Pre-Industrial Inequality: An Early Conjectural Map

Did our pre-industrial ancestors have incomes and life expectancies as unequal as theyare today? Or is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? For want ofsufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequalityfor 15 ancient, pre-industrial societies using what are known as social tables, stretchingfrom the Roman Empire 14 AD, to Byzantium in 1000, to England in 1688, to NuevaEspaña in 1790, to China in 1880 and to British India in 1947. It applies two newconcepts in making those assessments—what we call the inequality possibility frontierand the inequality extraction ratio. Rather than simply offering measures of actualinequality, we compare the latter with the maximum feasible inequality (or rent) thatcould have been extracted by the elite. The results, especially when compared withmodern countries the world round, give new insights in to the connection betweeninequality and economic development in the very long run.