Rethinking the impact of economic growth: A comparative study of rural market and subaltern economies in early modern Italy (1650-1800)

This project aims to test whether economic growth had a positive influence on prosperity levels in the past. Growth has long been seen as a precondition for high prosperity. However, through the use of GNP figures and real wages, indicators that only record commercial transactions, commercialized companies with economic growth will automatically emerge as more prosperous. This project will develop a new multidimensional prosperity index, to measure all essential dimensions of prosperity of different types of historical societies. This project will be the first to perform a systematic comparison of the prosperity levels of two fundamentally different societies on the two sides of the growth spectrum that coexisted in Piedmont during the early modern period. They will be studied from a long-term perspective (1650-1800), to test what kind of society was able to develop and maintain the highest overall levels of prosperity in the long term.