In preindustrial times, why were some settlements resilient and stable over the long term while others were vulnerable to crisis? This is the main question of Daniel Curtis's first book – and it is a deeply interesting and important one. As is known, all preindustrial societies had to face periodic environmental challenges, which in the opening pages Curtis identifies as bubonic plague, earthquakes and floods. Some settlements proved ‘resilient' against them, while others were ‘vulnerable’. To distinguish resilience from vulnerability, Curtis uses population decline or stagnation, loss or degradation of land, and destruction of houses or capital goods as markers. Thus (for example) a resilient community, when faced with crisis, would suffer fewer deaths and recover more quickly. The author, who declares that he rejects all forms of environmental determinism and criticises most earlier literature for having failed to subject findings to empirical testing, aims to develop a ‘systematic comparative framework dealing with coping strategies of societies against exogenous crises’ (p. 17). He takes from disaster studies the idea of ‘placing the arrangement of societies at the forefront of the theoretical framework’ (p. 18). The way in which societies were organised affected their strategies for exploiting resources and the development of institutions, and thereby their degree of resilience over time.

To make his hypotheses testable, Curtis introduces a typology of societies that is based on distributions of property (egalitarian v. polarised) and power (again, egalitarian v. polarised), and the degree to which these change over time (dynamic v. persistent). Finally, he applies his typology to case studies coming from five distinct European areas and periods: Cambridgeshire (Britain) in the period 1200–1340; Groeningen (Netherlands) in the period 1700–1900; the Central Dutch River Area (Netherlands) in the period 1300–1600; Tuscany (Italy) in the period 1300–1580; and Apulia (Italy) in the period 1600–1900.

There is much to like in this opera prima – it asks the right questions, the author is very well-read (a vast amount of literature is cited, including works published in the languages of the areas studied), and the theoretical framework is carefully delineated. It is a bold work that challenges the reader intellectually on an uncommonly high level. Consequently, to treat it with respect requires the reviewer to answer to at least some of the challenges. The author himself invites this, as he (who declares himself to have been inspired by Jared Diamond) believes it to be ‘better to write something which is open to criticism than write something conservatively and left to gather dust on the bookshelves’ (p. xiv).

A general problem of the book is that, although it is well-researched overall, it seems much stronger in its theoretical than in its empirical component. Curtis tells us a happy story (one which I, for one, would like very much to believe), according to which more egalitarian and more open societies were also more resilient against crisis, but fails to provide fully convincing evidence in support. There are issues with the way the data are used, and quite often the author has to integrate what information is available with bold conjectures, in order to be able to place each case study within his typology. A particularly important issue is the way in which the degree of polarisation in property distribution is quantified. The author (correctly) makes use of the Gini index to measure wealth inequality, but fails to calibrate it with the needed precision. He defines as ‘polarised’ a property distribution characterised by a Gini coefficient over 0.75, and ‘egalitarian’ as one under 0.65. These values are entirely reasonable, being determined on the grounds of the available literature, but Curtis fails to detect that they are appropriate only for distributions that do not include the propertyless. If we take as an example his study of Tuscany, where the Florentine contado is compared with the Cosentino area, the first is labelled ‘polarised’ due to a Gini of 0.8 while the latter would be ‘egalitarian’ with a Gini of 0.58. However, both measures are calculated with data collected from the famous 1427 catasto, which is an exceptional source as it also records the propertyless. Were the propertyless excluded from the calculations, the Gini of the contado would drop dramatically, very probably below the value of 0.65 – which would require attributing the same type to both Tuscan areas. A similar, but less serious, problem occurs for Apulia. (A recent working paper on the Florentine State contado by Alfani and Ammannati, which admittedly went online after the publication of Curtis's book, calculated Gini indexes for many communities of the contado, which – propertyless excluded – vary between 0.43 and 0.52: always below the threshold for an ‘egalitarian’ society.)

Another problem has to do with the way in which a society's property structures are defined as ‘dynamic’ or ‘persistent’. Curtis takes a change of at least 0.1 in Gini values as an indicator of dynamism, while a change of less than 0.05 would mark persistence – but strangely, no attempt is made to standardise this measure taking into account the varying length of the periods studied for each area (from 140 years in the Cambridgeshire to 300 years in Apulia or the Dutch River Area). This is all the more problematic given that Alfani and Ammannati have now shown that the Black Death (which falls into the time frame of most of Curtis's case studies) caused dramatic short- and medium-term perturbations to property distributions.

A final major issue is what exactly the author identifies as a cause of ‘exogenous crisis'. From the introduction, we are led to expect the likes of plagues and earthquakes to feature very heavily in the book – but this is not the case, for example, in either of the two Italian chapters. In the case of Tuscany, very little attention is paid to the impact of the Black Death, and the identified cause of crisis is the rise of the city of Florence as the predominant centre of the region. Similarly, in Apulia what led the ‘vulnerable’ town of Ascoli Satriano to suffer compared with ‘resilient’ Locorondo is said to be exploitation from the capital city of Naples, although it seems to me that much of the difference in the population trends of Ascoli Satriano and Locorotondo during the early modern period is due to the differential impact of the terrible 1656–1657 plague (Figure 7.4, p. 237). Can the (alleged) disruptive impact of rising capital cities truly be considered an ‘exogenous’ factor on par with, say, an earthquake?

Although this review has raised several issues in need of address, they can be addressed, at least in principle, and constructive criticism is not incompatible with an amply positive judgement. We should be grateful to Curtis for having offered us such a thought-provoking book – indeed, one of the most interesting books focusing on the economic history of preindustrial Europe published in recent years, and one that reminds us of the vast opportunities for original comparative research offered by European archives. It will not gather dust on the bookshelves.