Wealth in life and death: Assessing the representativeness and reliability of distinct sources for wealth inequality studies. An empirical and methodological study of wealth distribution in nineteenth-century Danish West Indies

The study of historical economic inequality has seen a revival in recent years. Along with a new wave of studies, the revival has brought to the centre of the debate the issue of the comparability of estimates that rely on distinct types of sources. Although a number of scholars have attempted to correct the bias inherent in one or another type of sources, a systematic empirical examination of alternative sources for one single territory and period is yet to be attempted due to e.g., source scarcity. The present project intends to study the reliability and the completeness of distinct sources of wealth inequality by investigating how the distribution of wealth and inequality varies depending on the sources employed. The project examines the case study of the Danish West Indies in the nineteenth century, for which two of the most common sources for historical wealth studies, namely tax registers and probate records, are available for the same population and time period. The contribution of the project is twofold. The first contribution is methodological innature and develops as a systematic test for issues of representativeness and completeness of historical sources for wealth studies. The second contribution is empirical in nature and is concerned with studying if and how the picture of wealth composition and distribution in the chosen case study differs depending on the source employed.