RHN 2/2024 | Call
Session Organisers: Giulio Ongaro, Matteo Di Tullio, and Benedetta Crivelli
World Economic History Congress: “Equality and Sustainability Challenges”
28 July – 1 August 2025, Lund, Sweden
Deadline for paper proposals: 15 January 2024
Deadline for session proposal submissions: 31 January 2024
Call for Papers for a Session Proposal:
World Economic History Congress 2025
Political inclusion, commons, and economic inequality in the preindustrial period (1500–1800)
The session aims at observing the relationship between inequality in accessing public institutions and decision-making, the consequent characterization of the management of public finances (especially taxation and common properties) and the increase in economic inequality in the Early Modern period. Recent years have seen a flourishing of studies which have added considerably to our knowledge of wealth inequality dynamics in preindustrial times, especially underlining the role played by the rising of the so-called fiscal-military State – and, specifically, of direct taxation – in fostering the process of inequality growth. But if taxation causes, very briefly, economic inequality, why does this happen? How do the choices in public economy, especially in terms of management of the common properties and of resort on direct taxation, at the municipal level, affect the paths of wealth differentiation among the population? Clearly, a depletion or a private use of the common properties could have produced important effects in terms of loss of incomes for the public treasuries and, therefore, an increase of direct taxation. More the fact that the process of loss of the commons, that was widespread in various European areas at least from the sixteenth century onward, was flanked by the strengthening of urban and rural élites and by the narrowing of the municipal councils (i.e., by a limitation of the inclusiveness of the public representative institutions) suggest focusing exactly on the coincidence between specific choices in terms of taxation and management of the commons and the limitation in the participation in the political life of the communities and the trends of economic inequality.
Papers could deal with (but not exclusively) the following topics:
- the level of inclusiveness of public municipal institutions, in terms of both representativity of the social groups and turn-over of the families represented in the councils;
- how this affected the municipal incomes coming from the commons and direct taxation;
- how these processes affected economic inequality.
If you wish to propose a contribution to the session, please send an email with a provisional title and a short abstract to the session organizers (giulio.ongaro@unimib.it; matteo.ditullio@unipv.it; benedettamaria.crivelli@unipr.it) before 15 January 2024.
Congress Website: https://wehc2025.com/