Abstracts
Caferro, William: War and the Economy of Italy (1350-1450): An Examination of the Evidence
This work examines Italian warfare (1350-1450) in terms of the famous debate over the nature of the late-medieval economy (“hard times or prosperity?,” see Cipolla). Although economic historians readily acknowledge that the period saw unprecedented military activity and that the campaigns were enormously costly, they have as yet offered no systematic studies of the costs and profits of war. Nevertheless, in recent years, as scholars have emphasized the “prosperity” of post-plague Italy, there has emerged, albeit implicit and abstract, a “war as good for the economy” argument. The paper will evaluate this argument, taking as its point of departure the statements made by William McNeill and Richard Goldthwaite, stressing the recycling wealth and so-called “one way money flows” from outside the peninsula. I will examine in particular the wages paid to soldiers (especially foreign mercenaries), and their patterns of spending. The paper aims as much at establishing a workable methodology for future research as finding a definitive answer.
Drelichman, Mauricio: Getting the Mesta Right: Spanish Wool Production and Trade In the Medieval and Early Modern Eras
The Mesta, an association of migratory shepherds of Merino herds, is inextricably associated with medieval and early modern Spain. Throughout the centuries, it amassed a substantial body of privileges that made it a favorite whipping boy on which to blame Spain's institutional and economic backwardness; yet little is still understood about the nature of the institution, its evolution, and its role in the Spanish economy throughout the six and a half centuries of its life. I argue that, in its early stages, the Mesta solved a complicated hold-up problem, enabling the production of fine wool in large quantities and enabling Spain to play to its comparative advantages, thus taking a prominent place in the trading economy of the medieval commercial revolution. I then link the fortunes of the Mesta to those of its product - wool - in international markets; while the privileges granted to it seldom changed, their actual enforcement waxed and waned with its economic power.
Etkes, Haggay: International Trade and Structural Changes of Ottoman Provinces: The Case of Ottoman Jerusalem and Gaza
The paper begins with a short review of the Mediterranean wheat trade between Italy and Cairo-Jerusalem during the 15th –16th centuries (respectively), and demonstrates the relation between the grain prices in these locations. It continues by examining the impact of the soaring European wheat prices on the economies of Jerusalem and Gaza during the 16th century. It provides evidence that the soaring grain prices in Italy, which influenced the local wheat prices, negatively affected the local real urban wages, and thus hindered the urban production and undermined urban demography.
The paper also explores the impact of the increase in the wheat prices on the rural sector: it examines its impact on the spatial distribution of population and the composition of production in the costal plains north to Gaza and Jerusalem’s mountains. While the former specialized in wheat production the latter were suitable for olive cultivation. The exploration of the rural sector is based on a new 5 period panel data based on Ottoman tax records.
The results of the paper do not coincide with the prevailing common wisdom regarding the Ottoman ability to block international trade and provide wheat - a basic staple - to its urban centers and army.
Fynn-Paul, Jeffrey: Of Prosperous Spaniards and Unhappy Italians: A Comparison of Wealth, Debt, and Capitalization in the Medium-Sized Cities of Catalonia and Tuscany circa 1420
Scholars working on living standards in late medieval Mediterranean cities are both blessed and cursed by the existence of David Herlihy’s monumental works on Italian households, particularly Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia and Tuscans and Their Families. In these studies, Herlihy paints an almost Dickensian picture of teeming urban underclasses, living hand to mouth and hopelessly mired in debt, as the sombre human backdrop to the glories of the Renaissance. Given a lack of comparable studies, it has been natural for Spanish scholars to assume that the situation in Spain must have been “like Italy, only worse,” since, for example, surviving architectural fabric suggests a distinctly poorer society in Spain.
Perhaps the greatest challenge posed by Herlihy’s works has been that of finding a data set comparable to the 1427 Florentine Catasto. As it turns out, the archives of the Catalan city of Manresa have produced a 1408 tax survey known as the Liber Manifesti, which contains detailed records for all of the city’s 640 households. The Liber Manifesti has enabled a direct comparison of many social and economic factors between Manresa and Herlihy’s Tuscan cities; this paper will focus on a comparison of per capita wealth, distribution of income, and debt levels, with a more speculative conclusion deriving from findings on the capitalization of household patrimonies.
A comparison of the Liber Manifesti with the Catasto figures shows a wholly unexpected prosperity on the part of the Catalans. Even when one over-compensates for Catasto omissions, Manresan per capita wealth comes to 301 florins versus 210 florins in Pistoia. A comparison of wealth distributions shows that upper class Manresan and Pistoiese fortunes were virtually identical in value, a finding which reflects poorly on Pistoia since it was twice the size of Manresa. It also means that Manresa’s lower and middle classes enjoyed the bulk of the prosperity differential between the two cities. Further dichotomy is shown by far lighter and more evenly distributed debt levels at Manresa.
How can one account for such a definite disparity between Manresan and Tuscan wealth, at all levels of society? This paper concludes that tax policy played a major role, as did the relative effects of warfare on embattled Tuscany versus peaceful Catalonia. A third reason derives from divergent policies in the public debt systems of Catalonia and Tuscany. It can be shown that Florentine debt policy drove upper-class liquid capital, upon which middle class prosperity ultimately depended, out of the Contado cities and into Florence itself. By contrast, I will argue that the Catalan system did not immediately encourage such a capital migration. In Catalonia, debt and tax policies combined to foster a stratum of prosperous medium-sized cities whose middle classes thrived in the decades around 1410. In contemporary Tuscany, middling cities and their middle classes were largely left to wither in the voracious “blazing sun” (Herlihy) of Florentine affluence.
Gabay, Karine: Coercion Power, Property Rights and Technology Adoption: Construction of Watermills in Pontheiu, France, During the 11th to 12th Centuries
In this paper, I use evidence concerning the construction of watermills in Ponthieu, a region in the north of France during the 11th-12th centuries, as a case study of the effects of political structure over investment in technology adoption in feudal economies. I show that more intense political competition resulted in a significantly higher level of watermill construction, after controlling for changes over time and geographical differences. This result, which is also consistent with the predictions of a theoretical model presented in the paper, is used to argue that the increase in investment in technology adoption in northwestern Europe during the 11th century can be largely attributed to the political changes that were taking place during the same period.
Grantham, George: Integrating Commodities in the Medieval Economy
Economic integration is carried by geographic mobility of inputs and outputs on a scale large enough to affect regional resource allocations. Apart from seasonal migration of harvest and construction workers (which developed late), the vehicles for European economic integration before the sixteenth century were commodities whose ratio of value to bulk was high enough to support the high cost of transport, and commodities whose production clustered along waterways that lowered the cost of transport to major markets. Of these commodities the most important were cloth (especially woolens and their material inputs of raw wool and dyestuffs), wine, and in lesser measure, leather. This paper focuses mainly on the European cloth industry, and shows that its spatial pattern of development from the tenth through the fourteenth century conforms to the general schema set out by Paul Krugman in Geography and Trade. I also make some observations about the agricultural consequences of that economic integration.
Greif, Avner: Commitment, Coercion, and Markets: The Nature and Dynamics of Medieval Institutions Supporting Exchange
The development of market-based exchange relies on the support of two institutional pillars that are, in turn, shaped by the development of markets. One such institutional pillar - 'contract-enforcement institutions' - determine the range of transactions in which individuals can commit to keep their contractual obligations. Yet, markets also require institutions that constrain those with coercive power from abusing others' property rights. These 'coercion-constraining' institutions influence whether individuals will bring their goods to the market in the first place. This paper build on historical evidence to discuss aspects of market-supporting institutions which we know the least about. First, the dynamics of market-supporting institutions and the implied dynamics of markets; second, the inter-relationships between the dynamics of market-supporting and political institutions where the latter comprise the rules for collective decision-making, political rights, and the legitimate use of coercive power. It argues, in particular, that neither the assertion that liberal political institutions lead to markets nor that markets lead to liberal governance are supported by theory or history. Markets and political institutions co-evolve through a dynamic inter-play between contract-enforcement and coercion-constraining institutions.
Karakacili, Eona: Rethinking the Role of Agriculture in the Middle Ages and Beyond: England During the 14th Century
The agricultural sector is a focal point in any theories of growth or living standards in the middle ages and beyond. Its huge size dominated pre-industrial production, fundamentally shaping GNP per capita, it employed the bulk of the workers, and of course, it was largely responsible for feeding its population. Historians concentrate upon the output of food per worker (agrarian labour productivity levels) as the lever which determined the potential for new sectors to emerge and expand, and as a critical determinant of living standards. It is generally thought that these levels were quite low, reaching a Malthusian crisis point prior to the Black Death. Rate levels thereafter fluctuated but remained low until an agricultural revolution, defined as a sharp increase in such rates and experienced first in England, permitted the next revolution—an industrial one—to emerge and allowed sustained growth to take place. Lacking aggregate data for centuries prior to the nineteenth for any country, historians are not able to directly measure such rates and attempt to determine levels and trends indirectly from such potential indicators as real wages or urbanization rates.
This paper summarizes sections from several chapters in my book-in-progress, Growth Before Industrialization: English Agrarian Labour Productivity During the Fourteenth Century. This work supplies the first direct measurement of such rates for any pre-industrialized country, using superb disaggregate data. Late medieval farm accounts, unique to England, supply all factor inputs and outputs in agriculture. I use these accounts to reconstruct agrarian labour productivity rates in a sample set of villages and assess the causes of productivity changes by comparing these locales across time and place. The data indicate that the output of medieval English farm workers, during the half century before the Black Death when pre-industrial rates were alleged to be at their nadir, equal or surpass the literature’s best estimates for their early nineteenth century counterparts. After the Black Death, rates mainly continued at former levels but declined substantially by 1400. This paper will concentrate on the post-Black Death decades and discuss the degree to which the volume and real value of rates support the divergent ideas concerning medieval/pre-industrial development supplied by the prevailing four schools of thought. It offers an alternative perspective on medieval growth and living standards and beyond. As part of this framework, it locates the nexus of historical medieval growth in the decisions made by ordinary English farmers, who determined trends in the output per worker. Farmers’ decisions were market-driven but were further influenced by changes in rural income distribution. The paper suggests that income distribution plays a role in growth, with an equitable income distribution possibly fostering growth.
McCants, Anne: Public Goods versus Private Spending: Surplus Production, Capital Accumulation, and Monumental Architecture in Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean.
This paper investigates the economic impact of the great high medieval building expansion, particularly as manifested in cathedrals and castles. It first seeks evidence for the source of the capital needed to complete these projects, whether from the current surplus of peasant production, or from the dis-hoarding of an already centuries-long process of accumulation. The welfare implications of these two possible funding scenarios are very different. Moreover, they suggest very different growth paths for the larger economy in which the building took place. This paper will examine the urban environments of both Christian Europe and the Islamic Mediterranean which sponsored the most important achievements of medieval monumental architecture, and the relationships they had with their rural hinterlands to assess both the sources of funding and the actual distribution of benefits across these two cultural areas.
Milanovic, Branko: An Estimate of Average Income and Inequality in Byzantium Around 1000
Using recent economic statistics from the peak period of Byzantine political and economic influence, we estimate the average income around the year 1000 to have been about 6 nomismata per capita per annum. This is then translated into current prices using two independent methods. They both yield an estimate around $PPP 640-720 in 1990 international prices. It is argued that this amount is some 20 percent below an average estimate of Roman incomes at the time of Augustus (around year one). Assuming that most of income differences in Byzantium were due to the differences in average incomes between social classes, we estimate the Gini coefficient to have been in the range between 40 and 45.
Munro, John: Flemish Woollens and German Commerce During the Later Middle Ages: Changing Trends in Cloth Prices and Markets, 1290-1550
This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic League as the major vehicle in marketing their textiles.
In previous articles, I examined the major factors that had led to the industrial and commercial reorientations of the Low Countries’ cloth industries during the 14th and 15th centuries. In brief, the spreading stain of widespread warfare, piracy, and general insecurity, especially in the Mediterranean basin, from the 1290s to the 1460s, led to a rise in transport and transaction costs that, in turn, had three major consequences for the Low Countries’ textile industries (1) to cripple the export-oriented production of cheap and light fabrics, most of which had been sent to Mediterranean markets and had comprised the bulk of northern textile exports to this region; (2) to encourage their draperies to engage in monopolistic competition and re-orient their export-oriented production towards high-priced ultra-luxury quality woollens, which could ‘bear the freight’ of higher transaction costs; such woollens were necessarily woven from finer-grade English wools, which came to be burdened with high export taxes; and (3) to force the Flemish and Brabantine draperies, facing increasing difficulties in Mediterranean commerce, to become more dependent on the Hanseatic towns for their cloth sales, certainly by the mid-14th century. But in effecting these industrial and commercial orientations, the Low Countries’ draperies encountered a new, more dangerous challenge from expanding English competition in textiles, which enjoyed the signal advantage of abundant high quality wools, which, for the domestic cloth industry, were tax-free and much cheaper. Nevertheless, the English took well more than a century to achieve final victory in the woollen broadcloth trade, though one that came to be fundamentally based upon German commercial forces, along with other commercial, monetary, and industrial factors outlined in this paper. Obeying the law of comparative advantage, the textile industries of the Low Countries responded to this English victory by once more re-orienting production to the cheap, light worsted-says; but they were able to do so only when structural changes in European markets and trading networks, with falling transaction costs, from the later 15th century, once more favoured the export-oriented production of such cheap textiles. Our perceptions of changes in medieval consumer markets are necessarily dependent upon an intimate knowledge of the actual products, with their relative values, sold there.
The major contributions of this paper, therefore, also lie in analysing production, product, cost, and price-changes in late-medieval and early-modern textiles, both cheap worsted and luxury woollens, based on nine tables: (1) export and production statistics for the English and Low Countries’ textile industries, 1280 - 1549; (2) dimensions, weights, and composition of selected Flemish and English woollens and worsted-says; (3) English wool prices at the Calais Staple, 1475-99; (4) Price relatives for Ghent woollens and Flemish ‘commodity baskets’, 1340-1540; (5) Rank-order of cloth values at Ghent (from cheap to luxury woollens), for 1360-69, relative to the values of a standard ‘commodity basket’ and the purchasing power of a mason’s wages; (6) Prices of selected Ghent woollens, large (luxury) and small (cheap), 1340-1412, in Flemish pounds groot and Florentine florins; (7) Prices of luxury woollens from Ghent, Mechelen, and Leiden and of cheap Hondschoote says, related to the purchasing power of a mason’s wage, for 1535-45; (8) Prices of English wools (with wool-export duties), English and Ghent woollens, in pounds sterling and Flemish pounds groot, with English-Flemish monetary ratios, and with English, Flemish, and Brabantine commodity price-indices, 1320-1550; (9) Prices of various English, Flemish, Brabantine, and Dutch woollens (in pounds sterling and Flemish pounds groot), 1400- 1520.
O’Rourke, Kevin H., and Jeffrey G. Williamson: Did Vasco da Gama Matter to European Markets? Testing Frederick Lane's Hypothesis Fifty Years Later
What impact did the voyages of Vasco da Gama have on the spatial operation of European commodity markets as measured by relative prices?
We have already collected annual observations on prices of high-value, low-bulk tradables (like pepper and other spices) and high-bulk, low-value non-tradables (like grains) from much of Europe, c1350-c1600. Among our sources are: Clark (England 1350-1650), Elsas (Munich 1450-1599), Felia (Barcelona 1463-1650), Hamilton (Navarre 1351-1451, New Castile 1551-1650, Old Castile 1501-1650, Valencia 1501-1650, Andalusia 1554-1650), Lane (Venice 1363-1510), Pribram (Austria 1371-1609), van der Wee (Belgium 1385-1600), van Luiten (France 1450-1600, Holland 1450-1650), and others. We will use the annual data as comparative time series, performing “before and after” tests, and applying modern econometric tools analysts use to assess market behavior. As economists, rather than financial analysts, our interest in relative, not absolute, prices since these are the market signals that influence resource allocation and income distribution.
We started this project with this question: Did nominal pepper (and spice) prices behave the way Frederic Lane (1968) says they did before and after da Gama? Namely, was there no change at all, his prediction given the assumption that the Portuguese simply pocketed the rents that the Arabs and Venetians had pocketed for so long? We have already gotten the answer to this question. Lane was wrong! He was mislead by only looking at nominal spice (pepper) prices, not relative prices.
We intend to move on with more general questions regarding the spatial operation of European commodity markets before and after the great overseas discoveries. Was the Venetian spice market (or pepper market more specifically) more or less well integrated with the west and north before and after da Gama? How did the integration of spice markets compare with grain markets (a commodity which is typically thought to be a non-tradable, thus implying segmented European grain markets)? Was the Iberian spice market well integrated with the Lowlands? How about compared with the grain market?
Pamuk, Sevket: International Comparisons of Urban Wages in the Late Medieval Era
During the last two decades economists and economic historians have paid a good deal of attention to the estimation of standards of living in different countries and the analysis of what happened over time to the gap between the leaders and followers. In the absence of GDP per capita estimates, real wages series for specific occupations, most often of skilled and unskilled construction workers in urban areas are virtually the only solid piece of information we have for the standards of living for the period before 1820. They also provide the most convenient vehicle for international comparisons of standards of living for this earlier period.
In recent studies I have pointed out to the existence of a gap in urban real wages between northwestern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean during the first half of the sixteenth century which persisted until the Industrial Revolution. The available evidence thus suggests that we need to look at the period before the sixteenth century for the origins of the wage gap between the eastern Mediterranean and northwestern Europe. On the other hand, a large wage gap between the eastern Mediterranean and other regions of Europe can not be observed before the Industrial Revolution.
In this paper I intend to compare the real wages of urban construction workers in England, the Netherlands, Italy, the Byzantine Empire and Egypt in the late medieval era (14th and 15th centuries) to shed further light on the origins of the wage gap within and around Europe.
Segal, Ethan: Polished Coins and Samurai Swords: Trade and State Relations in Medieval East Asia
In the 1990s, Japanese economic historians led by Adachi Keiji argued that medieval Japan was economically dependent upon state policies adopted in China. Their thesis, based in large part upon the study of medieval Japanese coin laws known as erizeni, was informed by assumptions that coins in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean derived their value from the marketplace while East Asian currencies derived their value from the state. This paper reevaluates that east/west dichotomy and challenges the notion that trade with China was the principal determinant of medieval Japanese prices.
After using counterexamples to reconsider the existence of an absolute division between eastern and western currencies, the paper focuses on medieval Japan and its trade relations with China. What role did Japanese state policy in economic regulation and price control? Was there a correlative relationship between the Beijing silver crisis of the 1460s and Japanese coin laws of 1480s? Close analysis of medieval Japanese records suggests that the domestic market played a larger role in determining the value of coins than any actions taken by the Japanese state or by China.
Shatzmiller, Maya: A Misconstrued Link: Europe and The Economic History of Islamic Trade
Historians like to refer to the economic history of Islamic trade in terms of early success and later decline. This analysis is based on observations of Europe’s rise as a mercantile powerhouse in the 16th-19th centuries, and the juxtaposition of Islamic trade to the Italian, Portugese, Spanish, Dutch and English cases, rather than on an independent analysis of the evidence. It is my contention that this analysis limits and misinterprets the function of trade in the medieval Islamic economy and thus distorts its true nature and by extension, that of the performance of the Islamic economy. Using primary sources, and existing research, including my own work, I would like to propose a new and different interpretation of the economic history of Islamic trade, which will challenge the theory of the decline and role played in it by the Southern European Levant trade of the 13th-16th centuries in the Islamic economic decline. I will do it by presenting the Islamic trade as an efficient economic system, pursuing a model of peripheral/regional integration, rather than a model of center/international one, a model more accurate and more efficient for the role Islamic trade played in integrating the different sectors, agriculture, manufacturing and services.
In my presentation I will refer to the formation of the structures of Islamic trade in the pre-1300, but focus on its performance during the 13th-16th centuries. I will discuss the system’s different components, by placing them within a series of five hypotheses.
- The first concerns the nature of the Islamic trade in the first three centuries as mercantile economy based on import of luxury items. The trading patterns which developed in the Islamic East were not as expected, a continuation of Roman and Persian trade. Evidence shows that with the arrival of Islam the nature and scale of manufacturing and commodities have changed completely and that brought fundamental change of the goods imported.
- A second hypothesis studies the evidence of the monetary circulation indicating that trade occurred between regions rather than nations. The trade between Europe, Byzantium and the neighboring Islamic areas, was regional and largely with locally produced items.
- The third hypothesis is that the role of the Islamic merchant law in the development and functioning of trade should not be reduced to investment contracts and financial instruments, but should include another factor, property rights. The study of property rights in Islamic law and society shows that the notarial and court systems enhanced the all encompassing effect of the law, providing a sense of insurance and stability to the individual players, if not to institutions.
- The fourth hypothesis studies the intra-family organization of Islamic trade maligned by those who see in it the cause for the presumed “stagnation and decline”. The evidence shows that it enhanced investment in trade by members of society who could not have participated in trade in person but had capital at their disposal, such as women. It was common to European trading patterns and should not be judged using today’s criteria requiring that trade be institutional, impersonal, or anonymous.
- The fifth hypothesis relates to the ability of the Islamic trade to integrate the productive sectors of the regional units. The evidence is provided by two achievements of the Islamic economy: the diversified occupational structures of the commercial and industrial sectors, which were matched by the diversified scales of the markets, and the division of labour in the transport occupations.
In conclusion, the analysis of the Islamic trade shows a comprehensive system whose different components functioned efficiently, challenging the assumption that the Southern European cities, with their transit trade and with their import of raw material and export of cheap finished goods caused the decline of the Islamic lands.
Straughn, Ian: Islamic Spatial Logics and the Economics of Empire: Rethinking the Peripheralization of Greater Syria (Bilad ash-Sham) 750-950CE
The early Muslim geographers have always had a keen eye for wealth, agricultural abundance and the existence of a luxury trade in their descriptions of the cities and towns of the early Islamic world. Greater Syria, the region known in the Arabic sources as Bilad ash-Sham, was particularly mentioned in early works for its succulent fruits, architectural beauty, diverse and cultured population and extensive markets. However, with the shifting of political and economic power from Damascus to Baghdad in the eighth century under the Abbasid dynasty there emerged a growing sense that this region had fallen into decline. This paper will examine the archaeological evidence for the economic peripheralization of Bilad ash-Sham during the period 750-950CE when Baghdad and the Abbasids were at their height. I argue that, despite the claims that this region was economically and politically punished for its ties to the former Umayyad regime, Bilad ash-Sham did not completely collapse continuing, in many areas, to maintain a strong urban character. This region was able to sustain a level of economic prosperity largely because of its continued strategic importance and its role within an imagined spiritual geography.
My interest in probing the nature and level of peripheralization experienced by the region of Bilad ash-Sham aims to demonstrate how certain complex spatial logics organized the political and economic structures of the Muslim polity in the wake of Abbasid efforts at centralization and administrative control. First, I argue that the Abbasid state was unable to exert effective territorial control over the diverse regions of the Muslim polity necessary in order to turn them into dependent economic peripheries. For Bilad ash-Sham this was marked for instance by the state’s inability subject the Arab-Byzantine frontier of northern Syria to its political and economic control. Instead patterns of settlement and commerce were often locally produced and not dictated by state efforts at militarization. Second, the Abbasid state was unable to establish itself as the uncontested cultural and spiritual center of dar al-Islam (“The Islamic Lands”). In failing to produce a dominant territorial discourse that gave legitimacy to a center-periphery model, Bilad ash-Sham was allowed to remain an important center spatial discourses tied to the production of knowledge (‘ilm) and spiritual benefits (baraka). Lastly, despite its production of certain styles and cultural forms that were emulated throughout the various Muslim lands, the markets of Aleppo, Damascus and Jerusalem were never flooded with the manufactured goods of Baghdad and Sammara’. Rather the archaeological evidence throughout the region demonstrates patterns of material culture that are almost exclusively local or regional. Even at this very quotidian material level the impact of Abbasid centralization was scarcely felt.
The position of Bilad ash-Sham within the territorial discourse of the Muslim polity provided the region with a level of cultural independence that undermined efforts at economic and political integration into a centralized model of imperial control. This case study, therefore, suggests the inapplicability of a world-systems model to the Muslim polity under the early Abbasids. It demonstrates that the concept of periphery inadequately captures the nature of Bilad ash-Sham and its economic relationship to the wider territorial organization of what might be inappropriately labeled the “Islamic Empire.”
Sussman, Nathan: Income Inequality in Paris in the Heyday of the Commercial Revolution
Rising inequality in recent decades in the U.S. and other developed economies has again focused attention on the relationship between inequality and growth, and the relationship between inequality and heterogeneity in abilities. This paper is a preliminary report based on the analysis of data extracted from the tax returns (the taille) imposed by Philip the Fair from 1292 to 1313 on the Parisian middle class. The major finding reported in this paper is that inequality in Paris in the heyday of the Commercial Revolution was very high – a Gini coefficient of 0.7. The medieval Gini coefficient is larger than values recorded for Latin American. Inequality was general and was not confined to one sector or the other. As theory would predict, this inequality was reflected also in large skill and ability premiums and was higher in the high return occupations. Inequality was also very high in skilled occupations controlled by craft guilds such as weaving or construction. The picture that emerges is that the Parisian economy of the late middle ages provided ample incentives for the acquisition of human capital and rewarded ability and skill, and in that respect was closer into the information age economy of today.
Puga, Diego and Daniel Trefler: International Trade and
Domestic Institutions:
Lessons from Medieval Venetian Globalization
International trade places unique demands on local capital markets, demands that can translate into investor protection rights and a richer domestic financial system. It can also lead to rent seeking behaviour on the part of local elites and a crowding out of domestic financial service providers. We explore the conditions under which international trade can be a positive or negative influence on domestic institutions by examining how Venice coped with the spectacular rise of international trade during the period 1100-1350.
In particular, we show that early pressures on financial markets led to the rise of important institutional innovations such as the commenda. The commenda allowed Venice to mobilize capital from small investors and small entrepreneurs. This led to both a rapid growth rate and to considerable income mobility. By 1324, the merchant class had sufficient resources to internally finance trade. As a result, the mobilization of capital – along with its positive effects on income mobility – were no longer in the interests of the emerging nobility. The consequence was that the nobility placed severe restrictions on the commenda and other institutions favourable to growth. This led to the long-run entrenchment of a rent-seeking nobility and, ultimately, to the decline of Venice.
Wareham, Andrew, Guanglin Liu and Xiangdong Wei: Taxation and the Economy: England and China Compared c. 900-1250
This session explores the relationships between state taxation, economies and cycles of growth in Song-China and England under Danish and Norman kings. In bringing together history and economics, it draws upon quantitative and prosopraphical databases and directs its attention towards a period of exceptional growth (namely 1020-1120 CE).
It tests whether taxation:
- had an inverse relationship with landlords’ rents
- furthered state investment and cycles of growth
- was linked to patterns of corruption, distortion and stagnation
It takes in discussions on the economics of kleptocracies and historical analyses of ‘the other transition’. While our models lend some support to a] and b], they emphasize the not-exact nature of such relationships and the importance of regional networks of development.