LIFE ON THE EDGE: ELITES, WEALTH AND INEQUALITY IN SONORA 1871-1910

Diego Castañeda Garza and Alice Krozer

Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 2023, vol. 41, issue 1, 7-38

Abstract: This paper engages with and aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion regarding the role of economic and political elites in inequality dynamics and their reproduction over time. We reconstruct the distribution of wealth employing a sample of wills from the El Colegio de Sonora database covering the period of 1871-1910. We show that the rapid industrialisation and modernisation process that occurred in northern Mexico during the late-19th and early-20th centuries led to a continuous increment in wealth concentration at the top of the distribution. The Gini index measure of 0.58 for the 1871-1885 period rose to 0.80 in 1901-1910. Rather than a natural or «Kuznetsian» inevitability fundamental (kuznetsian) necessity, however, our subsequent analysis of the wills of the upper classes suggests a critical role played by the political economy at the time and highlights the importance of control over natural resources on inequality dynamics.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Life on the Edge: elites, wealth, and inequality in Sonora 1871-1910 (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:reveco:v:41:y:2023:i:1:p:7-38_2

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().