INTRODUCTION

This is not the first time that Revista de Historia Económica/Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History publishes articles on wages, prices, living standards and other dimensions of human welfare (e.g. inequality, heights and numeracy). The research on living standards received a strong stimulus from the novel methodology and the wide comparative perspective proposed by Robert Allen in the early 2000s. RHE/JILAEH had been receptive to this field of research since some time before. This is probably so because prices and wages were at the core of Hamilton’s research program, one of the cornerstones of the 20 century investigation on the economic history of the most interesting period of the Spanish nation’s existence: the Early Modern Era. Instances of the traditional interest in this field by this journal come easily to mind. By lack of space, only a few will be mentioned. In 1993, Reher and Ballesteros coauthored the most cited article ever appeared in RHE/JILAEH: «Precios y salarios en Castilla la Nueva: La construccion de un índice de salarios reales, 1501–1991». Second to Reher and Ballesteros’ article in terms of citation comes Williamson (1999). Thus, two other main fields—inequality and Iberian America—are present in Williamson’s pioneering work for this journal. In 2010,RHE/JILAEH (28, 2) «Special Issue onLatinAmerican Inequality». It presented a rather diverse collection of articles dealingwith: income inequality (Williamson 2010) and its doubtful «colonial origins» (Dobado and García Montero 2010); modern educational inequality in comparative international perspective (Baten andMumme2010); the anomalies in education in relatively rich countries by lack of tax support (Lindert 2010); the effects on income inequality of the first globalisation in the Southern Cone (Bértola et al. 2010); and the reconstruction of labour income shares in the three largest Iberian American economies from 1870 to 2000 (Frankema 2010).