Early modern inequality through machine-read wealth registers

Recent research has highlighted a surprisingly high level of interpersonal inequality before the industrial revolution, prompting interest in the early modern period. Simultaneously, the technological development enabling machine reading of large amounts of handwritten sources has progressed  rapidly, meaning that much larger empirical material than before can be investigated.

This project will use machine reading to study wealth inequality in Sweden during the 16th and 17th centuries. By accessing extensive hand-written historical material, we may analyze the wealth of the entire population, including money, silver, livestock, seeds and various goods. Due to the large human work involved in reading and processing the data, this material has not been studied quantitatively for all households in the country before.

In the research program, we will investigate four thematic areas, pertaining to individual inequality between households, regional inequality, changes in inequality over time, and the composition of wealth. 

The results of the project will significantly contribute to the international research field by adding a close-to-complete inequality study for an entire population. Previous studies of the early modern period have often been limited to smaller geographic areas, only a part of the population, or a certain  type of property. We also contribute to the development of new methods and data for quantitatively analyzing the pre-industrial period.