Unequal poverty and equal industrialisation : Finnish wealth, 1750-1900

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Unequal poverty and equal industrialisation : Finnish wealth, 1750-1900 © 2018 The Author(s) Published version Bengtsson, Erik; Missiaia, Anna; Nummela, Ilkka; Olsson, Mats Bengtsson, E., Missiaia, A., Nummela, I., & Olsson, M. (2019). Unequal poverty and equal industrialisation : Finnish wealth, 1750-1900. Scandinavian Economic History Review, 67(3), 229-248. https://doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2018.1546614 2019 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=sehr20 Scandinavian Economic History Review ISSN: 0358-5522 (Print) 1750-2837 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sehr20 Unequal poverty and equal industrialisation: Finnish wealth, 1750–1900 Erik Bengtsson, Anna Missiaia, Ilkka Nummela & Mats Olsson To cite this article: Erik Bengtsson, Anna Missiaia, Ilkka Nummela & Mats Olsson (2019) Unequal poverty and equal industrialisation: Finnish wealth, 1750–1900, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 67:3, 229-248, DOI: 10.1080/03585522.2018.1546614 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2018.1546614 © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 29 Nov 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 870 View related articles View Crossmark data Unequal poverty and equal industrialisation: Finnish wealth, 1750–1900 Erik Bengtsson a,b , Anna Missiaia a , Ilkka Nummela c and Mats Olsson a a Department of Economic History, Lund University, Lund, Sweden; b Economic History Unit, Gothenburg University, Gothenburg, Sweden; c Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland ABSTRACT We present the first comprehensive, long-run estimates of Finnish wealth and its distribution from 1750 to 1900. Using wealth data from 17,279 probate inventories, we show that Finland was very unequal between 1750 and 1850; the top decile owned about 90% of total wealth. This means that Finland was more unequal than the much wealthier economies Britain, France and the US, which goes against the common assumption of richer economies being more unequal. Moreover, when industrialisation took offin Finland, inequality started a downward trajectory. High inequality 1750–1850 was bottom-driven, by a large share of the population owning nothing or close to nothing of value, while economic development after 1850 was pro-equal since the ownership of forests, since long in the hands of the peasantry, became more valuable with the development of forest-based industries. Our findings thus contradict commonplace assumptions that economic growth and industrialisation are associated with more inequality, as well as recent arguments that very few factors beyond catastrophes can decrease inequality. We instead argue for a more inductive and open approach to the determinants of long-run inequality. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 3 January 2018 Accepted 2 November 2018 KEYWORDS Inequality; wealth; Finland; probate inventories; social structure JEL CODES I3; N33 What causes variations in economic inequality? Growing inequality today has led to growing interest in historical studies; history allows us to study inequality in a variety of cases and scenarios. Thanks to studies building on probate inventories and taxation data, we now have long-run series of wealth inequality before 1900 for Britain, the United States, France and Sweden, as well as several cities and regions elsewhere (Alfani, 2015; Alfani & Ammanati, 2017; Bengtsson, Missiaia, Olsson, & Svensson, 2018; Hanson Jones, 1980; Lindert, 1986; Nicolini & Palencia, 2016; Piketty, Postel-Vinay, & Rosenthal, 2006; Shammas, 1993). We add here another case to the literature by presenting new estimates for wealth and its distribution in Finland from 1750 to 1900 based on information from probate inventories. Finland’s peculiarities make this study a significant contribution to the historical inequality literature. While countries like Britain and France belonged to the economic core of Europe and were relatively early industrializers, Finland was a much more peripheral, poor and backward economy. In 1700, Finnish GDP per capita only corresponded to 43% of the British one and 78% of the Swedish; in 1900 its level had further declined to 37% and 76%, respectively. 1 Finland only rapidly industrialised © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. CONTACT Erik Bengtsson [email protected] Department of Economic History, Box 7087, 220 07 Lund, Sweden 1 This according to the Maddison Project Database, available at https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/ (cf. Bolt, Inklaar, de Jong, & van Zanden, 2018). Hemminki (2014, p. 228) in her comparison of a district in southern Ostrobothnia in Finland and a district on the coast of the north of Sweden 1796–1830 finds that average wealth was about twice as high in the SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW 2019, VOL. 67, NO. 3, 229–248 https://doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2018.1546614 after 1870; industry contributed less than 20% of GDP until 1890 (Hjerppe, 1989, p. 62). The Finnish case thus offers a new perspective on the much-debated issues of the relationship between economic growth, industrialisation, structural change, and inequality. 1. Perspectives on historical inequality Recently, a series of related ideas on the causes of variation in long-run inequality have been put forward. The common core is that economic growth and higher levels of living standards are correlated with more inequality, and that there are few if any factors that can decrease it. A strong focus on economic growth in the inequality debate goes back at least to Kuznets’(1955) argument, based on data for the US, Britain and Germany from the 1870s to the 1940s, that industrialisation increased inequality, as incomes were higher in industry than in agriculture, and so agricultural workers were left behind. This argument has been immensely influential (cf. also the ‘Super Kuznets Curve’of Van Zanden, 1995). 2 While Kuznets’argument regarded income inequality, it has also been applied to wealth (e.g. Alfani, 2010). Relatedly, Milanovic, Lindert, and Williamson (2011) have shown that historically there is a positive relationship between GDP per capita and income inequality. In very poor societies, income inequality cannot be very high, as then the poorest groups would starve to death. Larger average incomes open up larger possibilities for inequality. However, the relationship is not deterministic: larger inequality is possible with higher average incomes, but not necessary. The degree of inequality is shaped by other factors, such as institutions, too. Several researchers have claimed that there are, at least in pre-industrial economies, few or no other factors than catastrophes (diseases, wars) that decrease inequality. Alfani (2015)inhis study of Piedmont in the north-west of Italy from 1300 to 1800 finds that inequality grew at all times, regardless of the pace of economic growth. According to Alfani as well as Scheidel (2017), inequality in Europe since 1300 only has had two episodes of decline: the first after the Black Death when lack of labour drove up wages and increased mortality fragmented large properties, the second during the twentieth century. Milanovic in his recent book, Global Inequality makes a similar argument for pre-industrial societies but claims that in industrialised societies, inequality can be decreased by education, social transfers, and progressive taxation (Milanovic, 2016,pp.4–5, 55). At least three historical studies contradict the commonly presumed relationship between economic growth and increases in inequality. Malinowski and van Zanden (2017) show that in Poland, due to serfdom and its legacy, the rural sector was more unequal than the industrial sector, contra Kuznets, so that growth of the urban sector actually had an equalising effect. Reis (2017)finds for Portugal from 1565 to 1770 falling inequality, ‘at a time of mostly positive macroeconomic performance’. Rossi, Toniolo, and Vecchi (2001) in a study of Italian income inequality 1881–1961 found that other factors than the Kuznetsian were most important for the trajectory of inequality. In a recent study of wealth inequality in Sweden in 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900 Bengtsson et al. (2018) argue against the strong focus on economic growth and industrialisation as drivers of inequality. They show that inequality grew from 1750 to 1800, from 1800 to 1850, and from 1850 to 1900, but in different ways: a bottom-driven increase (an increase in the number of very poor from 1750 to 1850 as proletarianisation reduced the farmers’share of the population); a top-driven increase (polarisation within the elite from 1850 to 1900); and polarisation driven by rural real estate as well as claims and investments. The Swedish case shows the need to not only consider Swedish district. However, we do not know how representative these districts are. According to Nummela (2017) the mean wealth was twice as high in the Swedish provinces compared to the Finnish provinces in 1800. 2 The same cannot be said about the second part of the Kuznets Curve, Kuznets’(1955) political economy argument that eventually, as urban lower-income groups organized for protective legislation, legislative interference and political decisions counteracted and decreased inequality. 230 E. BENGTSSON ET AL. Kuznetsian/macroeconomic inter-sector effects, but also the distribution and class structure within economic sectors. Studying inequality in pre-industrial societies, there are some reasons to focus on distribution of wealth, rather than income. In societies where subsistence was the rule, owning (some) property was the most important determinant of one’s living standards, and therefore wealth is the key variable of interest. Measurement of wealth may also be more precise than that of incomes: the individual’s annual income can require approximation, depending on the sources, and the sources on wealth are normally more abundant than the sources on income (Alfani, 2010, pp. 13–14). Nicolini and Palencia (2016) have been able to combine wealth (from probate inventory) and income (from fiscal registers) in a pre-industrial micro level study for Spain. An expected result is that wealth inequality is higher than income inequality, but they also show that income is closely associated with wealth, and that low income households, although underrepresented, are not absent in the wealth sample. This supports the use of wealth in our inequality study; it should say something about inequality more broader conceived too. This review of the literature motivates the interest in studying wealth inequality dynamics in Finland, a poor and backward European economy before 1900. Because of its special features –poor, late industrialisation –it offers a new perspective on inequality compared to those from previous studies of wealthier core economies. The next section provides an historical overview on Finland. 2. The Finnish case Finland was only created as an independent state in 1917, in response to the collapse of the Russian empire. Since the twelfth century the areas that today are Finland had oscillated between Swedish and Russian influence (Alapuro, 1988, p. 19). From 1809 until 1917 Finland was a Grand Duchy of Russia. The Russian Tsar Alexander let Finland keep its Swedish legislation and many of its institutions, including the four-estate Diet which was modelled on the Swedish one. However, the Diet was only called irregularly, in 1809 and then not until 1863. For this reason, Finland in the nineteenth century was to a high degree ruled by the bureaucracy (which in turn was dominated by the nobility). Alapuro (2004, p. 86) sees Finland in the nineteenth century as a combination of Western and Eastern European pattern: it was Eastern in that it was an ethnic minority ruled by an empire, while it remained Western in its social structure, with free farmers and no serfdom. 3 Finnish agriculture was less developed than that in the other Nordic countries, related to the very Northern geography, with following cold climate, of Finland (Alestalo & Kuhnle, 1987, p. 10; Ojala & Nummela, 2006). Finnish industrialisation was late. In the 1860s, 70s and 80s, industry stood for less than 20% of GDP (Hjerppe, 1989; Hjerppe & Jalava, 2006, pp. 33–35; Koivuniemi, 2018, pp. 213–215). It was also quite rural, described as taking place ‘in the middle of the forest’(Alapuro, 1988; Haapala, 1987). The forest was indeed central to Finnish industrialisation, in which timber and wood industry, including tar production, led the way. The rural location of industry also grew out of its dependence on water power and hence proximity to rapids. As late as 1860, exports only represented about 10% of GDP. However, they grew rapidly in the 1860s and 1870s, reaching a level of 25% of GDP in 1880, and staying around that level until World War One (Hjerppe, 1989, p. 151). Exports were heavily dominated by forest products. Lumber was 44% of exports in 1900 and together with paper and pulp industries, products based on wood constituted 69% of exports (Alapuro, 1988, p. 32; Kaukiainen, 2006; Kuisma, 1993). The use of steam as power source in the saw mills was forbidden until 1857, but after abolishing this regulation, the industry grew very rapidly. An indicator of the growing weight of the Finnish timber industry is that The Economist of London first started publishing the 3 Similarily, Eloranta, Ojala, Pehkonen, and Bruno (2018, pp. 18–19) find that Finnish wages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stagnated, as in Eastern European cities but in contrast to what happened in Stockholm and other Western European cities, where wages grew in this period. SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW 231 prices of timber and planks from Finland in 1856 (Klinge, 1996, p. 184). The forest-based industry became more and more complex and from the 1870s on paper industry grew rapidly, as new techniques were introduced and paper exports to Russia boomed (Haapala & Lloyd, 2018, p. 26; Meinander, 2006, pp. 129–130). Finland was connected to St Petersburg by railroad in 1870; as well, transports over the Gulf of Finland were an advantageous route (cf. Alapuro, 1988, pp. 59–61). In understanding the social aspect of Finnish industrialisation, it is important to notice that forests were to a high degree owned by farmers, especially since the middle of the eighteenth century after the general reparceling of previously state-owned fields and forests. As Ahvenainen (1974, p. 13) states, ‘the Finnish farmer is almost always also a forest owner’. Incomes from these exports facilitated the transition to stock-raising for the farmers, increased purchasing power in the countryside, and thereby increased demand for domestic industry products (Alapuro, 1988, p. 34, 43, 262). This gave timber, paper and pulp exports special inter-sectoral linkages in Finland. In Norway and Sweden, which also had large forest-based industries, it was more common that merchants and companies owned the forests and exploited them. The transition to stock-raising was important for Finnish farmers after 1870 because of the large supply on the international markets in this period of cheap Russian grains. Like all grain producers, the Finnish farmers here faced stiffcompetition, but their transition was successful both because of the forest-based incomes and because of the very rapid growth of St Petersburg which, together with the building of railroads from the 1860s on, offered a large market for Finnish butter and other animal products (cf. Peltonen, 1992a, who emphasises the painful nature of the transition). Finland’s experience of proletarianisation during the nineteenth century was intense, among other things because of relatively low rates of emigration to the United States and ‘nowhere else in Scandinavia did the problems of the landless rural proletariat become as pressing as in Finland’ (Alestalo & Kuhnle, 1987, p. 14; cf. Nummela, 2018, pp. 102–103). From 1801 to 1900, the Finnish population increased by 153%, which is a similar rate to Denmark’s 159% and Norway’s 154%, but higher than Sweden’s 119% (Jörberg, 1973, p. 14; see also Haapala & Peltola, 2018). In terms of historical inequality, Jutikkala (1953), Soltow (1981) and Nummela (1988) provide important previous studies of wealth distribution in Finland before 1900. 4 Jutikkala and Soltow both use a wealth tax from 1800, with a sample of 2000 male household heads. While this tax is very interesting for inequality researchers as it covered the entire population, estimates built on it are likely to underestimate inequality as the tax allowed people to choose to have their property assessed ‘silently’, whereby the details and values of one’s individual property were excluded from the tax statistics and official publications built on it. Since wealthy people had reasons to not let other people know how wealthy they were, this option is likely to have been used the most by people with a lot of wealth. This means that studies built on the 1800 tax underestimate the true level of inequality. The next benchmark after that are Statistics Finland’s wealth tables, which begin in 1909; they are built on tax data and more reliable (Roine & Waldenström, 2015). We will get back to these estimates in relation to our results. Nummela (1988) uses probate inventories, like this study but not with the adjustments for social class and the modern estimation techniques used here. 3. The dataset Our estimates for wealth and its inequality 1750–1900 are built on probate inventories. Probate inventories were mandatory by law in Sweden-Finland from 1734 on (Markkanen, 1978, p. 67). They were made at the time of death to settle the division of inheritances, for re-paying debts, and for paying a small (0.125%) tax which funded poor relief. The Swedish-Finnish probate inventories were very comprehensive in their coverage of asset types, as they included real estate and land 4 There are also studies (Nummela, 1990b,2011) based wholly or partly on a 1571 one offtax; since this is outside of our period, we do not discuss that here. 232 E. BENGTSSON ET AL. as well as movables and cash, and all debts. They are thus a very good resource for studying historical wealth and its distribution (cf. Bengtsson et al., 2018; Kuuse, 1974). Unlike the 1800 wealth tax used by Soltow (1981), they include movables, and unlike for example the British probate inventories, they include real estate (cf. Lindert, 1986). 5 The content of the probate inventory of the lower to middle classes could be as follows. The middle classes, such as farmers, would have clothes of wool, extensive bedding, a good selection of crockery, furniture such as clocks, several sets of clothing, books, and in the case of farmers, animals. The very poor would have very little furniture, little clothing beyond what they wore at the time, and very meagre household goods (see Moring, 2007, pp. 241–242 who presents four actual individuals from the mid-nineteenth century). As Moring (2007, p. 246) remarks, ‘Inventories are fascinating sources that make us feel as if we come closer to the past.’However, here we will abstract from the individual cases to focus on the aggregates. The Finnish probate records have been used for example by Laurikkala (1947) in his study of the dwellings and household appliances of farmers in one southwestern region in the eighteenth century, Markkanen (1977) in a study of wealth and credit relationships in the rural population of central Finland 1850–1914, Nummela (1990a,1995) in studies of wealth inequality in Savonia and Central Finland, and Hemminki (2014) in a local study of farmers in a western district of Finland and an eastern district in northern Sweden 1796–1830 in terms of their wealth and, especially, their credit relationships. Often discussed features of pre-industrial probate inventories is if they contain all assets of the deceased and if certain assets could be underestimated. As we have seen above, the first objection is not relevant for Finland and Sweden. Concerning underestimation there are Swedish investigations indicating some underestimation of all kinds of assets, and especially land, before the 1860s (see discussion in Bengtsson et al., 2018). It is impossible to know if and how much this is the case in our Finnish sample. But if so, it would probably underestimate inequality 1750, 1800 and 1850, since land was an important asset, driving inequality. The analysis in the paper builds on a great number of probate inventories collected by Ilkka Nummela between 1985 and 1989 (cf. Heikkinen, Hjerppe, Kaukiainen, Markkanen, & Nummela, 1987 for an early report from the project). As a whole, the dataset includes 27,100 probate inventories from 1653 to 1915. The inventories come from six towns and 28 rural judicial districts. It must be stressed that the dataset has not been created by a random sampling strategy; rather, the inventories have been collected over a longer time and for different purposes. This is a problem for the generalizability, but we believe that the dataset should still be used, given how large it is, that it encompasses so many different parts of Finland, and, simply, that it is the only comprehensive dataset of historical wealth which exists for Finland. We will come back to the possible problems of the unrepresentative sample. The towns in the dataset are Oulu/Uleåborg 6 on the northwest coast in the province of Ostrobothnia, Kokkola/Gamlakarleby on the west coast (also in Ostrobothnia), Hämeenlinna/Tavastehus in the southern central part of the country (Tavastia Proper), Kuopio in eastern central Finland (Savonia), Porvoo/Borgå on the south coast, and Käkisalmi/Kexholm in Viipuri Province, since 1944 transferred to Russia. They constitute a healthy mix of towns in that they include towns from different parts of the country and with different histories –for example, Porvoo is a medieval city, while Käkisalmi was a small peripheral town which grew especially with the arrival of railways and paper mills around 1900. We have to remember that Finland was a very rural country in the period we study, so the towns are small. In 1805, Oulu had 3483 inhabitants, Kokkola 1710, Hämeenlinna 1689, Kuopio 819, and Porvoo 2038. The most populous cities (rather: towns) in Finland in this time were Turku with 11,300 inhabitants and Helsinki with 8843 (Jutikkala, 1953, pp. 96–97). In other words, we miss the two largest towns, but on the other hand the six towns in the sample 5 A marginal exception is that for the nobility, books, clothes and small things could be excluded from the inventories (Ilmakunnas, 2004, p. 133). This means that we slightly underestimate the wealth of the nobility and therefore also inequality. 6 As Finland is bilingual, we state the town names both in Finnish (first) and Swedish (second). SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW 233 are rather representative of Finnish towns in this period, in their variety. Oulu was indeed the third largest town, while Kuopio in 1805 was very small. By 1900, the population had grown to 16,306 in Oulu, 2646 in Kokkola, 5357 in Hämeenlinna, 11,732 in Kuopio, 5035 in Porvoo, and 1626 in Käkisalmi. Nineteenth century population growth was quite rapid in Oulu and Kuopio, but slow in Kokkola. Again, this shows the variety in our sample of six towns. The rural parishes are drawn especially from three parts of the country. 7 One is the southwestern region, southeast of Tampere and northwest of Helsinki. This is the region where industrialisation – and industrial agriculture –began in Finland (Klinge, 1996, pp. 108–110). The second region wellrepresented is around Jyväskylä in central Finland, slightly to the northeast. The third region is the eastern province of Savonia, which in the nineteenth century was known as an economically backward region (Alapuro, 1988, p. 58). This diversity, that the sample is drawn from the northwest and southwest of Finland, regions which had strong trade ties to Sweden, and from the east, which on the contrary traded more intensely with St Petersburg after 1809, is a strength of the dataset. 8 However, the very North, which had a very small share of the population, and the eastern-most region of Carelia are both missing. We will further discuss the problem of regional composition below, and crosscheck with other data that the representation issue does not bias the results. We construct four benchmark estimates (1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900), for which we cluster enough inventories to be able to produce nationally representative estimates. In order to compile our benchmarks, we use a 20-year window, considering all observations recorded 10 years before and 10 years after each benchmark year. Because of the width of our windows, we have deflated all series using 1900 prices. We follow Bengtsson et al. (2018) in classifying the population in four social groups: nobility, bourgeoisie, farmers, and a residual category of ‘others’/workers and lower middle classes. The reasons for using a nobility category are rather self-evident, given their privileges, including their group representation in the parliament until 1906. They have been studied as a group by for example Wirilander (1982). The bourgeoisie, until the late nineteenth century privileged by mercantilist regulations, captures the mostly urban merchants, traders and entrepreneurs who ran businesses. They play an important role in Finnish historiography (e.g. Rosenlund Eriksson, 2010). The farmers were a very large share of the population. The final category could be spliced up in more categories but we use the broad category of workers and lower middle classes to get enough probate inventories in each group. Thus, this category is quite heterogeneous. 9 Beyond the issue of regional composition discussed above, and which we will get back to in the empirical investigation, the dataset has three major shortcomings, arising from the nature of Finnish probate inventories. The first is that it does not include information on the age at death of the probated individuals (Markkanen, 1978, p. 68, remarks on this difference between Swedish and Finnish practice.). This is problematic as the probated population is on average older than the living one and therefore the sample has to be adjusted for age to be able to represent the living population (Lindgren, 2002; Piketty et al., 2006). We solve this problem by relying on the age distribution from the Swedish dataset in Bengtsson et al. (2018). We basically order the individuals in the two samples according to their wealth attach to each individual a percentile and match Swedish and Finnish individuals based on the percentile they occupy in their distribution. Finally, we assign for each match the age of the Swedish individual to the Finnish one. This is of course a second best solution compared to having direct information on the age of the deceased; bias in this case could arise especially 7 The precise districts included are Akaa, Hattula, Haukivuori, Hausjärvi, Jokioinen, Jämsä, Karstula, Keuruu, Korpilahti, Laukaa, Leppävirta, Längelmäki, Mikkeli, Muhos, Multia, Mäntyharju, Pieksämäki, Pihtipudas, Pirkkala, Pälkäne, Rautalampi, Saarijärvi, Sahalahti, Somero, Sääksmäki, Tammela, Viitasaari, and Vilppula. The number of probate inventories per district varies from 52 in Pihtipudas and 63 in Karstula to 1851 in Pieksämäki and 1901 in Rautalampi. 8 Cf. Klinge (1996, pp. 187–192) on the effects on eastern Finland of the 1856 Saimaa canal and the 1870 S:t Petersburg railroad. Alapuro (1988, p. 57, 74–77) stresses that Ostrobothnia was strongly integrated with the Swedish economy, not the least Stockholm, before 1809 and that it lagged the rest of Finland after the integration in the Russian empire. 9 Bengtsson et al. (2018) in their study of Sweden 1750–1900 show in an Appendix that using a more fine-grained classification, with 11 or 16 social groups, does not change the overall results in terms of estimated wealth inequality. 234 E. BENGTSSON ET AL. from the matching of the wealthiest individuals with an age far from the true one. However, although the age-earning profile of the two countries might have differed over the period, we are confident that the high number of observations can even out the effect of individual mismatching. The second shortcoming is that except for the years 1827–1865, we do not have enough information on the wealth of the nobles. The reason is that an important part of the noble court archives of Finland went up in smoke in the Great Fire of Turku in 1827 (Nummela, 2013). We adjust for this problem by first compiling an all Finnish benchmark for the nobles in 1850. We then assume that the development of the size of Finnish nobles’wealth mirrors that of the Swedish nobles from Bengtsson et al. (2018) that were located outside of Scania and Stockholm; Scanian and Stockholm nobles were especially wealthy, and thus not comparable to Finnish ones. We then extrapolate to 1750, 1800 and 1900 by applying this growth rate to the 1850 Finnish nobility. Our methodology can be justified as an assumption given that the Finnish nobles –in fact, they were often Swedish-speaking –had a similar position before 1809 as other regional nobility within the country, and that the Russians did not interfere with the composition of the nobility after 1809. The Finnish elites, in return, allied with the new Russian regime without much fuss (Meinander, 2006,p.100).Wemustrememberthat the Tsar had very low ambitions in terms of ‘Russification’of Finland, at least until 1899; Swedish and Finnish remained the main languages of the province, and much of the administration, army etc. were separated from the main Russian state (cf. Meinander, 2006, pp. 143–145). However, this still means that our estimate for 1850 is more complete and more reliable than the estimates for 1750, 1800 and 1900. We will get back to the reasons why we still believe that the results are defensible also for these years. The third shortcoming is that in our sample the urban population is generally over represented. 10 To overcome this issue, an adjustment through the replication of individuals from the rural population is necessary to match the correct urban-rural ratio. It is however not realistic to assume that the overrepresentation of the urban population is the same in all social groups: for instance, we know that the bourgeoisie and the nobility are far more urban than the Finnish average; therefore, adjusting them according to the overall urban share of Finland would introduce far more rural bourgeois and nobles than there should be. To avoid any bias of this type, we proceed is the following way: we leave the sample as it is for the nobility (which is 51% urban and 49% rural in 1850, the only year we have direct information), for the bourgeoisie (which fluctuates between 72% urban in 1800 and 95% urban in 1900) and for the farmers (which are always 100% rural) and we only adjust the workers, replicating the rural ones until the overall urban-rural ration for Finland was correct. Doing so, we are able to arrive to a balanced rural-urban sample without changing the intra-group urban-rural ratio for the groups for which we believe the starting sample is not clearly biased. Tables 1 and 2 describe the dataset after ages have been assigned and the 1850 nobles have been used to in the other years. Table 1 shows the four social groups that we use in the analysis and Table 2 shows the sample in the seven age classes. The columns ‘True’indicate the share of each social and age group in the living population. As is clear from the two tables, the distribution of both social and age groups in the sample is very unbalanced. In particular, nobles and older individuals are overrepresented. We adjust for these two dimensions. To adjust for age we use the inverse mortality multiplier approach, simply multiplying each wealth observation in each age group for the inverse of the mortality rate by age group. Doing so, the observations for the younger groups have a larger weight in the calculation of inequality measures. For social groups, we keep the size of the most overrepresented group fixed and then replicate individuals in the other groups so that they match the living population shares (following Bengtsson et al., 2018). 10 The urban share in the sample in our four benchmarks is 35%, 23%, 26% and 53% while Finland as a whole had an urbanisation rate of 5%, 5.5%, 6.4% and 12.6%. SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW 235 Beyond the expected drop in inequality, a similar pattern through time is observed, confirming the overall picture, although with some smoother evolution. Panel B in Table 10 provides a robustness check for the changing geographical composition of the dataset. Since the dataset was not created to be nationally representative, the geographical representation varies over time. Especially, there are very few observations from Eastern Finland (more specifically the Savonia region) in the 1750 and 1800 benchmarks, but many in the 1850 and 1900 benchmarks. Since Savonia was poorer and probably less unequal than other parts of the country, especially the southwest, this might bias the results (cf. Åström, 1993, p. 33). Panel B tests for this effect. Panel B in Table 10 shows that our results hold up when we exclude Savonia parishes and the Savonia town Kuopio from the sample. One more robustness check is represented by the inequality measures that we can calculate based on the 1914 Estate Tax paid on testamentary successions (Finland Statistiska Byrån, 1909–1917). This source provides the number of individuals and the wealth of the succession in Finland in 1914 before any taxation (similarly to our probate inventories). The data are presented in 18 wealth brackets and with a breakdown in 8 regions, for which we have both rural and urban wealth. This dataset, unlike ours, does not provide a breakdown by social group but it provides a full geographic Figure 2. Top decile’s share of total wealth 1800–2010, using our data only for 1850. Notes: Sources: Soltow’s(1981) tax data analysis for 1800, official estimates presented by Roine and Waldenström (2015) for 1909–2010. Our estimate for 1850. Table 10. Robustness checks: wealth inequality excluding nobility or excluding Savonia, 1750–1900. 1750 1800 1850 1900 Level 95% conf. Level 95% conf. Level 95% conf. Level 95% conf. Panel A. Excluding the nobility Top 1% 63.40% 60.8–66.0 60.79% 57.3–64.3 46.18% 43.2–49.2 38.67% 35.3–42.0 Top 5% 78.92% 77.2–80.6 78.55% 76.4–80.7 72.31% 70.5–74.1 68.76% 66.8–70.7 Top 10% 83.88% 82.5–85.2 86.12% 84.7–87.5 84.18% 83.1–85.3 82.72% 81.6–83.9 Gini coeff. 0.88 .872–.891 0.91 .901 .918 0.90 .891–.904 0.89 .881–.894 Panel B. Excluding Savonia Top 1% 63.23% 60.9–65.6 68.95% 65.8–72.1 76.77% 72.6–80.9 59.79% 54.5–65.1 Top 5% 80.47% 79.0–82.0 85.17% 83.5–86.8 91.60% 90.0–93.2 86.30% 84.3–88.3 Top 10% 85.25% 84.1–86.4 90.69% 89.6–91.8 95.60% 94.8–96.4 93.22% 92.2–94.2 Gini coeff. 0.89 .882–.898 0.94 .929–.943 0.97 .960–.972 0.95 .938–.953 Note: Jackknife confidence intervals are reported. 242 E. BENGTSSON ET AL. coverage of the country, making it suitable to be compared to our overall estimates. From this dataset, we can first check whether the overall level of wealth inequality is comparable with ours; we can then remove first the regions of Savonia as in Table 10 and then the most northern region of Oulun, which beyond the city of Oulu is missing in our dataset, to check whether they impact the overall trend. Table 11 shows the results. If we compare our results for 1900 from Table 3 to Panel A, we note that the Gini coefficient and the 10% top share are both in 1914 four points lower, while the 1% top share is two points higher. Considering the different year base, the different source and the fact that the 1914 estimates use information from wealth classes, this appears as a remarkably consistent result. Panel B and C supports the geographical composition of our sample, showing that at least in 1914, removing either the Eastern region of Savonia or the Northern region of Oulun does not significantly change the overall results. Afinal robustness check is to compare the level of wealth per household according to our probate inventory dataset. According to our data, the level of wealth per household is in 1900 prices 278 kr in 1750, 215 kr in 1800, 183 kr in 1850, and 968 kr in 1900. There are not many indicators that we can compare with within Finland. Heikkinen et al. (1987, p. 69) provide wage data for 1750–1913 in constant prices. According to their data, the real wage fell by about one quarter from 1750 to 1800, then increased by about 67% to 1850, and then increased much more rapidly, by about 100% to 1900. Our data concord with Heikkinen et al.’s wage data in that wealth falls 1750–1800 and that 1850–1900 is the most rapid increase, but our 15% decrease 1800–1850 is not matched in the wage data. Of course, wages and wealth are quite different indicators, and especially in an agrarian, subsistence-based economy such as the Finnish, we should not expect a perfect fit. Heikkinen et al. (1987, pp. 80– 82) also study probate inventories, using an early version of the dataset used in this paper, with six cities but a much more limited rural sample. When deflating inventory wealthy by the prices of a consumer basket, they find a huge fall in average wealth from the mid-eighteenth century to 1800, by about half, and then a fairly large increase to 1850. From their inspection of the data, it appears that measured wealth around 1750 simply was abnormally high. It should also be noted that they do not control for changes in the social composition of the population, as we do. Heikkinen and Nummela (2015) estimate GDP per capita in Finland since 1733 using wage data and Swedish wage and GDP data. They find that Finnish GDP per capita fell significantly from 1750 to the early nineteenth century, then increased until 1850, and then increased much faster 1850–1900. In general, then it seems that the data we use give a picture which accords with previous studies when it comes to the level of wealth. For the decrease in average wealth which we find 1800–1850, the most likely explanation is proletarianisation, as the share of the population who were farmers decreased by 7 percentage points, with a corresponding increase in the workers’share. This means that while wealth might have increased within social groups –farmers, over-sampled by Heikkinen et al. (1987), and Table 11. Robustness checks: wealth inequality in 1914. 1914 Level 95% conf. Panel A. All regions Top 1% 35.61% 30.5–40.7 Top 10% 72.78% 70.2–75.3 Gini coeff. 0.82 0.805–.837 Panel B. Excluding Savonia Top 1% 34.76% 29.4–40.1 Top 10% 73.99% 71.3–76.7 Gini coeff. 0.83 .810–.844 Panel C. Excluding Oulun Top 1% 36.12% 30.9–41.3 Top 10% 73.50% 70.9–76.1 Gini coeff. 0.83 .810–.843 Note: Jackknife confidence intervals are reported. SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW 243 workers, proxied by real wage –there was a contradictory force driving down average wealth in the total population, as the poorer groups grew faster in size. 5. Conclusions Finland is the poorest economy for which we now have consistent long-run inequality estimates before 1900. As such, our study provides peculiar insights into the dynamics of inequality. The Finnish case provides evidence at odds with three influential arguments in the extant literature. One, the relationship between average incomes and inequality. As argued by Milanovic et al. (2011), we would expect poorer economies to have lower inequality. However, Finland in 1800 was as unequal as the much wealthier countries Britain and France, and more unequal than the wealthier United States. Two, the even more influential argument that inequality grows with industrialisation and urbanisation (the Kuznets Curve). On the contrary, in Finland inequality grew before industrialisation from 1800 to 1850, and decreased heavily from 1850 to 1900, during industrialisation. Our results then join in with what Alfani and Ammanati (2017, p. 1073) call ‘revisionist’studies of historical inequality, studies which contradict the classical Kuznetsian argument, like Rossi et al. (2001), Malinowski and van Zanden (2016) and Reis (2017). Three, the decrease in inequality from 1850 is also at odds with the argument made by Scheidel (2017) and Alfani (2015) that inequality only decreases in connection to disasters and wars. By all means, 1867–1868 saw a Finnish famine caused by harvest failures that resulted in over 100,000 deaths –in fact the last major famine in the history of the Nordic countries (Dribe, Olsson, & Svensson, 2017; Voutilainen, 2016). But there are no signs showing that this produced the kind of economic or institutional change that could reverse long-term trends in inequality patterns. In Finland between 1850 and 1900 inequality decreased because of a kind of inclusive growth, built on widespread property rights in a large share of the population, when the forest became more valuable as timber industry and other forest-based industries grew. Finland is just one country case study and it might prove to be exceptional, but the results do point to that we need further studies to further our understanding of historical inequality. We would argue that the Finland results presented here suggest the historical inequality literature must consider the influence of property rights and their distributions, class, and institutions as well as economic development and external factors such as wars and disasters, if we shall understand long-run inequality (cf. Acemoglu & Robinson, 2015; Lindert & Williamson, 2016). The peasantdominated Finnish route here appears as a historical counterpart to what in development economics would be referred to as ‘inclusive growth’. The comparison with Sweden is striking. In Sweden, inequality increased drastically from 1850 to 1900. This increase was driven especially by new industrial fortunes being concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie elite (Bengtsson et al., 2018). In Finland, the development in these years is very different. Industry was less dominant in the economy, and the ownership of peasant farmers was more important as a share of the economy. In Sweden, wealth inequality only started to decrease after 1930, with strong trade unions driving up wages and decreasing profits, and taxation reducing the great fortunes. Sweden never had a land reform, and despite the country’s egalitarian reputation, the role of great noble landowners was quite important in 1900 and still is today (Gary & Olsson, 2017). Finland on the other hand seems to have had a stronger farmer class in 1900. It went through a terrible, costly Civil War between ‘Reds’and ‘Whites’, but in this country unlike in Sweden, in the 1920s a string of land reforms was put through, decreasing the right of companies to buy forest, and strengthening crofters’right to the soil. In 1923, companies owned only 7.6% of forest land, while individuals held 51.0% and the state 39.8% (Statistics Finland, 1930, p. 95). These reforms have been put forward as an explanation of rapid and equal economic growth in the 1920s and 1930s (Meinander, 2006, p. 164), in arguments parallel to those stressing the positive impact of land reforms in East Asia after 1945. Maybe we can see the Finnish route to equality, compared to the Swedish, as a more whole-heartedly agrarian one. We should remember that in Finland in 1950 still about half of the labour force was in agriculture, while the same figure was only 23% in Sweden 244 E. BENGTSSON ET AL. (calculated from Edvinsson, 2005). Thus, although it would appear easy to bunch together Sweden and Finland as two similar, Nordic countries, there routes to equality were marked by differences as well as similarities. The important role of big capital in Swedish modernisation has been pointed out in the comparison with Norway, which lacked a ‘Wallenberg’family and where instead the petite bourgeoisie and state bureaucrats were more important (Sejersted, 1993). A similar point can be made in the comparison with Finland. The development of Finnish inequality 1750–1900 contrasts with the mostly influential arguments in the historical inequality literature. This highlights the fact that, just as Alfani and Ammanati (2017) point out in their recent study of the Florentine state 1300–1800, our stock of high-quality measurements of pre-1900 inequality actually is quite limited. We may for example point to the lack of longrun estimates of inequality in such an important state as Prussia. In an economy allegedly so dominated by nobles (the famous Junkers, Moore, 1966; Wehler, 1973), how did inequality develop during the nineteenth century as international market integration increased and industry spread? On the other end of the spectrum, there is no study of the peasant farmer-dominated economy of Norway, which we would expect to be especially equal. On the more unequal end of the spectrum, the Baltic states with their large estates and long duration of feudalism, and of course Russia with a similar model, would be fascinating cases for inequality analysis. To develop our understanding of and theories about historical inequality, we need studies of such nations and regions. Our paper also opens up for further investigation of how the poor country of Finland could be so unequal 1750–1850. This paper has focused on the wealth estimates themselves and situating the Finnish case in an international context, but we have not developed the analysis of the Finnish context. Such an approach would be highly interesting to further advance our understanding of long-run change in inequality. Acknowledgements This paper has been presented at Finland in Comparison V conference in Tampere, October 2016; the Nordic Historians’Meeting in Aalborg, August 2017; the European Historical Economics Society conference in Tübingen, September 2017; and the Economic history seminar at the Paris School of Economics, October 2018. We are grateful to all participants for comments and criticisms. We have discussed the paper with Sofia Gustafsson, Valeria Lukkari, and Jarmo Peltola and are very grateful to them for their input. We are indebted to the editors and the two anonymous referees of the journal for constructive criticisms and suggestions which have helped to improve the paper. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Funding Work on the paper has been supported by the grants ‘Growth and inequality before the industrial revolution, Scania 1650 to 1850’,financed by the Swedish Research Council, grant 421-2012-1278, and ‘Wages, economic performance and inequality. Scandinavia in the “Little Divergence”in Europe’,financed by Handelsbankens forskningsstiftelser, grant P2014-0070:1. ORCID Erik Bengtsson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1523-0565 References Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2015). The rise and decline of general laws of capitalism. Journal of Economic Perspectives,29(1), 3–28. Ahvenainen, J. (1974). The competitive position of the Finnish paper industry in the inter-war years. Scandinavian Economic History Review,22(1), 1–21. SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW 245 Alapuro, R. (1988). State and revolution in Finland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alapuro, R. (2004). What is western and what is eastern in Finland? Thesis Eleven,77(1), 85–101. Alestalo, M., & Kuhnle, S. (1987). 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