Wealth inequalities and population dynamics in early modern northern Italy

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 513-549

  Alfani, Guido ^a  

^a BOCCONI UNIVERSITY   (Italy)

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EID: 77953508921     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/jinh.2010.40.4.513     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. For examples of the growing number of empirical studies that describe the evolution of inequality during industrialization, see Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, American Inequality: A Macro Economic History (New York, 1980)
2. Williamson, Did British Capitalism Breed Inequality? (Boston, 1985)
3. Y. S. Brenner, Hartmut Kaelble, and Mark Thomas (eds.), Income Distribution in Historical Perspective (New York, 1991), which includes several studies of Europe, America, and Oceania.
4. Simon Kuznet's original hypothesis is to be found in "Economic Growth and Income Inequality" American Economic Review, XLV (1955), 1-28
5. Paolo Malanima, "An Age of Decline: Product and Income in Eighteenth Century Italy," Rivista di Storia Economica, XXII (2006), 91-133
6. idem, "Pre-Modern Equality: Income Distribution in the Kingdom of Naples (1811)," paper presented at the Fourteenth International Congress of Economic History, Helsinki, 2006
7. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc (Paris 1966), found, during the crisis years from 1680 to 1750, an increase in the concentration of land due to a kind of sélection naturelle that would have favored the largest landowners
8. For Holland, see Jan L. van Zanden, "Tracing the Beginning of the Kuznets Curve:Western Europe during the Early Modern Period," Economic History Review, IV (1995), 643-664
9. Lee Soltow and idem, Income and Wealth Inequality in the Netherlands, 16th-20th Centuries (Amsterdam, 1998)
10. For revision of the traditional view of Italian economic trends, see Malanima, "Le crisi in Italia e la crisi del Settecento," Società e Storia, C-CI (2003), 373-386
11. idem, "An Age of Decline"; Alfani, Il Grand Tour dei Cavalieri dell'Apocalisse: Economia, Popolazione e Calamità nell'Italia del Cinquecento (Venice, 2010)
12. idem, "Population and Environment in Northern Italy during the XVIth Century," Population, IV (2007), 1-37
13. idem, "La dinamica della popolazione dell'Italia settentrionale nel Cinquecento: Dal generale al particolare e viceversa: casi, comparazioni, questioni," Cheiron, XLII (2004), 95-131
14. Williamson, "Growth, Distribution, and Demography: Some Lessons from History," Explorations in Economic History, XXXV (1998), 241-271, posed a similar question for the time of the demographic transition, suggesting that what really matters is age distribution and not rate of population growth. This case, however, is completely different from that of pretransitional societies.
15. Another study relating wealth concentration and city size is van Zanden, "Tracing the Beginning." For the debate about demography and inequality, see Williamson, "Growth, Distribution, and Demography."
16. The population estimate comes from Historical City Archive of Ivrea (hereinafter cai), n. 2938. For the effects of Turin's growth on early modern Piedmontese cities, see Giovanni Levi, "Come Torino soffocò il Piemonte," in idem, Centro e periferia di uno stato assoluto (Turin, 1985), 11-69.
17. For the introduction of parish books of baptism in Italy, see Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers: Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern Italy (Aldershot, 2009)
18. for the availability of demographic sources before the seventeenth century, idem, "Il secolo dimenticato: Primi contributi per una riscoperta demografica del Cinquecento nell'alta Italia," Popolazione e Storia, II (2003), 9-30
19. In general, since the particolari (individual owners) were heads of family, the estimi are hearth-per-hearth, not person-per-person, declarations of property-the most common of early modern Italian fiscal systems. The lire used in Ivrea's estimi did not correspond to any coined money; it was a pure unit of measurement used to define the value of each owner's estate compared to that of the other owners. As such, the lire d'estimo could not be easily converted into any money in use at the time; it simply allowed easy definition of the tax that every owner had to pay. In other words, given that the total value, as expressed in lire d'estimo, of the taxable estate of Ivrea was known, the value of the taxable estate of each owner could be used to define his quota d'estimo (share of the estimo) and to determine his tax burden-in particular, his share of the Tasso (explained below).
20. The value given to the taxable estate (both as recorded in the estimi and in the correzioni) owned by every individual takes into account not only transient circumstances, such as the damage caused by floods, but also the different rights and obligations attached to lands or other estates. For example, in 1632 Giovanni Antonio Porcelli obtained a reduction of 12 denari to the value attributed to his vineyard because he could prove that it was burdened by a censo in favor of the Chapter of the Cathedral. Concerning the estimi and correzioni, the sources consulted are cai, n. 1438-39 for year 1466; n. 1441 for year 1487; n. 1444 for year 1518; n. 1449 for year 1544; n. 1470 for year 1593; n. 1478 for years 1620 to 1628; n. 1483 and 1485 for years 1629 to 1631; n. 1486 for years 1632 to 1648; n. 1487 for years 1649 to 1674.
21. For more detailed information about the estimi of Ivrea, see Alfani and Andrea Caracausi, Struttura della proprietà e concentrazione della ricchezza in ambiente urbano: Ivrea e Padova, secoli XV-XVII, in Alfani and Michela Barbot (eds.), Ricchezza, valore e proprietà in Età preindustriale (1400-1850) (Venice, 2009).
22. Cai, n. 1750. The census of 1613 is not listed among the Piedmontese censuses in Giuseppe Prato, "Censimenti e popolazione in Piemonte nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII," Rivista Italiana di Sociologia, X (1906), 308-376.
23. As far as I know, the source is unknown to historians and historical demographers alike. The only information that I have about its nature and its aims is the copy of the instructions sent by the central government to the communities, pasted at the end of the book collecting all of the individual declarations: "Instructions about what is required from the agents of the Communities of the places in order to have notice of the goods and capitals, to be sent here [Turin] for the soccorso [aid] due to His Highness" (there follows a description of the information to include and of the procedures to adopt, as already discussed). Hence, the document could have been used to calculate Ivrea's contribution for the soccorso militare (military aid) or for a similar means of extraordinary taxation. Other communities of Piedmont might have preserved their own copies, but I have not found any other similar document to date, or any study that mentions one. Apparently, this exceptionally useful source for socio-economic and demographic research is unique.
24. For censuses in early modern Piedmont in general, apart from Prato's article, see Karl Julius Beloch, Bevölkerungsgeschichte Italiens (Berlin, 1937-1961), 3 v. Concerning the 1427 Florentine catasto, although Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber clearly stated that it was an exceptional source, even by Florentine standards, other scholars took their work as representative of a general Italian situation.
25. See David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families (New Haven, 1985)
26. Herlihy, Santa Maria Impruneta: A Rural Commune in the Late Middle Ages, in Nicholai Rubinstein (ed.), Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Forence (London 1968), 242-276
27. idem, "Family and Property in Renaissance Florence," in Harry A. Miskimin, idem, and Abraham L. Udovitch (eds.), The Medieval City (New Haven, 1977), 3-24
28. idem, The Distribution of Wealth in a Renaissance Community: Florence 1427, in Philip Abrams and E.Anthony Wrigley (eds.), Towns in Societies:Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology (New York, 1978), 131-157.
29. For the Tasso, see Enrico Stumpo, Finanza e stato moderno nel Piemonte del Seicento (Rome, 1979)
30. for its political implications, Matt Vester, "Territorial Politics and Early Modern 'Fiscal Policy': Taxation in Savoy, 1559-1580," Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, XXXII (2001), 279-302
31. idem, "Fiscal Commission, Consensus and Informal Representation: Taxation in the Savoyard Domains, 1559-1580," Parliaments, Estates and Representations, XX (2000), 60-74
32. For the general characteristics of the Savoyard fiscal state in the early modern period, see Attilio Garino Canina, "La finanza del Piemonte nella seconda metà del XVI secolo," Miscellanea di storia italiana, XXI (1924), 499-638
33. For the characteristics of the Savoyard fiscal system and its evolution within the Italian and the European situation, see Carlo Capra, "The Italian States in the Early Modern Period," in Richard Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c.1200-1815 (New York, 1999), 417-442
34. Lucio Pezzolo, Republics and Principalities in Italy, in P. K. O'Brien and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla (eds.), The Formation and Efficiency of Fiscal States in Eurasia 1498-1914 (New York, forthcoming)
35. Pezzolo and Stumpo, L'imposta diretta in Italia dal medioevo alla fine dell'ancien régime, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La fiscalità nell'economia europea (secoli XIII-XIX) (Florence, 2008), 75-98.
36. Most of the Piedmontese communities paid the Tasso by distributing it according to the estimo, but they were largely free to do otherwise (according to their statutes); their only requirement was to pay a certain sum to the duke, fixed in gold scudi. The burden upon the communities increased with inflation (given the devaluation of silver with respect to gold). Many of them had to incur debts to pay. In Ivrea, as in other places, this system also caused other problems: When the taxable estate decreased (due to a natural disaster or to new fiscal exemptions), the burden per unit of taxable estate increased, because the amount due by the community to the state remained the same.
37. cai, n. 3826. Feudal property was scarce in Ivrea because, after being the seat of a Frankish marque, the city in the Middle Ages became dominated by the bishopric. For exactly the same reason, however, the patrimony of the Church comprised a large share of the total property.
38. cai, n. 1496. In the case of clerical property, it has to be noted that the source in the previous paragraph takes into account land never included in an estimo because it was ecclesiastical ab antiquo, as well as land acquired later, which was given an estimo value at some point. The source in this paragraph concerns only property that originally was secular and comprised in the estimo, and was acquired by the clergy only later.
39. In 1613 Ivrea, the same figure was estimated to be around 13%. See Alfani and Caracausi, "Struttura della proprietà e concentrazione della ricchezza"; van Zanden, "Tracing the Beginning," 645.
40. Raymond De Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397-1494 (New York, 1963)
41. The Gini index was introduced by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1921. It is calculated according to the formula G=(2/(nI))*(i(Fi-Qi), where (in our case) n is the number of individuals; i is the position of each individual in the ranking sorted by increasing wealth; the sum goes from 1 to n-1; Fi is equal to i/n; Qi is the sum of wealth of all individuals between position 1 and i, divided by the total wealth of all individuals.
42. See Gini, "Measurement of Inequality of Incomes," Economic Journal, XXXI (1921), 124-126
43. Renzo Corritore, La costituzione di scorte granarie pubbliche e la politica economica degli Stati in Età pre-industriale (forthcoming)
44. Dante Zanetti, Problemi alimentari di una economia preindustriale: Cereali a Pavia dal 1398 al 1700 (Turin, 1964), 70-77
45. The "sacks of grain" were probably standards sacks of 5 emine, which, according to the decree of the duke of Savoy in January 1612, had a volume of 115.274 litres.
46. See Savino Giglio Tos, Ivrea nel XVII secolo (Pont Canavese, 2002), 36-37
47. For the wide recourse to credit in the early modern period and its "culture," see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London, 1998)
48. For births in northern Italy, see Alfani, "Population and Environment." Ivrea partly lost its strategic position for commerce due to the strengthening of the Montcenise Pass, long compromised by the conflicts of the sixteenth century. According to a Discorso sovra il Tasso (a request for reduction of the amount of Tasso due by Ivrea), dated 1657, the re-opening of the Pass, which diverted a large share of the traffic to and from France, was one of the main causes of the economic, demographical, and fiscal difficulties faced by the city from the beginning of the seventeenth century (cai, n. 3826). The importance of the Montcenise also caused much concern in the Aosta Valley, which traditionally had profited from the movement of merchandise. That the dukes of Savoy favored the Montcenise is shown by a tax on imports and exports levied on the Aosta Valley in 1561-the Péage de Suse, or Susa toll (the Valley of Susa, west of Turin, being the route to the Montcenise Pass), became a sore spot between the Valley and the central government until 1735, at least. Thanks go to Alessandro Cesi for information about these little-known aspects of the history of the Aosta Valley. For the Montecenise, see also Leonardo Carandini, Il grande valico (Novara, 1960).
49. th Century," paper given at Fifteenth World Economic History Congress, Utrecht, 2009
50. Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution (London, 1993; orig. pub. 1976).
51. The methods, which basically involve using the house of residence to locate the terziere to which each individual owner belonged (thus making it possible to calculate measures per terziere even when the entries in the estimo are not organized according to quarter of residence), are explained in Alfani, "Dinamica demografica e concentrazione della ricchezza nelle popolazioni urbane di antico regime: quale legame? (Ivrea tra Quattrocento e Seicento:Prime indagini e riflessioni di metodo)," in Marco Breschi and Malanima (eds.), Prezzi, redditi, popolazioni in Italia: 500 anni (dal secolo XV al XX) (Udine, 2002), 45-60.
52. Herlihy, Family and Property; idem and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families; idem, Distribution of Wealth
53. van Zanden, "Tracing the Beginning." For Livorno
54. see Bruno Casini, Il catasto di Livorno del 1427-29 (Pisa, 1984)
55. For Paris and London, see Nathan Sussman, "Income Inequality in Paris in the Heyday of the Commercial Revolution," working paper (Jerusalem, 2007); for the other cities, van Zanden, "Tracing the Beginning," 645-647
56. For year 1613, cai, n. 1750; for year 1619, n. 2938; for year 1627, n. 1753; for years 1627-1650, n. 1757; for year 1665, n. 1759; for year 1698, Archive of Turin, art. 531, March 9, as quoted by Giglio Tos, Ivrea nel XVII secolo, 94; for year 1682, Francesco Carandini, Vecchia Ivrea (Ivrea, 1927), 282.
57. For Turin, see Alfani, "Tono istituzionale e migrazioni urbane: il ruolo dell'acquisto o della perdita dello status di capitale nelle dinamiche demografiche delle città italiane (secoli XVI e XIX)," in Ercole Sori and Anna Treves (eds.), L'Italia in movimento: due secoli di migrazioni (XIX-XX) (Udine, 2009), 49-74.
58. Levi, "Come Torino soffocò il Piemonte"; for the plague of 1630, Alfani, "Pestilenze e 'crisi di sistema' in Italia tra XVI e XVII secolo: Perturbazioni di breve periodo o cause di declino economico?" in Cavaciocchi (ed.), Uomo e Biologia (Florence, 2010).
59. Alfani and Samuel K. Cohn, "Nonantola 1630: Anatomia di una pestilenza e meccanismi del contagio (con riflessioni a partire dalle epidemie milanesi della prima Età moderna)," Popolazione e Storia, II (2007), 99-138.
60. idem, "Households and Plague in Early Modern Italy," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXVIII (2007), 177-205
61. Prato, "Censimenti e popolazione"; Lorenzo Del Panta, Le epidemie nella storia demografica italiana (Turin, 1990)
62. For the Savoyard wars of the first half of the seventeenth century, see Claudio Rosso, "Il Seicento," in Pierpaulo Merlin et al. (eds.), Il Piemonte sabaudo: Stato e territori in età moderna (Turin, 1994), 173-267; for the involvement of Ivrea, Giglio Tos, Ivrea, 27-54.
63. In the civil war of 1638-1642, the madamisti-supporters of the "Royal Madam" Cristina, who, with French aid, claimed the regency in the name of her son Carlo Emanuele-opposed the principisti-under the leadership of the princes Maurizio and Tommaso (Carlo Emanuele's uncles), who contested Cristina's regency and looked to Spain as an ally. Ivrea favored the principisti.
64. What follows is a synthesis of the discontinuities in the sources that had to be considered: The redaction of a new estimo, started in 1629 and ended 1632, broke down into a documentary series of correzioni that began in 1620 and ended in 1674. A further break, due to the physical size of the registers, occurred in 1649. The individual sources treat, on a yearly basis, the periods 1620 to 1628, 1629 to 1631, 1632 to 1648, and 1649 to 1674. Careful reconstruction and record linkage can solve this problem. Separation of the goods of the rural towns, however, is more difficult to negotiate. Even the first book of correzioni (1620-1628) breaks with other sixteenth-century sources by registering in separate lists the goods of Palazzo and Piverone, placed on the morainal hill of Serra northeast of Ivrea. These two communities remain apart in later sources, but they are joined in the correzioni of 1629-1632 by Bollengo and Borgofranco, and in the correzioni of 1632-1648 by Fiorano and Parrocchie (Parishes), a territory comprising the villages of Samone, Salerano, and Banchette south of Ivrea on the route to Turin. The last correzioni (1649-1674) lists the goods as the earlier one did. Given that after the separation of these rural goods, individuals could appear in different estimi (if they owned goods in more than one territory), perfectly analogous aggregates are difficult to reconstruct. The loss of goods amounts to about 6,600 denari, or 7.9% of the total, in 1629 and to about 8,500, or 11.9% of the residual, in 1632. The disappearance of these goods does not prevent a comparison between concentrations of different sets of goods; it simply calls for extra care in analyzing data. A tenor di delegatione (a speech on behalf of the city) of 1652 described how the conflict concerning the fiefs had developed, attributing its cause to the fact that not all of the estate of the enfeoffed communities was correctly removed from the estimo, thus failing to reduce the fiscal burden on Ivrea sufficiently and generating a fiscal gray area. In other words, the city was burdened with a share of the Tasso that should have been charged upon the enfeoffed communities, the inhabitants of which could not be coerced into paying, or so Ivrea's representatives claimed (cai, n. 1492). The petitions repeatedly sent to the dukes of Savoy were the sign of a deep, and growing, fiscal malaise.
65. For more detail about this issue, see Alfani, "Prima della curva di Kuznets: stabilità e mutamento nella concentrazione di ricchezza e proprietà in Età Moderna," in idem and Barbot (eds.), Ricchezza, valore e proprietà; idem, "Fiscality and Territory: Ivrea and Piedmont, 15th-17th centuries," paper presented at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, Geneva, 2009. For the decree of feudi nuovi (new enfeoffments), see Rosso, Il Seicento.
66. From 1629 to 1631, the average number of people removed from the registers, probably because of death, was forty-five per year-more than four times as many as in the years preceding the crisis. Adjustments made to the register did not coincide exactly with demographical phenomena, but they were influenced by the time taken by heirs and notaries to regulate the succession-hence, the peak of "deaths" in 1631 and not in 1630. So far as owners were concerned, note that the estimo does not always provide a full account of the rights associated with real estate. Its main concern is to identify taxpayers and define their share of the Tasso or property tax. Usually the taxpayer was the head of family, who might represent brothers, for example, sharing certain ownership rights with him. The state divided the Tasso among communities, unconcerned about how each community divided it among its members; the city shared its quota of Tasso among heads of family, unconcerned about what happened within their families. The questions of who was registered in the estimi, when, and how have similar procedures across Italy, though influenced by different fiscal systems.
67. See, for example, the case of Pavia in Cipolla, "Condizioni economiche e gruppi sociali in Pavia secondo un estimo cinquecentesco," Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, 15, no. 5 (1943), 264-287.
68. The correzioni of 1629 to 1631 actually continued until 1632, but they did not yet include the separation of the estimo of Bollengo and Borgofranco. Hence, the data for 1632 in Figure 4 come from the same source as the data for 1629 to 1631, but the data for 1632 in Figure 3 come from the next correzioni covering 1632 to 1649. 27 cai, n. 1496/3.
69. For the surge in donations during the Counter-Reformation, see Stumpo, Il consolidamento della grande proprietà ecclesiastica nell'età della Controriforma, in Giorgio Chittolini and Giovanni Miccoli (eds.), La Chiesa e il potere politico: Annali della Storia d'Italia (Turin,1996), 263-289.
70. According to a petition of the city dated around 1640, the clergy of Ivrea made continuous appeals against the Tasso and tried to get brevi, or statements of exemption, even from the pope, thus throwing their rights and duties into confusion (cai, n. 1757). In 1697, of the 30 lire (6,000 denari) of estimated goods owned by the clergy, 18 lire, or 60%, was totally exempt from taxation, and 12 lire counted only toward the Tasso. It is impossible to know how much of the estate owned by the clergy and registered in estimi and correzioni of earlier decades was actually eligible for taxes. In 1697, Ivrea tried to force the clergy to pay taxes on all of its "usurped" lands, probably in the context of a campaign initiated by the dukes of Savoy to curtail widespread abuses by the clergy. That many communities were becoming increasingly indebted and thus unable to pay tribute explains the keen interest of Duke Vittorio Amedeo II in the matter.
71. See Geoffrey Symcox, "L'età di Vittorio Amedeo II," in Merlin et al. (eds.), Il Piemonte sabaudo, 271-438.
72. Stuart J. Woolf, "Sviluppo economico e struttura sociale in Piemonte da Emanuele Filiberto a Carlo Emanuele III," Nuova Rivista Storica, XLVI (1962), 1-57.
73. The city's frequent complaints about the extensive property of the clergy being an immense burden on the lay population were justified. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, the clergy owned 36.8% of the territory of Ivrea tax-free, whereas the figure was only about 6.8% for Piedmont as a whole at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Woolf, "Sviluppo economico," 9). During the seventeenth century, the clergy also doubled their estimo property. Even granting that all of it counted toward the Tasso (and it did not), it would still have been exempt from other taxes.
74. For floods, see Giglio Tos, Ivrea nel XVII secolo, 127-128
75. To this point, social groups have been distinguished by profession and socio-economic status. Henceforth, other social variables will be considered-clerical or lay status, place of origin, and rights of residence in Ivrea (through citizenship or simple habitation).
76. For the Theil index, see Anthony F. Shorrocks, "The Class of Additively Decomposable Inequality Measures," Econometrica, XLVIII (1980), 613-625
77. idem, "Inequality Decomposition by Population Subgroups," ibid., LII (1984), 1369-1385.
78. See also the next note
79. A Theil index can be considered a weighted average of inequality within subgroups (in our case, citizens, clergy, and foreigners), plus of inequality between subgroups. Hence, it is possible, for example, to calculate the Theil index for Ivrea's citizens in 1629-0.754 (third column in Table 3); the contribution of this specific group of owners to total inequality in Ivrea, however, is smaller-0.675 (fourth column in Table 3)-the result of weighting the Theil calculated for citizens according to their share of the total wealth of Ivrea. bgi (0.086 in 1629) is a measure of inequality between all groups in terms of a weighted sum of the logarithm of the ratio of each group's average wealth and the average wealth of the total population. The Theil index calculated for all of the owners in Ivrea can then be obtained as the total wgi (the sum of the contribution to wgi of each subgroup-0.725 in 1629), plus bgi (0.725 + 0.086 = 0.812 in 1629, after rounding). Unlike the Gini index, Theil is not a standardized index; it does not vary within a specific interval of values. As a result, although Theil is useful for analyzing the data in specific case studies, it is not suitable for making comparisons between different cases studies.
80. Kuznets, "Economic Growth"; Williamson, "Growth, Distribution, and Demography."