INCOME, WEALTH AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS : A historical perspective.

For some years now, discussions around living standards and social inequalities, and more recently the debate on the industrious revolution in European societies, have shown the need to rethink the working methodology in social history studies, especially with regard to rural areas. First, we have recognized the need to take into consideration as indicators of working class living standards not just wages, as was the case for a long time, but also other forms of income, which we need to analyse together, and which often force us to revise and reinterpret the series of available wages. Secondly, this line of revision and reinterpretation has brought with it the need to take the household as a unit of observation, both for studying the composition of the different types of income that could have affected different family economies and detecting processes of change and social dynamics that may have gone unnoticed until now. For this seminar, we would like to particularly invite researchers who address this problem based on the following three lines of enquiry :

1) the diversity of wages and construction of wage series: which wages we are speaking of and the interest in documenting them;

2) the structure and nature of family economy income in rural areas;

3) the impact of different ways of obtaining income - and accumulating wealth - on social dynamics and processes of social differentiation.

Researchers interested in presenting a paper at this seminar should send an abstract and a title before 30 April to Rosa Congost (rosa.congost@udg.edu)
 

Organizers :

Centre de Recerca d’Història Rural of University of Girona
International Scientific Coordination Network (GDRI)
AAA “Agriculture, Approvisionnement, Alimentation”.
HAR2014-54891-P, Neither elite nor poor.
Middle classes and social change in countryside in historical perspective”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.