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From the Present to the Past The Historical Dynamics of Wealth in Early Modern Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2017

Katia Béguin
Katia Béguin*
Affiliation:
Centre de recherches historiques-LaDéHis – EHESS
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Abstract

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Historians generally account for the dynamics of asset accumulation and the concentration of wealth in early modern societies by invoking systems of inheritance, matrimonial strategies, political distribution, and market transfers of property. Thomas Piketty emphasizes a more significant factor: higher returns on inherited capital. This article considers the ways in which early modern history might make use of such a hypothesis.

Type
Reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 70 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 87 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Les Ȥitions de l’EHESS 2015

References

1. Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 350–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Although he takes inequalities in income into account, Piketty’s analysis mainly focuses on wealth, which is more concentrated than income.

3. Of course, such conditions were not constant from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, nor were they common to all countries in early modern Europe. However, this situation does at least correspond to what was traditionally known as the “dark seventeenth century.”

4. Piketty, Capital, 362 and 614, n. 26.

5. The sumptuary taxes levied on the consumption of luxury goods were an exception to this regressive trend of indirect taxes. However, the product of these taxes remained a marginal part of overall tax revenue in France because their purpose was above all linked to social classification and control of appearance, at least until the Revolution. In England, the relative weight of sumptuary taxes in the overall tax revenue was larger. See: Roche, Daniel, La culture des apparences. Une histoire du vêtement, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1989)Google Scholar; Fogel, Michèle, “Modèle d’État ou modèle social de dépense? Les lois somptuaires de 1485 à 1660,” in Genèse de l’État moderne. Prélèvement et redistribution, ed. Genet, Jean-Philippe and Mené, Michel Le (Paris: Éd. du CNRS, 1987), 227–35 Google Scholar; Berg, Maxine and Clifford, Helen, “Luxury, Consumer Goods and British Taxation in the Eighteenth Century,” in La fiscalità nell’economia europea, secc. XIII-XVIII, ed. Cavaciocchi, Simonetta (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2008), 2:1101–14 Google Scholar.

6. Legal and customary practices such as the retrait lignager directly aimed to encourage the conservation or the return into a family group of inherited assets that had been sold. They allowed the seller’s next of kin to replace the buyer, on the condition that the latter be reimbursed, by virtue of the collective right of kinship over a family’s patrimony. This right of retrait lignager could only be applied to assets with the legal status of real property, in other words, to patrimonial capital par excellence. See Pothier, Robert Joseph, “Traité des retraits,” in Traités sur différentes matières de droit civil appliquées à l’usage du barreau et de jurisprudence française (Paris/Orléans: Jean Debure/Vve Rouzeau-Montaut, 1773), 1:707–905 Google Scholar.

7. Descimon, Robert, “Power Elites and the Prince: The State as Enterprise,” in Power Elites and State Building, ed. Reinhard, Wolfgang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 101–21 Google Scholar.

8. For an explanation and an example of this method in use, see Dessert, Daniel, “Pouvoir et finance au XVIIe siècle: la fortune du cardinal Mazarin,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 23, no. 2 (1976): 161–81 Google Scholar.

9. Piketty, Capital, 392–93.

10. Stone, Lawrence, The Crisis of Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Bitton, Davis, The French Nobility in Crisis, 1560–1640 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Petersen, Erlig Ladewig, “The Crisis of the Danish Nobility, 1580–1660,” in Social Historians in Contemporary France: Essays from Annales, ed. Ferro, Marc (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 157–79 Google Scholar. Billacois, François, “La crise de la noblesse européenne (1550-1650). Une mise au point,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 23, no. 2 (1976): 258–77 Google Scholar; Crouzet, Denis, “Recherches sur la crise de l’aristocratie en France au XVIe siècle: les dettes de la maison de Nevers,” Histoire, économie et société 1, no. 1 (1982): 1–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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13. Descimon, Robert, “La haute noblesse parlementaire parisienne. La production d’une aristocratie d’État aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” in L’État et les aristocraties, XIIe-XVIIe siècle. France, Angleterre, Écosse, ed. Contamine, Philippe (Paris: Presses de l’ENS, 1989), 357–84 Google Scholar. The legal venality of judicial offices, established in 1604, served as a guarantee that families would be able to resign the office in favor of a third party, or to sell it in case of death, subject to the payment of an annual tax depending on the value of the office.

14. Mousnier, Roland, La vénalité des offices sous Henri IV et Louis XIII (1946; repr. Paris: PUF, 1971)Google Scholar.

15. Descimon has shown that the value ofdowries among the high parliamentary nobility in Paris increased tenfold over the seventeenth century, doubling approximately every twenty years. See Descimon, “La haute noblesse.”

16. Haase-Dubosc, Danielle, Ravie et enlevée. De l’enlèvement des femmes comme stratégie matrimoniale au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999)Google Scholar; Nassiet, Michel, Parenté, noblesse et États dynastiques, XVe-XVIe siècles (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2000 Google Scholar).

17. Piketty, Capital, 362–66 and 451–52. Similar arrangements were initiated by the fedecommesso in Italy, the mayorazgo in Spain, the substitution in France, and the entail in Britain. For an overview of the current state of research and an up-to-date bibliography on Mediterranean Europe, see: Chauvard, Jean-François, Bellavitis, Anna, and Lanaro, Paola, “De l’usage du fidéicommis à l’âge moderne. État des lieux,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines 124, no. 2 (2012): 321–37 Google Scholar; Dedieu, Jean-Pierre, “Familles, majorats, réseaux de pouvoir. Estrémadure, XVe-XVIIIe siècle,” in Réseaux, familles et pouvoirs dans le monde ibérique à la fin de l’Ancien Régime, ed. Castellano, Juan Luis and Dedieu, Jean-Pierre (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998), 111–46 Google Scholar; Massei-Chamayou, Marie-Laure, “L’économie successorale dans Pride and Prejudice ,” Revue de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVII e et XVIII e siècles 63 (2006): 99–116 Google Scholar.

18. As a result, creditors could only be paid with revenues produced by capital immobilized in a trust, and not with the capital itself.

19. Venice and Rome retained the possibility of substitution in perpetuity, but Austria and France limited the duration to two generations, Piedmont and Tuscany to four generations, and England to a twenty-year period following the death of the donor. See Chauvard, Bellavitis, and Lanaro, “De l’usage du fidéicommis.” Revolutionary France, followed by most other states, outlawed such substitutions of heirs during the nineteenth century.

20. Piketty, Capital, 430ff.

21. Lyon-Caen, Nicolas, “Un prix sans aménité. L’indemnisation des propriétaires parisiens à la fin de l’Ancien Régime,” Histoire et mesure 28, no. 1 (2013): 75–106 Google Scholar; Lyon-Caen, , “L’immobilier parisien au XVIIIe siècle, un marché locatif ?,” Histoire urbaine 43, no. 2 (2015): 55–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Couperie, Pierre and Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, “Le mouvement des loyers parisiens de la fin du Moyen Âge au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales ESC 25, no. 4 (1970): 1002–23 Google Scholar.

22. Béaur, Gérard et al., Property Rights, Land Markets, and Economic Growth in the European Countryside (13th–20th Centuries) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. There were approximately 150,000 rentiers in France at the time of Louis XIV’s death, in a kingdom of some twenty million subjects. For England, the available figures show 10,000 in 1709–1710, 40,000 in 1720, and 60,000 on the eve of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), out of a total population of almost ten million inhabitants. In both cases, and even after correcting for household size, the elites that initially received these annuities were exceedingly small.

24. See the calculations concerning defaults on payments for public annuities in France between 1640–1660 in Béguin, Katia, Financer la guerre au XVIIe siècle. La dette publique et les rentiers de l’absolutisme (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2012), 104–38 Google Scholar.

25. Clark, Gregory, “Debt, Deficits, and Crowding Out: England, 1727–1840,” European Review of Economic History 5, no. 3 (2001): 403–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Béguin, Financer la guerre, 245–54.

26. Of course it would be necessary to know the portion of these returns on assets that had actually been recapitalized.