PRELIMINARY DRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHORS. ALL EQUAL IN THE FACE OF DEATH? Explaining regional differences in wealth inequality after the Black Death. The case of social agrosystems in rural Hainaut (1250-1500). Joris ROOSEN (Utrecht University) [email protected] Sam GEENS (FWO, University of Antwerp) [email protected] Despite its longstanding historiographical tradition, the topic of wealth inequality has gained particular momentum during the last decade. Especially the Global Financial Crisis of 2007- 2008, with its negative effects on unemployment and poverty levels, has spurred the interest of social scientists and policy makers. In search of the drivers of inequality, scholars have not only focused on the present day, but have increasingly turned towards premodern societies. Most notably, the EINITE-project under the supervision of Guido Alfani has retraced evolutions of wealth in Italy and the Low Countries between the fourteenth and nineteenth century.1 In both regions, inequality tended to increase over the whole period except for the century after the Black Death. Other studies, although few and with a more limited geographic or chronological scope, seem to confirm this universal rise of inequality.2 These new results challenge us to rethink traditional theories on the distribution of wealth. In his pioneering work, Jan Luiten van Zanden extended the ideas of Simon Kuznets to premodern times and argued that, in this period, economic growth went hand in glove with increasing inequality.3 However, his hypothesis seems improbable in the light of recent studies on stagnating and declining economies, such as early modern Florence or Flanders, where inequality increased just the same. 4 In addition, an analysis of the relationship between GDP per capita and economic inequality yielded no significant results.5 Several scholars have therefore proposed a variety of new explanations. In general, they can be grouped under three possible drivers. First, a lot of weight has been given to demography. 1 See for Italy: G. Alfani and F. Ammannati, ‘Long-term trends in economic inequality’, Economic History Review, 70/4 (2017), pp. 1072-1102; Alfani, ‘Economic Inequality in Northwestern Italy’, Journal of Economic History, 75/4 (2015), pp. 1058–1096. For the Low Countries: W. Ryckbosch, ‘Economic inequality and growth before the industrial revolution’, European Review of Economic History, 20/1 (2016), pp. 1-22. 2 See for example: M.M. Coşgel, and B.A. Ergene, ‘Inequality of wealth in the Ottoman Empire’, Journal of Economic History, 72 (2012), pp. 308-331; E.A. Nicolini and F. Ramos Palencia, ‘Decomposing income inequality in a backward pre-industrial economy’, Economic History Review, 69 (2016), pp. 747-772; J. Reis, ‘Deviant behaviour? Inequality in Portugal 1565–1770’, Cliometrica, 11 (2017), pp. 297–319. 3 J.L. van Zanden, ‘Tracing the beginning of the Kuznets curve’, Economic History Review, XLVIII (1995), pp. 643-664. 4 Alfani, ‘Long-term trends in economic inequality’. 5 B. Milanovic, ‘Towards an explanation of inequality in premodern societies’, Economic History Review, forthcoming (available online: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ehr.12613). See esp. table 2. 1 PRELIMINARY DRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHORS. Inequality appears to increase with population growth and population density, while demographic shocks, like plague or warfare, can cause a decrease.6 Second, it is possible that the organization of production steered inequality through the endowment of its principal factors and the functional distribution of income. In this classical framework, wealth is more likely to be unevenly distributed in economies focusing on large-scale, standardized production with low wages than in those focusing on skill-intensive production where labor is highly valued.7 Lastly, historians have pointed at the power of (local) elites to create coercive institutions that regulate the way wealth can be accumulated, such as taxation or access to commons.8 Due to the still very limited amount and fragmented nature of data, the above explanations remain highly hypothetical and scholars have stressed the need for more empirical research. This paper seeks to contribute to this developing field by analyzing the regional evolutions of wealth inequality within the countryside of the county of Hainaut in the century and half after the Black Death. This period is arguably one of the most interesting to research premodern wealth, since studies on Tuscany and Piedmont suggest that, at this time, societies witnessed both a rare prolonged decline of inequality and the beginning of its long-term increase.9 Retracing the distribution of wealth allows us to verify if Hainaut experienced a similar process. Did the Black Death and recurrent plague waves had an egalitarian effect here as well? When did the trend reverse (Section 2. Retracing wealth in an era of demographic shocks)? Furthermore, by comparing inequality between four subregions, we hope to test the explanatory power of non-demographic drivers for rural Hainaut. Can the observed evolutions be attributed to productional and/or institutional factors (Section 3. Wealth and social agrosystems)? Depending on the place and time, such an explanation might vary. For example, Guido Alfani showed that plague induced depopulation in Piedmont had a very different impact in the fourteenth century than it had in the seventeenth century because of institutional change. While partible inheritance was common in the former period, families had adopted strategies to prevent patrimonial fragmentation by the latter period.10 However, before examining such changes in wealth distributions and their explanations, we first highlight the case study and its different sources. 6 For population density: Milanovic, ibid. For population growth: P.T. Hoffman et al., ‘Real Inequality in Europe since 1500’, Journal of Economic History, 62/2 (2002), pp. 322-355. For demographic shocks: W. Scheidel, The Great Leveler, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, esp. pp.289-342; Alfani, ‘Wealth Inequalities and Population Dynamics in Early Modern Northern Italy’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XL/4 (2010), pp.513-549. 7 Ryckbosch, ‘Economic inequality and growth’. 8 M. Di Tullio, ‘Cooperating in time of crisis: war, commons, and inequality in Renaissance Lombardy’, Economic History Review, 71/1 (2018), pp. 82-105. 9 Alfani and Ammannati, ‘Long-term trends in economic inequality’; Alfani, ‘Economic Inequality in Northwestern Italy’. 10 Alfani, ibid., pp.1077-1078. 2 PRELIMINARY DRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHORS. 1. The county of Hainaut and its sources Late medieval Hainaut was a county in the south of the Low Countries, encompassing at its largest extent 4656 km² (see Appendix 1).11 Although it was never a leading economic or political center of Europe, its great variety of productional organization and institutions within a geographically limited area makes Hainaut an ideal case for our comparative analysis of wealth distribution. To differentiate between subregions within the county, we utilize the concept of social agrosystems. This theoretical framework identifies ‘systems of rural production based upon region-specific social relations involved in the economic reproduction of a given geographical area’. 12 Specifically, environment, access to land, power structures, income strategies, and farming techniques are taken into account. The approach avoids the common mistake of seeing administrative borders as defining economic borders. Based on the shared characteristics described in the extensive work of Gérard Sivéry on rural Hainaut, we were able to identify four subregions in the county: northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest (see Appendix 2 for an overview of all characteristics per region).13 They are separated by a central area around the capital of Mons which can best be described as a transitionary zone (see map 1). Since a clear set of common characteristics is lacking, this area is excluded from our comparative analysis, though, whenever the entire county is discussed, the data for these localities are included. Three out of the four subregions consist of fertile loamy soil, which makes them well suited for cereal cultivation. Here, the majority of the population were farmers who sold their produce at local or specialized grain markets, such as those of Valenciennes, Ath and Mons. A large part of the surplus was traded with the nearby county of Flanders, which needed a constant import to feed its highly urbanized population. The way grain production was organized within each subregion, however, differed significantly. In the southwest, local ecclesiastical lords had a very strong position and village communities were weak, with little organization and hardly any formal responsibilities. This was reflected by the enforcement of a “Flurzwang-system” (i.e. a communal system in which all the arable land was employed in a large three-field system). Peasants were forced to grow certain crops and follow a certain crop rotation on their individual holdings, which were often smaller than 1 hectares. Only from the second half of the 15th century, the collective forced three-field system started to decline in favour of short-term leasehold for small holdings. Similarly to the major grain producing regions of Northern France, Artois and Cambrésis, those micro-holdings were contrasted