Mortality, morcellation, and the market: the impact of epidemic disease mortality on land distribution in a seventeenth-century-Holland village

Abstract

The current article aims to explain the distributional consequences of epidemic mortality by assessing the relationship between post-epidemic land redistribution and land market exchange for one village in early modern central Holland. It argues that plague mortality redistributed land through an increase in smallholders, growing landholding of middling owners, as well as accumulation at the top so that distributional change is not straightforwardly captured by aggregate indices. The user distribution, too, saw increases in smallholding, and more pronounced absorption of land at the top, while middling holdings declined. Land was exchanged chiefly through non-market mechanisms (most notably inheritance and marriage) and ended up mostly in the hands of new owners, rather than accumulation by established owners. The land market, however, did respond to the mortality shock by smoothing out land transactions in an otherwise contracting market. The mortality shock occurred during an already uncertain time—land values fell by 20 percent already in the years before the epidemic struck. The specifics of redistribution are thus explained by the decision to hold, sell, or acquire land, which was partly based on land market conditions, specifically the secular decline in land values in which the epidemic occurred and differing returns to scale per soil type.