The colonial roots of land inequality: geography,factor endowments,or institutions?

Land inequality is one of the crucial underpinnings of long‐run persistent wealth and asset inequality. This article assesses the colonial roots of land inequality from a comparative perspective. The evolution of land inequality is analysed in a cross‐colonial multivariate regression framework complemented by an in‐depth comparative case study of three former British colonies: Malaysia, Sierra Leone, and Zambia. The main conclusion is that the literature tends to overemphasize the role of geography and to underestimate the role of pre‐colonial institutions in shaping the colonial political economic context in which land is (re)distributed from natives to colonial settlers.     

If the landlord so wanted . . . Family,farm production,and land transfers in the manorial system1

The manorial system was a salient feature of the pre‐industrial economy in Europe from the early middle ages until the late nineteenth century. Despite its importance, it is not usually the main focus of eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century European economic history. Looking at a vital manorial economy, this article deals with land transmissions, a crucial factor in the socioeconomic reproduction of pre‐industrial societies, and demonstrates both similarities and important differences between the tenants on manorial land and freeholders. Although their strategies were often similar, we show that the manorial system consisted of a two‐party government—the landlord and the tenant—whose interests did not always coincide. In the nineteenth century, market expansion and commercialization promoted more active landlord strategies in terms of demesne expansions and by means of implementing short‐term leases. This made intergenerational transfers within the family increasingly difficult for tenants.     

Wealth inequality in Sweden, 1750–1900†

This article examines the evolution of wealth inequality in Sweden from 1750 to 1900, contributing both to the debate on early modern and modern inequality and to the general debate on the pattern of inequality during industrialization. The pre‐industrial period (1750–1850) is for the first time examined for Sweden at the national level. The study uses a random sample of probate inventories from urban and rural areas across the country, adjusted for age and social class. Estimates are provided for the years 1750, 1800, 1850, and 1900. The results show a gradual growth in inequality as early as the mid‐eighteenth century, with the sharpest rise in the late nineteenth century. Whereas the early growth in inequality was connected to changes in the countryside and in agriculture, the later growth was related to industrialization encompassing both compositional effects and strong wealth accumulation among the richest. The level of inequality in Sweden in 1750 was lower than for other western European countries, but by 1900 Sweden was just as unequal.     

Numeracy of Africans,Asians, and Europeans during the early modern period: new evidence from Cape Colony court registers

The lack of accurate measures of human capital formation often constrains investigations into the long‐run determinants of growth and comparative economic development, especially in the developing world. Using the reported ages of criminals in the Court of Justice records in the Cape Archives, this article documents for the first time numeracy levels and trends for inhabitants of the Cape Colony born between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth century: the native Khoesan, European settlers, and imported slaves from other African regions and Asia. This variety of origins allows us to compare contemporaneous levels of early modern development across three continents. By isolating those slaves born at the Cape, we also provide a glimpse into the dynamics of human capital transfer in a colonial setting. The Colony's relatively high level of human capital overall had implications for what was later to be the richest country on African soil, but the very unequal attainment of numeracy also foreshadowed extreme income inequality.     

Institutional Foundations for Shared Growth in Sub‐Saharan Africa*

Abstract: The paper examines the dynamically evolving triangular relationships between institutions, growth and inequality in the process of economic development, in order to deepen the understanding of institutional conditions for pro‐poor growth and shared growth. In this context, the paper discusses the institutional conditions found in sub‐Saharan Africa, which may have produced the growth pattern that is unequal and against the poor. The analysis shows that sub‐Saharan African countries require transforming institutions for embarking upon and sustaining a development path which would ensure shared growth in years to come. The paper first evaluates the growth‐inequality‐poverty nexus, as found in the recent literature, which increasingly challenges the trade‐off between growth and equity, as postulated in the traditional theories. Various definitions of pro‐poor growth are discussed and a sharper definition of the concept of ‘shared’ growth is provided. Definitions of institutions are then examined, as well as the triangular inter‐relationships between institutions, inequality and poverty. The paper finally analyses specific institutional conditions found in sub‐Saharan Africa that prevent economies from emerging out of low‐equilibrium poverty traps that are characterized by low economic growth, unequal distribution of income and wealth as well as unequal access to resources and power.     

‘FORGING,AHEAD’: INDUSTRY AND ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION IN A MELBOURNE SUBURB 1906–85

The trajectory of the suburb Sunshine in Western Melbourne (1906–85), from industrial powerhouse to repository of social problems, sheds light on the issues surrounding organic urban expansion. For the many Australians living on the fringes of large cities, a sense of deprivation – particularly inequality in services – undercut the presumed comfort and stability of the post‐war period. Unrest in outer areas deepened following the contraction of the ‘long boom’. The area's pre‐Second World War origins as a manufacturing suburb regulated by the industrialist Hugh V. McKay is starkly contrasted with its later incarnation as a site of industrial and suburban sprawl.     

The rise and fall of Spain (1270–1850)1

Two distinctive regimes are distinguished in Spain over half a millennium. The first one (1270s–1590s) corresponds to a high land–labour ratio frontier economy, which is pastoral, trade‐oriented, and led by towns. Wages and food consumption were relatively high. Sustained per capita growth occurred from the end of the Reconquest (1264) to the Black Death (1340s) and resumed from the 1390s only broken by late fifteenth‐century turmoil. A second regime (1600s–1810s) corresponds to a more agricultural and densely populated low‐wage economy which, although it grew at a pace similar to that of 1270–1600, remained at a lower level. Contrary to pre‐industrial western Europe, Spain achieved its highest living standards in the 1340s, not by mid‐fifteenth century. Although its death toll was lower, the plague had a more damaging impact on Spain and, far from releasing non‐existent demographic pressure, destroyed the equilibrium between scarce population and abundant resources. Pre‐1350 per capita income was reached by the late sixteenth century but only exceeded after 1820.     

The economic geography of race in the New World: Brazil, 1500–2000†

Race is a fundamental aspect of historical inequality and institutions, yet it is at times overlooked within the literature on comparative development in the Americas. This article investigates the nature of staple production in Brazil and attendant changes in the racial composition of 20 modern states from its discovery by the Portuguese to the present. The Indigenous population was surpassed by that of African descent in the north‐east, south‐east, and north, respectively, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; not until decades after the abolition of slavery did people of European heritage come to constitute a majority. These transitions were guided by the relative productivity, natural increase, and price of Native and African slaves, contingent on the extent of natural resource wealth (mineral deposits or land suitable for growing cash crops) and supply of free labour. In those areas where slavery was most profitable, a 1 per cent increase in the relative cost of Native labour raised the proportion of people of African ancestry by up to 2 per cent, depending on the measures of slave prices and racial classifications considered. This relationship is robust to changes in output prices or the populace of European descent, and alternative scenarios of aboriginal population decline.     

Unions and the Great Compression of wage inequality in the US at mid‐century: evidence from local labour markets

This article tests whether places with higher exposure to unionization during the 1940s, due to their pre‐existing industrial composition, tended to have larger declines in wage inequality, conditional on local economic and demographic observables and regional trends. We find a strong negative correlation between exposure to unionization and changes in local inequality from 1940–50 and 1940–60. This does not appear to be underpinned by skill‐specific sorting of workers or by firms leaving places with high exposure to unionization. We also find that the correlation between exposure to unionization in the 1940s and the change in inequality after 1940 persists in long‐difference regressions to the end of the twentieth century.     

Real inequality in the early modern Low Countries: the city of ’s‐Hertogenbosch, 1500–1660

This article studies the welfare effects of economic growth in the early modern Low Countries. It applies the recently developed concept of ‘real inequality’ to a case study of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century ’s‐Hertogenbosch in the Southern Netherlands and demonstrates, by incorporating relative price movements, that specific (and in this case stagnant) nominal income inequality trajectories may disguise underlying shifts in real inequality that are influenced by socially biased relative prices. The analysis is then extended to include changes in demography and household size, which reveals a second important limitation in the study of long‐term economic inequality. In contrast to the stagnation and eventual decline in nominal inequality seen in ’s‐Hertogenbosch during the long sixteenth century (1500–1650), this broadened concept of ‘augmented’ real inequality in fact suggests the occurrence of a significant upturn during the first half of the sixteenth century. Furthermore, while nominal inequality had decreased, real inequality appears to have been higher by the middle of the seventeenth century than it had been around 1500. The study of global and/or long‐term inequality, in particular, would benefit greatly from a proper social, economic, and historical contextualization of these trends, not least in terms of the social biases in relative prices and household composition.     

Government spending and the distribution of economic growth

In the United States, total government spending, and especially government social spending, has increased greatly over the last 50 years. What effect this has had on economic growth is a subject of intense debate among politicians, policymakers, and economists. However, there has been less attention paid to the distributional effects of government spending even though economic inequality has grown greatly over the last generation and much social spending is at least indirectly intended to reduce inequality. The effects of government social spending in the United States on growth in family income at deciles of the income distribution were estimated. The results suggested that social spending but not non‐social spending was likely to increase growth in family income per capita measured over 10‐year intervals. The largest effects of social spending were for deciles below the median income. At no point in the distribution does social spending have a negative effect.     

The growth,poverty and inequality nexus in South Africa: Cointegration and causality analysis

This study empirically established the long-run relationship and causality effects that exist between growth, poverty and inequality. The analysis was carried out on a panel of nine South African provinces from 1995 to 2012. To capture poverty and inequality in a broader context, two measures of poverty (income and non-income) and three measures of inequality (income, education and land) were adopted for the study. The results confirm that there is a long-run relationship between growth, poverty and inequality. Notable results from the causality tests suggest that growth does not promote equal distribution of income in society but as income distribution begins to equalise, economic growth rises. This is regarded as growth–inequality disconnect. The unidirectional causality, which runs from income poverty to income inequality, suggests that a rising level of income poverty will lead to falling income inequality in the society; likewise, income inequality increases as non-income poverty declines.     

GDP in the Dutch Cape Colony: The National Accounts of a Slave‐Based Society

New estimates of the gross domestic product of the Dutch Cape Colony (1652‐1795) suggest that the Cape was one of the most prosperous regions during the eighteenth century. This stands in sharp contrast to the perceived view that the Cape was an “economic and social backwater,” a slave economy with slow growth and little progress. Following a national accounts framework, we find that Cape settlers' per capita income is similar to the most prosperous countries of the time – Holland and England. We trace the roots of this result, showing that it is partly explained by a highly skewed population structure and very low dependency ratio of slavery, and attempt to link the eighteenth‐century Cape Colony experience to twentieth‐century South African income levels.     

Institutions for the taking: property rights and the settlement of the Cape Colony, 1652–1750

We examine the formation of property rights in land during the early settlement by the Dutch of the Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa. After its founding in 1652 as a provisioning outpost for ships of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the colonial government promoted settlement initially by granting land with well-specified and enforced property rights in restricted zones near Cape Town. By 1714 it transitioned to accommodate rapidly expanding settlement by creating a weaker form of property rights, the loan farm, which was imprecisely defined and had limited government enforcement. We develop a profit-maximizing monopsony model to explain the VOC's choice to transition from the better-specified land grant to the less well-specified loan farm. We conclude that the decline in the population size and ability of the Khoikhoi, the Cape's original inhabitants, to organize effective resistance to the Dutch invasion was critical to the transition, as it lowered the costs of private enforcement of settlers’ territorial claims. The choice of property rights thus enabled and encouraged the rapid taking by European settlers of the western Cape of Africa for the expansion of the Dutch colony's pastoral economy.     

Ronald Finlay,Rolf G. Henriksson,Hkan Lindgren & Mats Lundahl (eds), Eli Heckscher,International Trade and Economic History

Abstract

The great world economic and globalisation boom of the pre-First World War era was accompanied by great inequality in the distribution of income and wealth particularly during industrialisation, with the new world European settler economies being no exception. Canadian wealth inequality over the period 1870–1930 was also substantial and is examined using probated estates from the Eastern Judicial District of the province of Manitoba and Wentworth County, Ontario. However, wealth inequality is found to be less pronounced in frontier Manitoba relative to Ontario with higher and more dispersed rates of land ownership in the West as well as lower wealth levels and greater farm employment, as the key factors in this difference. This suggests that the farm economy of pre-First World War Canada was associated with greater equality of wealth. One of the inevitable effects of Canadian industrialisation and economic development was a rise in wealth inequality but the process of western settlement and associated free grants helped mitigate it. By extension, global economic inequality might also have been mitigated during this period by the presence of agricultural frontiers with subsidised land grants.     

Decomposing income inequality in a backward pre‐industrial economy: Old Castile (Spain) in the middle of the eighteenth century

Research on economic inequality in early modern Europe is complicated by the lack of appropriate data for reconstructing income or wealth distributions. This article presents a study of income inequality in mid‐eighteenth‐century Old Castile (Spain) using the Ensenada Cadastre, a census conducted between 1749 and 1759. The article describes the information provided by this census and then discusses its advantages and disadvantages for reconstructing income profiles and calculating income inequality. This is followed by analysis of a dataset derived from the Cadastre that consists of more than 4,000 observations from Palencia (a province in northern Spain) and contains information on sources of household income, each household head's main occupation, residence location, and other household characteristics. Demographic data from this census is used to weight observations in the sample and thereby minimize selection bias. Findings show that inequality in eighteenth‐century Spain was probably substantial despite its relative backwardness; that the relationship between inequality and per capita income was not clear‐cut and was probably influenced by measurement of the higher incomes; and that although income inequality was largely driven by uneven land distribution, labour income also contributed to overall inequality—especially in urban centres.     

A colonial legacy of African gender inequality? Evidence from Christian Kampala, 1895–2011

The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. In this article, occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala are used to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century‐long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white‐collar (high‐status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white‐collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. However, gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda's independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre‐colonial times. The data presented here also support Boserup's view that gender inequality was rooted in indigenous social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well‐educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans.     

Material and moral resources: the 1984–5 miners' strike in Scotland

This article contributes to debates about the economic framework of industrial politics by examining aspects of the 1984–5 miners' strike in Britain, focusing on developments in Scotland. It focuses on strike endurance and pit‐level variations in strike endurance by examining the contrasting quantity and quality of the material and moral resources available to the strikers at different collieries and in different communities. Powerful local variables in building or inhibiting strike commitment included pre‐strike pit‐level production, industrial relations, and the impact of debates about the economics and finances of coal‐getting; incomes gained for households during the strike by married women in part‐time and full‐time employment; expenditure saved by households in local authority housing where rents were in effect deferred by sympathetic local authorities; communal attitudes to pits, jobs, and redundancies; the character and weight of political tradition; and the cultural as well as economic role of women. By focusing on developments at community and colliery level the article challenges dominant narratives of the strike, which remain wedded to high politics, the strategy of the union leadership, changes in energy supply and policy, and public order.     

Resources,techniques, and strategies south of the Sahara: revising the factor endowments perspective on African economic development, 1500–20001

This article seeks to revise and re‐apply the factor endowments perspective on African history. The propositions that sub‐Saharan Africa was characterized historically by land abundance and labour scarcity, and that the natural environment posed severe constraints on the exploitation of the land surplus, are broadly upheld. Important alterations are suggested, however, centred on the seasonality of labour supply, Ruf's concept of ‘forest rent’, and, for precolonial economies, the role of fixed capital. This revised endowments framework is then applied in order to explore the long‐term dynamics of economic development in Africa, focusing on how the economic strategies of producers and political authorities created specific paths of change which shifted the production possibility frontiers of the economies concerned, and ultimately altered the very factor ratios to which the strategies had been responses.     

Cooperating in time of crisis: war,commons, and inequality in Renaissance Lombardy

This article addresses the question of how exogenous shocks led to economic redistribution at a local rural community level in the pre‐industrial period, and how inequality can be limited (or not) by institutions and endogenous social structures within the community itself. This article presents a micro‐analytical study conducted mainly on unpublished sources, focusing on a boundary area (the Geradadda) disputed by Milan and Venice during the long period of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) in a broad European perspective. To understand the impact of wars, the management of local commons and communal assets is analysed in the more general context of the management of local finances. This research shows how local communities organized cooperative behaviours for the defence of local resources, developing innovative credit systems and encouraging a process of redistribution. Before other important factors—such as the distribution of wealth or of local political and social power—cooperation between social groups and the role played by elites were the keystones to limiting the increase in inequality.