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Project

Wealth inequality and mobility in Mechelen in the very long run, 1500-1960.

The distribution of wealth is a key characteristic of any society. Wealth generates income as well as economic, political, social and cultural power. Fuelled by the Great Recession of 2008 and screaming headlines of the world's richest only becoming richer after or even during each crisis (COVID-19 included), social scientists have increasingly turned to the history of wealth inequality to better understand long-term trajectories of how wealth and income distributions shaped and were shaped by societal transformations. In a similar vein, scholars of social mobility increasingly question long-standing claims of ever rising societal 'openness'. This BOF-KP connects with these lines of research and will make four key contributions based on a long-run study of probate inventories, typically drawn up for the purposes of inheritance division and debt payments after someone's death. First, by systematically sampling the very long period 1500-1960 with benchmarks approximately every 50 years, the analysis will cover the impact of major social, economic and political transitions on the distribution of (probated) wealth in the city and surrounding villages of Mechelen in the Southern Netherlands/Belgium. Second, the uniquely rich heuristic density of the chosen case study will allow this BOF-KP to provide novel and more detailed wealth mobility estimates than presently available in the literature. Third, the results of this exercise will be highly instructive in preparation of a larger-scale 'national' study on long-term wealth inequality and mobility. Finally, when dealing with millions of observations stemming from different sources, record linkage must be highly automated to be feasible – this project will test the merits and limits of various approaches and as such speak directly to the booming (methodological) field of large-scale record linkage.
Date:1 Apr 2022 →  31 Mar 2023
Keywords:SOCIO-ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, WEALTH TRANSFERS, ECONOMIC HISTORY
Disciplines:Economic history, Household behaviour and family organisations, Economic sociology, Early modern history, Modern and contemporary history, Socio-economic history