"Unequal mountains? Political inclusion, commons and local finances in central-northern Italy during the early modern period"
Abstract
The seminar will present the research questions, the methodology, and the first results of two connected research projects, “Political Inclusion and Inequality in Preindustrial Italian Alps (1500-1800)” (financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, PI Giulio Ongaro) and “Taxation, Public expenditure, and Economic inequality in preindustrial Venetian Lombardy (1400-1800)” (financed by the CARIPLO Foundation, PI Matteo Di Tullio).
The projects investigate the role played by inclusive institutions in affecting economic inequality in preindustrial Northern Italian Alpine, pre-alpine, and Apennine areas. They observe (I) the level of inclusiveness of the political municipal institutions; (II) how this affected the municipal incomes coming from the commons and direct taxation; (III) how these processes affected economic inequality that, as a grounded historical literature demonstrates, was intimately linked to the fiscal dynamics.
Doing so, the projects answer to the following main research questions: 1) How did the potential unequal access in the decision-making influence the management of commons and the resort on direct taxation? 2) How did this affect economic inequality? The projects focus on the period 1500-1800 in which economic inequality starts a path of monotonic growth. It is quite evident that this process was flanked by a drastic change in public revenues, the rising of the so-called “fiscal-military State”, which means (a) the intense increase of the public expenditure and (b) the parallel growth of the regressive direct taxation. A process worsened by the deterioration of the municipal finances. This often meant that the municipal institutions sold their assets to face the indebtment but, by doing so, they cause the loss of important municipal “ordinary” revenue, pivotal to limit the local fiscal pressure. This general picture, characterised by an increase in direct taxation and the loss of the commons, fostered economic inequality and was promoted by the concomitant restriction of access to municipal councils, which exacerbated inequality in decision-making processes.
Focusing on the central and northern Italian mountain regions gives us the opportunity to select theoretically perfect case studies in which to observe the aforementioned dynamics. This is because (i) the commons and municipal assets played an essential role in the local finances of these regions, and (ii) mountain communities are traditionally considered to be more egalitarian than others. As expected, the initial findings of the projects suggest that the causal relationship is more complex than the linear connection between the reduction in municipal councils, the decrease in income from the commons, the increase in direct taxation and the growth in economic inequality. Other variables, such as demographic trends and the maintenance costs of the commons, have affected this relationship according to the specifics of each case study. However, the basic assumptions of the projects seem to be largely confirmed.