Guido Alfani is Professor of Economic History at Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan. His recent works include Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy: The Grand Tour of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2013) and, with Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine in European History (Cambridge, 2017). Matteo Di Tullio is a research fellow in early modern history at Università degli Studi di Pavia, Italy and a member of the Dondena Centre at Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi. He is the author of The Wealth of Communities: War, Resources and Cooperation in Renaissance Lombardy (2014).

• List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The Venetian fiscal system: centre and periphery; 2. The rich and the poor; 3. Economic inequality in the long run; 4. Taxation, redistribution and inequality; Appendix: building regional distributions of wealth for the Republic of Venice and for Veneto; Archival sources; Printed sources; Bibliography; Index.

'Guido Alfani and Matteo Di Tullio take two giant strides forward in the early history of inequality. First they expand our view of Europe's wealth inequalities over several centuries and across regions. Then they show how the state itself may have been a significant source of the rise in inequality, with its growing fiscal pressure on the poor.' Peter H. Lindert, co-author of Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700