agricultural production may have had little impact on household structure. Evidence from fifteenth-century Tuscany illustrates that household extension was not as common among sharecroppers during this period of time. Qualitative analyses of personal correspondence and tax declarations from the fifteenth century suggest reasons why landlords' management techniques did not lead to household extension among sharecroppers. Unlike landlords in later periods of time, fifteenth-century landlords relied more on rearranging plots of land than particular demographic practices, because land consolidation was still in progress and farms were not fixed geographically. In addition, during the earlier period of time, sharecropping was less institutionalized and landlords had less power over their tenants. These findings suggest that sharecropping, as a tenurial form, did not necessarily lead to household extension. Instead, the effect of the tenurial form depended on the nature of sharecropping and the degree of landlords' power. * * * * * The study of historical household structure is an exciting field, because of the debates that mark its terrain and because an understanding of contemporary household structure requires knowledge of households in the past. Describing contemporary households as " modern " or even " post-modern " , requires the term, " pre-modern " , as a referent. Indeed, historical families are often viewed through a " distant mirror " (Tuchman 1978), in which the living see the dead as themselves or, more often, as the inverted image of themselves. This connection between past and present is reflected in the academic debates over the historical prevalence of nuclear and extended households. The commonly accepted scholarly wisdom about the size and composition of historical households has been frequently reinterpreted, depending on whether these households are seen to be similar to contemporary ones, or their opposites. This article inserts the paradoxical case of the household structure of fifteenth-century Tuscan sharecroppers into this debate. Sharecropping, a form of leasing in which the rent is a share of the harvest, plays a central role in this literature. Historical studies show that sharecroppers often lived in large, extended families, casting doubt on earlier arguments that the nuclear family was uniformly the Emigh 37-73 26/2/98, 4:12 pm 37
Global concerns over climate change and associated impacts of the so-called Anthropocene, convinced an increasing number of historians to reconsider the role of natural variability and ‘natural’ hazards and disasters in the past. Whether discussing the production of hazards or the societal responses they provoked, historians increasingly adopt the language of environmental and disaster studies, with their clear focus on systems, how systems get disturbed, are able to absorb change or instead reach a tipping point or threshold followed by qualitative change. But is systemic vulnerability or resilience really the problem when discussing natural hazards and disasters in the past? Exploring the history of coastal flood disasters in the North Sea Area before 1800 AD, I argue that past societies might have been quite resembling in their overall systemic resilience to natural hazards and disasters. Mostly through absorption, and sometimes through flexible adaptation, societies were perfectly able to overcome even the worst flood disasters. Notwithstanding this overall resilience however, societies varied greatly in the way individual people or groups of people were put at risk of suffering from a natural hazard, seeing their persons, their material assets, or their livelihoods threatened. While the system was resilient, people sometimes (though not always) proved tremendously vulnerable. Concluding this paper, a plea is launched for a renewed focus on the sociology of disaster victims in the past (rather than on the overall resilience of societies).
This papers 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.
2008
In the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, the exploitation of landownership underwent drastic changes in various parts of Northwestern Europe. In these changes, the emergence of the lease plays a pivotal role. At the end of the Middle Ages, in a number of areas within the North Sea area, the greater part of available land was held at lease for relatively short terms. The competitive and contractual nature of such leasing has caused many to associate it with the emergence of capitalism in the countryside, seeing its rise as a key element in the transformation of the rural economy and society in the last millennium. In view of this, it is surprising that the emergence of leasing has received little systematic attention, particularly where its roots, its early development, its exact arrangements and the social and economic context of its emergence are concerned, let alone the regional and chronological differences in these elements. This volume aims to make a first step in exploring these issues.
Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750, Volume I: Peoples and Place, Edited by Hamish Scott (March 2015).
2014, in C. Briggs, P. Kitson and S. J. Thompson (eds.), Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Britain, 1290-1834. Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer: 269-305.
This paper explores a key analytical issue in historical research on agrarian societies: the need to be attentive both to rural people’s decisions as economic agents and to the constraints on their choices. It begins by examining evidence of goal-maximizing behaviour by rural people – not just peasant farmers but women, servants, serfs, landless workers, youths, and many others – in a diversity of pre-industrial societies. It then analyses some central constraints within which rural people made their choices: family and inheritance systems, village communities, manorial systems, legal rules and customs, and the actions of rulers. It concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding the functioning of rural economies, now widely recognized as central to long-term improvements in economic growth and human well-being.
In historiography, the functioning of poor relief has often been explained by focussing on a single prime mover, be it elite ambition to control labour (cfr. Lis & Soly), or the need for social groups to protect themselves because of growing urban anonymity (cfr. Lynch). Recently however, several researchers suggested that the functioning and extent of relief were characterised by outspoken regional differences. In this article we want to further explore this suggestion by using the potential of the Low Countries’ countryside as an ideal laboratory to test the impact of regionally diverging social structures on the extent and functioning of relief. Not only did all its communities share the same relief institution, the poor table, it was furthermore characterised by the presence of all types of societies: from very commercial (coastal Flanders), over proto-industrial (inland Flanders), to communally organised (Campine area). By analysing poor table accounts for all three regions we aim to illustrate how the extent of relief was determined by the distribution of power and the level of social homogeneity within a given region.
The history of agriculture and the countryside in Italy has a long tradition of studies. The deep historical and environmental diversity that characterizes Italian history, the wealth of archival sources and the cooperation above all with archeology have addressed studies on the medieval countryside, with a focus on regional specificities and the relationships between agrarian history and economic history: urban-rural relationships, agricultural structures and the countryside, reclamation and cultivation techniques, forms of farm management and work, animal breeding and transhumance, diet and the movement of goods. In recent years, the need has been felt for a comparative overview of the entire peninsula, able to highlight common traits and diversified paths precisely during the Middle Ages with different methods of agricultural rationalization and development, or the use and management of resources such as transhumant pastures. The investment in agricultural land and the different forms of land use represent a significant step in the economic history following the 14th-century crisis that affected individuals, cities and rural communities, and such public enterprises as charities. This interest in the comparison, in Italy and Europe, also featured various overview studies dedicated to the environment and landscapes, seeking to incorporate new kinds of research coming from the modern world. The present text is the revised version of the speech presented at the International Conference Old and New Worlds: The Global Challenges of Rural History (V Encontro Rural RePort – XV Congreso de Historia Agraria de la SEHA, Lisbon 2016), in the Session Old and New Challenges for Rural History of Middle Ages coordinated by Antoni Furió.
This article studies a collection of data on economic inequality in fifteen towns in the Southern and Northern Low Countries from the late Middle Ages until the end of the nineteenth century. By using a single and consistent source type and adopting a uniform methodology, it is possible to study levels of urban economic inequality across time and place comparatively. The results indicate a clear growth in economic inequality in the two centuries prior to the industrial revolution and the onset of sustained economic growth per capita. The results presented lend support to the " classical " explanation of inequality as the consequence of a changing functional distribution of income favoring capital over labor over the course of the early modern period. These findings provide an alternative resolution of the conundrum presented by " optimist " and " pessimists " interpretations of early modern economic development. . Inequality in history The growth of income inequality in many countries of the Western world over the last thirty years has significantly bolstered the centrality of inequality to debates in economics, social sciences, and policy making. Nevertheless, inequality's somewhat unexpected return to public consciousness and research agendas has confronted social scientists and policymakers alike with the finding that most knowledge of its fundamental causes and effects is still limited and often highly contested. As a result, many economists have turned to the past for more insight into the underlying logic of inequality movements through time. In particular, the long-term relationship between inequality and economic development has been central to much historical investigation. This strand of economic history has sought answers to the question whether inequality is good for economic development and has tried to do so by looking at the experience of the past two centuries. The current paper addresses the same issue of the relationship between inequality and economic development, but goes further back in time, and focuses on the long formative period of Western, capitalist economies. It aims to determine the extent to which pre-industrial levels of inequality were affected by economic development, and by the long-term emergence of a capitalist economy, and to consider how inequality might have influenced development itself. Several theories on the relationship between inequality and development exist for the modern era, but given the scarcity of sources that allow for the reconstruction of income and wealth inequality before the twentieth century, their applicability to the pre-and early industrial period is largely unclear. As is well known, the most influential modeling of the relationship between economic growth and inequality was presented first by Simon Kuznets in his 1954 presidential address to the American Economic Association (Kuznets 1955). Based on cross-sectional data on the level
In historiography, the functioning of poor relief has often been explained by focussing on a single prime mover, be it elite ambition to control labour (cfr. Lis & Soly), or the need for social groups to protect themselves because of growing urban anonymity (cfr. Lynch). Recently however, several researchers suggested that the functioning and extent of relief were characterised by outspoken regional differences. In this article we want to further explore this suggestion by using the potential of the Low Countries’ countryside as an ideal laboratory to test the impact of regionally diverging social structures on the extent and functioning of relief. Not only did all its communities share the same relief institution, the poor table, it was furthermore characterised by the presence of all types of societies: from very commercial (coastal Flanders), over proto-industrial (inland Flanders), to communally organised (Campine area). By analysing poor table accounts for all three regions we aim to illustrate how the extent of relief was determined by the distribution of power and the level of social homogeneity within a given region.