Chapter A new method of expanding the reconstruction of the occupational structure in Renaissance Florence: A preliminary investigation with insights into the economic impact of political and economic changes

Overview & Synopsis

Previous analyses of occupational structures in the urban centres of Western Europe in the late Middle Ages and Early modern times have attempted to estimate the shares of the labourers employed in different sectors using the information reported in the fiscal censuses. These contributions have often had to deal with the unavoidable limitations of the sources, such as their coverage of almost only the male declarants or that only a fraction of those censed declared their profession. As a result, the reconstruction of the occupational structures and the derived analysis of labour mobility based on these sources presented severe coverage limits of the labour force, for a large part of which, usually 40-50% of the active labourers, it was not possible to know the actual profession. We analyse seven fiscal censuses from Florence, ranging from the second half of the 14th century until the mid-15th century, to reconstruct the urban occupational structure among the male declarants. In addition, for a selected sample of neighbourhoods in one of the fiscal documents, we show a possible new method to integrate the existing information to increase the fraction of known occupations among the urban labour force. We show that our proposed method 1) significantly increases the proportion of the labour force with a known occupation and 2) substantially improves the knowledge of the occupational structure compared to the one obtained from the analysis of the sole declared occupations.