Earlier research on poverty failed to provide us with consistent measures of its prevalence across space and time. This is due to the limitations of the available sources and to the difficulty of applying to them the poverty definitions of modern social science. This article discusses different...

Recent research has explored the distributive consequences of major historical epidemics, and the current crisis triggered by Covid-19 induces to look at the past for insights about how pandemics can affect inequalities in income, wealth, and health. The fourteenth-century Black Death, which is...

Earlier research on poverty failed to provide us with consistent measures of its prevalence across space and time. This is due to the limitations of the available sources and to the difficulty of applying to them the poverty definitions of modern social science. This article discusses different...

This article provides a comprehensive picture of economic inequality in northwestern Italy (Piedmont), focusing on the long-term developments occurring from 1300 to 1800 ca. Regional studies of this kind are rare, and none of them has as long a timescale. The new data proposed illuminate many...

This article provides a picture of long-term developments in the relationship between population and resources in Northern Italy that takes fully into account climate. It analyzes both the slow underlying development of climatic conditions over the centuries (in the theoretical framework of the...

This article makes use of Lee’s ‘dynamic synthesis’, which aims to combine the views of Malthus and Boserup, to provide a new interpretation of population dynamics in Northern Italy from about 1450 to 1800. The article analyzes Lee’s theory and suggests that, even if it is difficult to...