Inequality in Restoration England: Status, Occupation and Wealth in the Town and Countryside

This PhD will use and create new digital humanities resources to investigate wealth and social inequalityacross seventeenth-century England. This has been selected because of recent research and the relevanceof this famous historical period. Late seventeenth-century England sustained drastic social and economicoverhauls which changed its world forever. This has parallels to the current, and coming, social andeconomic changes that we are going through as a nation and society.Using Branko Milanovic's 2018 model for wealth inequality in pre-industrial societies as a jumping off point,this thesis will go further and investigate disaggregate data from rural and urban societies undergoingtransition from a pre-modern to a modern society. Previous watershed models of historic social wealthdistribution will be brought into the conversation and assessed in turn.The thesis will focus on two research themes:1. investigate wealth and population distribution both within and in-between the town and the countrysideof Restoration England.2. ask how occupation affected economic status and residential zoning in both urban and ruralenvironments.The regional areas of study will be London and Middlesex; Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire; Bristol withSomerset and Gloucestershire; Norwich and Norfolk; and Northampton and Northamptonshire. This willgive a picture from each corner of the country and wide base for nation-wide comparison. The project willuse tempered data from the Hearth Tax for wealth and population distribution and supplement this withlocal probate inventories and other contemporary records - which have not yet been brought together onthis scale.New digital resources for interdisciplinary research will be created: collections of data maps and an onlinedatabase of historical persons who are recorded in multiple contemporary documents. This will give athree-dimensional image of a society in history and the people who lived in it.