Inequality in pre-industrial Bohemia: The city of Budweis

ABSTRACT Distributional information can shed new light on societies and their well-being, now and in the past. This article constructs historical wealth inequality statistics for Budweis, a large town in South Bohemia. Utilised data sources include rare detailed local tax censuses from 1416 and 1523 and a national tax register from 1654, as reported in the literature, further adjusted for the lowest social groups and processed to create social tables. If the underlying data are accurate, the wealth inequality Gini coefficient in 1416 was between 0.739 and 0.777. The estimated wealth share of the top 1% was 22.6% in 1416 and 14.2% in 1523, which is notably less than in the pre-industrial UK or France, as well as in the present-day Czech Republic. The findings support the notion of an egalitarian rather than individualistic pre-industrial Bohemian society.