The project Taxation, Public Expenditure, and Economic Inequality in Preindustrial Venetian Lombardy (1400–1800) examines the role of public institutions in managing economic inequality in the Lombard districts under Venetian rule. The analysis is based on two fundamental research questions, situated within the well-established historiographical field of measuring economic inequality through statistical methods. To this end, a standardized tool such as the Gini index is employed to quantify wealth distribution.
A key step is to define the broader economic context, in which previous studies have identified—even within the Venetian mainland state (Terraferma)—the emergence of the so-called “fiscal-military state”. This concept refers, on the one hand, to (a) the sharp increase in public expenditure (especially military spending, which sextupled in the Venetian state between the mid-fourteenth and the mid-sixteenth century), primarily benefiting large contractors and high finance investors in public debt; and, on the other hand, to (b) the parallel growth of regressive direct taxation (which rose in these territories by between 20% and 50% during the early modern period).
On this basis, the research first investigates (1) how local public institutions and their fiscal and economic policies could influence inequality dynamics, either exacerbating or mitigating them. Secondly, (2) it introduces an innovative qualitative measurement tool: socio-political inequality in access to decision-making processes. The aim is to assess the actual involvement of citizens—or more specifically, which sectors and families, and how their participation changed (or did not change) over time—in decisions concerning public finances. It also seeks to evaluate the consequences of such participation in terms of tax policies and the use of other instruments for shaping the community budget, for example in the management of common goods in response to rising inequality.
The sources selected for this study are based on three main pillars: (i) estimi (property tax assessments), used to measure wealth distribution through the Gini index; (ii) municipal budgets, aimed at constructing a database that includes data on public revenues and their redistribution; and (iii) records of municipal councils, examined to highlight their political composition and to focus on the relationship between elite control over taxation procedures, common property management, and the redistribution of public income, in order to observe their potential connection with rising economic inequality. The data will be collected through extensive archival research on largely unpublished documentation, preserved mainly in the municipal archives of the selected case studies located in the provinces of Bergamo and Brescia.
In conclusion, the project aims to provide a deeper understanding of the medium- and long-term dynamics of economic inequality in this region, with the objective of reconstructing both its causes and the policies that produced the different trajectories such disparities assumed over time. It emphasizes that economic inequality was closely intertwined with inequality in access to decision-making processes. In this respect, particular importance will be given to comparing fiscal and budgetary strategies among district capitals, smaller urban centers, and rural communities, in order to identify similarities and differences. These variations will be analyzed as the result both of the degree of political-fiscal authority delegated by the Republic and of the specific economic and environmental conditions characterizing each local context.
The project analyzes the following case studies in the districts of Bergamo and Brescia:
District of Bergamo:
District of Brescia:
The methodology adopted in Taxation, Public expenditure, and Economic inequality in preindustrial Venetian Lombardy (1400–1800) is also applied in the research conducted within the framework of the PRIN PNRR 2022 project Political Inclusion and Inequality in Preindustrial Italian Alps (1500–1800), in which the University of Milano-Bicocca, the University of Pavia, and the University of Parma take part.
In this regard, please refer to the dedicated website of the University of Milano-Bicocca:
https://sites.google.com/unimib.it/politicalinclusioninequality/the-research-project/short-description
