Pre-industrial Inequality

Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 30 pre-industrial societies using what are known as social tables, stretching from the Roman Empire 14 AD, to Byzantium in 1000, to England in 1688, to Nueva España around 1790, to China in 1880 and to British India in 1947. It applies two new concepts in making those assessments - what we call the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio. Rather than simply offering measures of inequality, we compare its observed level with the maximum feasible inequality (or surplus) that could have been extracted by the elite. The results, especially when compared with modern poor countries, give new insights into the connection between inequality and economic development in the very long run.