Join us for a seminar and discussion with Guido Alfani on “Economic Inequality in Preindustrial Societies: The Republic of Venice and Europe, ca. 1300-1800.” The event will take place in Room 8304.
Guido Alfani is associate professor of economic history at Bocconi University, Milan. He has published extensively on wealth and income inequality in Italy during the late medieval and early modern period. He has been the principal investigator of the project funded by the European Research Council (ERC), EINITE – Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe 1300-1800 (www.dondena.unibocconi.it/EINITE), whose aim was to reconstruct inequality measures in the long run of history and to reach a better understanding of the determinants of inequality change in preindustrial societies. He is currently the principal investigator of a new ERC project, SMITE, whose focus is on social mobility.
Paper Abstract
Recent research in economic history has unearthed previously unknown facts about the long-term trends in inequality. We now have, for at least some areas of Europe, continuous time series of key inequality indicators from ca. 1300. Most of these series have resulted from the research conducted by the project EINITE – Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe 1300-1800. These new data are changing the way in which we perceive economic inequality not only in the past, but even today – as a key lesson from history, is that economic inequality (especially, but not only, of wealth) has a marked tendency for increasing over time, and only catastrophes on the scale of the Black Death or the World Wars managed to bring it down, albeit temporarily. This seminar will focus on new research being conducted on what was, until the beginning of the early modern period at least, one of the main economic powers of Europe and the Mediterranean: the Republic of Venice. In some respects, this is the world area for which we now have the most detailed information about wealth inequality and poverty, for the period from ca. 1400 until the end of the Republic. It is also an area perfectly suited to test some hypotheses about the deep causes of the tendency for inequality to grow that seems to have characterized almost the entire European continent during the early modern period, independently from economic growth. The seminar will focus on the role played by institutions, and in particular by the rise of the fiscal-military state. The findings for the Republic of Venice will be placed in a broader European perspective.
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