The Economic Consequences of the Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars: A Watershed in Spanish History?

By Leandro Prados de la Escosura (Carlos III University de Madrid) and Carlos Santiago-Caballero (Carlos III University de Madrid).

Abstract: The Napoleonic Wars had dramatic consequences for Spain’s economy. The Peninsular War had higher demographic impact than any other military conflict, including civil wars, in the modern era. Farmers suffered confiscation of their crops and destruction of their main capital asset, livestock. The shrinking demand, the disruption of international and domestic trade, and the shortage of inputs hampered industry and services. The loss of the American colonies, a by-product of the French invasion, seriously harmed absolutism. In the long run, however, the Napoleonic Wars triggered the dismantling of Ancien Régime institutions and interest groups. Freed from their constraints, the country started a long and painful transition towards the liberal society. The Napoleonic Wars may be deemed, then, a watershed in Spanish history.

URL: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hes:wpaper:0130

Distributed by NEP-HIS on: 2018-04-30

Review by: Guido Alfani (Bocconi University)

Figure 1: Francisco de Goya, Muerta de hambre, c. 1812-1820. Drawing. Source: see entry in Goya en El Prado.

Summary

Large-scale war, as well as other major shocks that punctuate human history – plagues and famines for example – have been the object of much recent research in economic history, especially regarding their long-term consequences. Leandro Prados de la Escosura and Carlos Santiago-Caballero focus on the so-called “Peninsular War” which followed Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808. They set out to provide an in-depth analysis of the short-term effects of this devastating war, then focusing on their long-term consequences. They argue that although the immediate consequences of war were considerably damaging to the Spanish economy, in the long run they were probably positive as the Peninsular War triggered the transition from an absolutist empire to a modern nation. They support their argument by means of counterfactual analysis.

This paper presents an overview of recent research on different dimensions of the Spanish economy during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, re-organized around how the Peninsular War raging from 1808 to 1814 affected the trends. Much of this research has been published in Spanish, often in publications difficult to find outside of Spain, and consequently this paper is precious for international scholars as a kind of guide to recent achievements in Spanish economic history.

Overall, the Peninsular War, which was triggered by the invasion of Spain by Napoleonic armies – first a peaceful process, agreed upon with the Spanish authorities in order to force Portugal to enforce the “continental block” trade policies against Britain and leading to the Franco-Spanish invasion of Portugal in 1807 – had negative economic consequences in the short run. This is clear looking at the industrial sector, which suffered because of a sharp reduction in internal and international demand as well, the unrestricted influx of French and British goods, a shortage of inputs and high war taxation. Certain sectors – like the luxury productions organized around the Reales Fábricas or “Royal Factories” – never recovered. War also badly affected trade, which was disrupted both at the national and international scale, suffered because of increasing transportation costs and was badly hindered by interruption of contacts with the colonies.

The immediate impact of war is less clear on agriculture, given that on the one hand war led to plundering and confiscation by the armies, while on the other hand it brought to an end Old Regime institutions that vexed the countryside, like the tithe paid to religious institutions. In addition, a large-scale process of confiscation and sale of lands and real estate owned by the Church (the desamortización) took place, leading to a spread of private (lay) property and altering the distribution of wealth across the country. The impact of war on agriculture, however, has to be understood also in the light of the widespread famines affecting Spain during the war period.

More generally, from the demographic point of view the Peninsular War was clearly catastrophic, leading to “population falling one million short of its potential and its direct effect representing half a million casualties, around 5 per cent of the population” (p. 18). To place these figures in the right perspective, the authors note that this is more than double the population loss during the 1936-39 Civil War.

Beyond the desamortización, war also had other important political and institutional consequences. First of all, it started the process ultimately leading to the independence of Spanish America, as also argued by Grafe and Irigoin (2012). This has crucial importance to the way in which the authors frame their discussion of the long-term consequences of the Peninsular War, as specialists in the history of fiscal systems have clarified how colonial revenues to the Crown were instrumental in enforcing state centralization in the mainland (Yun Casalilla 1998). In other words, “empire strengthened absolutist monarchy” (p. 19).

Taken together, the liberalization of the land market – through the desamortización and the end of impartible inheritance systems like the mayorazgo – and the weakening of the absolutist power of the crown would have favored the “Liberal Revolution” sweeping through Spain during the immediate post-war decades.

In the authors’ view, this causal connection between the Peninsular War and the Liberal Revolution explains why although the short-term consequences of war were negative, the long-term ones were probably positive. They support this argument by a simple counterfactual analysis (which is openly presented by the authors as just the first step in a more encompassing research program). The analysis provides some statistical support to the idea that the Peninsular War marked a structural break in the long-term economic development of Spain. In particular, by the mid-nineteenth century per-capita GDP might have been 12% higher, real wages 139% higher, and land rents 30% lower than they would have been if the Peninsular War had not taken place.

Figure 2: The Battle of Vittoria, June 21st 1813. Print. Source: See entry in The British Museum Collection Online.

Comment
This paper is an interesting contribution to the study of the economic impact of major shocks. In earlier research, one of the authors has contributed to clarify that the most iconic “bad in the short-run, positive in the long-run” shock, the fourteenth-century Black Death, had in fact long-term negative consequences in Spain due to the low population density of this European area in the Middle Ages (Álvarez Nogal and Prados de la Escosura 2013). Consequently, there is no reason to believe that the authors have any kind of a-priori in favor of positive long-term consequences of mortality shocks, which unfortunately seems to be a fairly common sin in much contemporary economic history (see further discussion, for the case of plague, in Alfani and Murphy 2017).

Additionally, the paper is built around a detailed and sector-by-sector analysis of how the Peninsular War affected directly the Spanish economy, which is a nice change from the wave of econometric articles in which the actual mechanisms through which crises might have affected the real economy are often just hinted at. For the same reason, this paper offers interesting elements for a comparison with recent research on the economic consequences of wars and other major shocks, research which has focused mostly on the medieval and early modern period (for example, Alfani 2013; Curtis 2014). Given the focus of the paper, the points made about the direct, short-term impact of war are somewhat stronger than the argument about a positive impact in the long run, which might still be the result of other causal factors. However, in this regard the paper is quite openly presented as just a first step, and a very necessary one, given the crucial importance of exploring and clarifying the historical mechanisms through which shocks might affect an economy before proceeding to complex statistical analyses of the data.

Looked at from this perspective, the paper presents only minor issues. A more detailed historical narrative of the Peninsular War would indeed be useful to the international reader. More importantly, no reference whatsoever is done to the fact that the French invasion triggered a phase of institutional and political change across much of continental Europe. The sale of Church property for example, as well as the end of fideicommissa and mayorascos, occurred throughout Catholic Europe. So there is reason to wonder why the Peninsular War would have had different consequences from the (forceful) spread of French innovating ideas and institutions that occurred in other parts of Europe. An obvious difference is, of course, the large-scale demographic impact of war itself – but in the current version of the paper, it is not clear whether the authors are considering the possibility of “Malthusian” dynamics interacting with political and institutional change. For example, to what degree the reported increase in per-capita GDP is the consequence of improvements in the institutional framework, and to what degree it is instead the result of a mass mortality-induced rebalancing of the resources/population ratio? This is a particularly important question, given that much of the war-related mortality was due to widespread famine, possibly to an even larger scale than the authors imply, as suggested by the most recent systematic analysis of famine in Spain (Pérez Moreda 2017).

Selected bibliography

• Alfani, Guido (2013), Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy. The Grand Tour of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Basingstoke: Palgrave
• Alfani, Guido and Murphy, T. (2017), “Plague and Lethal Epidemics in the Pre-Industrial World”, Journal of Economic History 77(1), 314-343.
• Álvarez Nogal, Carlos, and Leandro Prados de la Escosura (2013), “The Rise and Fall of Spain (1270–1850)”, Economic History Review, 66 (1), 1–37.
• Curtis, Daniel R. (2014), Coping with Crisis. The Resilience and Vulnerability of Pre-Industrial Settlements. Farnham: Ashgate.
• Grafe, Regina, and Alejandra Irigoin. (2012), “A Stakeholder Empire: the Political Economy of Spanish Imperial Rule in America”, Economic History Review 65 (2), 609–651.
• Yun Casalilla, Bartolomé. (1998), “The American Empire and The Spanish Economy: An Institutional Perspective”, Revista de Historia Económica 16 (1), 123-156.
• Pérez Moreda, Vicente (2017), “Spain”, in Guido Alfani and Cormac Ó Gráda (eds.), Famine in European History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 48-72.

On the Long-term Determinants of Cultural Traits: Family Structures in the Past

Origins and Implications of Family Structure across Italian Provinces in Historical Perspective

By Graziella Bertocchi (Modena and Reggia Emilia University and IZA) and Monica Bozzano (Modena and Reggia Emilia University)

Abstract: In this study we review the literature on the origins and implications of family structure in historical perspective with a focus on Italian provinces. Furthermore we present newly collected data on three of the main features of family structure: female mean age at marriage, the female celibacy rate, and the fraction of illegitimate births. The data are collected at the provincial level for 1871, the year of Italy’s political unification. The analysis of the data allows us to confirm and quantify the geographic differentiation in family patterns across the country.
We also illustrate the links between family structure and a set of socio-economic outcomes, in the short, medium, and long run.

URL: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10327

Distributed by NEP-HIS on: 2017‒06‒25

Review by: Guido Alfani (Bocconi University, Milan)

The recent interest in the long-term determinants of cultural traits has led to a new wave of research on family systems in the past, as well as to debates that renewed old disputes about the actual possibility of identifying areas of coherent family systems and their causal effect on contemporary behaviours. Graziella Bertocchi and Monica Bozzano have been very active in this field, focusing on such a culturally fragmented and varied area as Italy. In this new working paper, they present further evidence at the provincial level from the Italian 1871 census. They show the importance of looking at the sub-national and indeed, at the sub-regional level to identify correctly the prevalent family structures and demographic behaviours. Their data show feeble evidence that the so-called EMP (European Marriage Pattern) is associated with economic development, human capital accumulation and women’s empowerment. These findings are relevant to current debates on European family systems and on their possible permanent effects on cultural traits.

Italian Family, early twentieth-century. Source:  www.novecento.org.

Summary

This paper presents new data, at the provincial level, about family structures in Italy in 1871. In that year, the first national census was made after the conquest of Rome and the incorporation of the residual territories of the former Papal States, and Veneto, into the Kingdom of Italy. The authors provide information about family types, female age to marriage, proportion of brides under age 20, female final celibacy rates, and illegitimacy rates. Family types are classified as nuclear vs complex, as well as according to the four-way classification introduced by Todd (1990) which combines residential habits (neolocal vs patrilocal) and inheritance systems (partible vs impartible): absolute nuclear family, egalitarian nuclear family, stem family, and communitarian family. Additionally, the authors build upon earlier research (Bertocchi and Bozzano 2015) to apply their own classification of Italian families, which distinguishes between egalitarian families with late female age to marriage (found to be prevalent, in 1871, in the North-West of Italy), incomplete stem families (prevalent in the North-East), communitarian families (prevalent in the Centre) and egalitarian families with early age to marriage (prevalent in the South).
Beyond the technicalities of the classification, an important contribution of the article is to clearly show, by means of a set of well-drawn maps, the high variability of family types and behaviours to be found across the Italian peninsula, even in contiguous territories. The obvious consequence of this, is to make it much more difficult to neatly characterize different parts of Italy according to their family systems and prevalent demographic behaviours.
Interestingly, the authors focus on characteristics connected to the so-called European Marriage Pattern (EMP), including nuclear residential patterns, relatively late age to marriage and relatively high final celibacy rates. The prevalence of the EMP has been connected to economic success, as originally hypothesized by Hajnal (1965) and as later assumed by many economic historians and economists (for example, Greif 2006; De Moor and Van Zanden 2010). But in this paper, in the authors’ words, “Overall our results show very feeble evidence that the different characteristics of the EMP are associated with economic development, human capital accumulation, or women’s empowerment” (p. 14). However, the authors do find a significant correlation between some of their indicators and measures of contemporary gender balance. For example, gender equality in economic leadership (measured as the rate of women in managerial positions) in year 2009 is found to grow with the female mean age to marriage in 1871 and to decline with the proportion of brides under age 20 and the prevalence of nuclear families. This is in line with earlier research by Bozzano (2016).
The authors are mindful of placing correctly their discussion in the broader context of current research on the long-term impact of family systems and structures done by economic historians and economists. Consequently they provide to all researchers interested in the field a useful survey of the recent literature (although a better coverage of recent demographic and historical-demographic literature would also have been useful – see for example Reher 1998).

Comment

This paper is an interesting and important contribution to the renewed pan-European research efforts aimed at identifying the characteristics of past family systems. Although many researchers pursue this objective solely to improve our knowledge of the past, others are driven by the aim of finding long-term determinants of differences in current social and economic behaviour. Two examples of this are the “Patriarchy Index” project (Szołtysek et al. 2017) and the recently-started Institutional Family Demography project (IFAMID) led by Arnstein Aassve, which is currently focusing on the measurement of another of Hajnal’s favoured indicators, the prevalence of life-cycle servants, at the European sub-national level. Yet other scholars have analysed previously-neglected aspects of past societies which could also explain current behaviour – for example godparenthood practices, which began to diverge across Europe at the time of the Reformation and which might have led to differences in ways of doing business (Alfani and Gourdon 2012).
The sub-national scale of analysis is a particularly useful characteristic of this paper. First, it allows (at least on principle) for more precise measurement and greater explanatory power. Secondly, and maybe even more importantly, it reminds us that complexity in the geographic distribution of social systems and behaviours is the common feature of most of the European continent. Indeed, a seemingly frequent characteristic of old debates is that they are easily forgotten – and what might have seemed to be final acquisitions need to be re-discovered and re-discussed, decades later. This is the case of debates about the actual possibility of applying broad generalizations to studies of European social-economic dynamics, the most common of which, both when referring to the European continent, or to Italy alone, seems to be the “North vs South” one. Such debates already involved, in a somewhat defensive position, Peter Laslett and his school, but have been renewed due to the popularity acquired by Todd’s more recent classifications among economists and to some degree among economic historians (interestingly, Todd seems to have been much less influential on historians of the family). The debates about the role played by the EMP in determining economic success, which have recently been the object of intense discussion in the pages of the Journal of Economic History (Dennison and Ogilvie 2014; 2016; Carmichael et al. 2016), have old roots. It is still unclear where current discussion will lead us – whether we are bound to conclude that if we examine European family systems closely, they are in fact too diverse and intermixed to be of much use as indicators of persistent cultural divides, or whether we will finally reach a consensus on broad, documentable differences which do not only fit nicely with our views on European societies (even though such views might be more than a little tainted by prejudice and ideology), but do actually explain something. What is clear is that, in order to make the discussion progress in a fruitful way, we need more high-quality data – which is what this paper successfully delivers for Italy.
There are, of course, issues which might be debated further. For example, this paper (like most of its kind) does not discuss the choice of period to measure differences in past family systems. It is not enough to state that the earliest-available encompassing census is used – is 1871 also the right period to measure such differences? Were not family differences already influenced by the Industrial Revolution and the demographic transition, and were not these processes more advanced at that time in the North (and especially in the North-West) than in the South of Italy? And why did the authors not control in their regression analysis for the pre-unification Italian state to which each province belonged, given that they work on a period immediately following the birth of the Kingdom of Italy? Indeed, why should we rule out the possibility that pre-unification states also had permanent effects, perhaps due to some influence on their local family systems? Finally, how far could family systems in 1871 determine differences in cultural traits today, given the intense internal migration processes that affected Italy? Many northern regions today have a very mixed population if we consider where the current population’s ancestors lived in 1871. Should we not conclude that current cultural traits are better explained by past family systems in provinces of out-migration (mostly the southern ones) compared with those of in-migration (mostly the northern ones)? And how could we take this into account, if indeed it is possible?
But these are questions better left for further research and for future debates, which already seem to be looming on the horizon. For now, we should be grateful to the authors of this paper for providing us with new material to ponder.

Selected bibliography

Alfani, G. and Gourdon, V. (2012), “Entrepreneurs, formalization of social ties, and trustbuilding in Europe (fourteenth to twentieth centuries)”, Economic History Review 65 (3), pp. 1005–1028
Bertocchi, G. and M. Bozzano (2015),“Family Structure and the Education Gender Gap: Evidence from Italian Provinces,” CESifo Economic Studies 61, pp. 263–300.
Bozzano, M. (2016), “On the Historical Roots of Women’s Empowerment across Italian Provinces: Religion or Family Culture?”, European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming.
Carmichael, S. G., De Pleijt, A., van Zanden, J.L. and De Moor, T. (2016), “The European Marriage Pattern and Its Measurement”, Journal of Economic History 76, pp. 196–204.
De Moor, T. and J. L. van Zanden (2010), “Girlpower: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period”, Economic History Review 63, pp. 1–33.
Dennison, T. and S. Ogilvie (2014), “Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth?”, Journal of Economic History 74, pp. 651–693.
Dennison, T. and S. Ogilvie (2016), “Institutions, Demography, and Economic Growth”, Journal of Economic History 76, pp. 215–217.
Greif, A. (2006), “Family Structure, Institutions, and Growth: The Origins and Implications of Western Corporations”, American Economic Review 96, pp. 308–312.
Hajnal, J. (1965), “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective”, in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (eds.), Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, Edward Arnold, London, pp. 101–143.
Reher, D.S. (1998), “Family ties in Western Europe: Persistent Contrasts”, Population and Development Review 24, pp. 203-234
Szołtysek, M., Poniat, R., Gruber, S., Klüsener, S. (2017), “The Patriarchy Index: a new measure of gender and generational inequalities in the past”, Cross-Cultural Research 51 (3), pp. 1-35
Todd, E. (1990), L’Invention de l’Europe. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Wealth and Income Inequality in the Early Modern Period

Comparing Income and Wealth Inequality in Pre-Industrial Economies: Lessons from 18th-Century Spain

By Esteban A. Nicolini (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) and Fernando Ramos Palencia (Universidad Pablo de Olavide)

Abstract: In this new working paper on preindustrial inequality, Nicolini and Ramos Palencia build upon their earlier work on income inequality in eighteenth-century Old Castile (Nicolini and Ramos Palencia 2015) by looking into one particularly important, and difficult to assess, aspect: how to reconstruct, for a given preindustrial society, estimates of both income and wealth inequality – considering that the sources, according to the place and the period, have the tendency to inform us only about one of the two. Given the amount of new information about long-term trends in preindustrial inequality, of either income or wealth, which has been made available by recent research, the authors point at what clearly constitutes one of the next steps we should take and in doing so, they also provide a useful contribution to the methodological debates which are taking place among scholars working on preindustrial inequality.

URL: http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/heswpaper/0095.htm

Distributed by NEP-HIS on 2016-03-29

Review by Guido Alfani

Summary

In this paper Nicolini and Ramos explore the connection between income and wealth for a large sample of communities from different Spanish provinces: Palencia, Madrid, Guadalajara and Granada. They combine information from two different sources:

1. the Catastro de Ensenada (ca. 1750), which provides information about household income, and

2. probate inventories (covering the period 1753-68), a source which has often been used to estimate wealth inequality.

These two sources are combined using nominative linkage techniques in order to take advantages of one to solve the weaknesses of the other. In particular, the almost-universal scope of the survey within the Cadastre enables Nicolini and Ramos to assess with certain precision the actual coverage of the probate inventories (which tend to be biased towards the upper part of the distribution). This allows them the resampling or weighthing of the information to improve the study of wealth inequality. It should be underlined that the Catastro de Ensenada is a truly exceptional source. It was an early attempt at introducing a universal tax on income. As the new tax was proportional and should have replaced a number of indirect provincial taxes with regressive effects, this fiscal innovation clearly moved in the direction of a more equitable system of taxation. Unfortunately, the new tax was never implemented – but at the very least, the attempt to introduce it generated a vast amount of useful information.

Nicolini and Ramos were able to reconstruct both income and wealth for 194 observations, out of the much larger sample of 6,214 households for which they only have information about income. Nicolini and Ramos then explore the connection between income and wealth, finding (as was expected) a very strong correlation. However, they go much deeper, thanks to an econometric approach in which the distortions in the sample (determined in particular by over-representation of rich households) are corrected by weighting. They obtain many interesting and potentially useful results, in particular:

1. they estimate the average rate of return to wealth to be 2.9% p.a. – which is, generally speaking, much smaller that usually implied in the literature. For instance, the rate of return to wealth implied by Lindert in his work on the Florentine Cadastre of 1427 was 7% p.a. (see below). However, if the association between income and wealth is analyzed by considering their logarithm (which is the econometric specification preferred by Nicolini and Ramos), then the elasticity of income to wealth varies between 0.4 and 0.9 depending on the region. This means that a 10% increase in household wealth is associated to an income increase comprised in the 4-9% range. This range is consistent with empirical findings in many studies of past and present societies, all of which suggest that income inequality is lower than wealth inequality;
2. the distribution of household income increases less steeply than the distribution of household wealth. This might be due to the fact that labour income is relatively larger in the bottom part of the distribution, or that the wealth of the bottom part of the distribution consists for a larger part of income-producing assets, while the wealth of the richest people would consist also of other assets, including (unproductive) status goods and luxuries as well as cash;
3. the relationship between wealth and income differs depending on the sector of activity of the household head (primary vs secondary/tertiary) and on the place of residence – although somewhat surprisingly, and differently from what reported for other European regions (for example Tuscany by Alfani and Ammannati 2014), Nicolini and Ramos do not find that urban households had greater wealth than rural ones. In the study by Nicolini and Ramos urban and rural wealth were usually on par, but in the extreme case of Guadalajara urban dwellers were less wealthy than rural dwellers.

 

Sample of Catastro de Ensenada (Archivo Simancas)

 

Comment

This paper makes many interesting and potentially important contributions to the study of inequality in the early modern period, a field which has been particularly fertile in recent years. First, it provides new information about inequality in the Iberian peninsula, integrating other recent studies (e.g. Santiago-Caballero 2011; Reis and Martins 2012). Secondly, it contributes considerably to the development of a methodology to translate in a non-arbitrary way income distributions into wealth distributions, and vice versa. This is a crucial point, which deserves some attention.

The Ensenada Cadastre is an exceptional source as it provides data on income. As a matter of fact, most other sources of the “cadastrial” kind are essentially property tax records, which always list real estate and sometimes other components of wealth – but not income. However, it has also been argued that for the preindustrial period, in most instances wealth distributions are the best proxy we have for income distributions (Lindert 2014; Alfani 2015). This being said, moving from the good-quality distributions of wealth that have recently been made available for different parts of late medieval and early modern Europe (in particular, Alfani 2015; Alfani and Ryckbosch 2015) to acceptable distributions of income is clearly a worthy pursuit.

I would differ with Nicolini and Ramos Palencia in their statement that theirs is the first attempt at studying together income and wealth distributions in the pre-industrial period. For example, Soltow and Van Zanden (1998) did so in their study of the Netherlands. However, Nicolini and Ramos do provide useful and interesting insights into how to convert wealth distributions into income distributions. Many such attempts are currently underway and there are earlier examples, like Lindert’s method to convert the distribution of wealth in the 1427 Florentine catasto into an income distribution (results used in Milanovic, Lindert and Williamson 2011).

Moreover, Nicolini and Ramos Palencia stress many potential pitfalls in procedures of this kind. This being said, there are aspects of their current reconstructions which are a bit surprising and might be the result of sampling issues, as 59% of the 194 observations relate to the province of Palencia. Is Guadalajara, where rural dwellers were wealthier than urban dwellers, an exceptional case or does this depend on the very small sample (just 12 observations) the authors have for that region? To dispel any doubts, more probate inventories should be collected, in order to improve the territorial balance within the sample and to better account, both in the estimation process and in the econometric analysis, for possible regional variations. However, this does not alter the general conclusion. The paper by Nicolini and Ramos is a very useful piece of innovative research, grounded in new archival data and packed with useful insights about how to improve our knowledge of inequality in the pre-industrial period.

 

Ferdinand VI (1713 – 1759), called the Learned, was King of Spain from 9 July 1746 until his death.

 

Selected Bibliography

Alfani, G. (2015), “Economic inequality in northwestern Italy: A long-term view (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries)”, Journal of Economic History, 75 (4), 2015, pp. 1058-1096.

Alfani, G. and Ammannati, F. (2014), Economic inequality and poverty in the very long run: The case of the Florentine State (late thirteenth-early nineteenth centuries), Dondena Working Paper No. 70.

Alfani, G., Ryckbosch, W. (2015), Was there a ‘Little Convergence’ in inequality? Italy and the Low Countries compared, ca. 1500-1800, IGIER Working Paper No. 557.

Lindert, P.H. (2014), Making the most of Capital in the 21st Century, NBER Working Paper No. 20232.

Milanovic, B., Lindert, P.H. and Williamson, J.G. (2011). “Pre-Industrial Inequality”, The Economic Journal 121: 255-272.

Nicolini, E.A. and F. Ramos Palencia (2015), “Decomposing income inequality in a backward pre-industrial economy: Old Castile (Spain) in the middle of the eighteenth century”, The Economic History Review, online-first version, DOI: 10.1111/ehr.12122.

Reis, J., Martins, A. (2012), “Inequality in Early Modern Europe: The “Strange” Case of Portugal, 1550-1770”. Paper given at the conference Wellbeing and Inequality in the Long Run (Madrid, 1 June 2012).

Santiago-Caballero, C. (2011), “Income inequality in central Spain, 1690-1800”, Explorations in Economic History 48(1): 83-96.

Soltow, L. and Van Zanden, J.L. (1998), Income and Wealth Inequality in the Netherlands, 16^th-20^th Century. Amsterdam, Het Spinhuis.