Page 21 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Eonomy and Networks of Rural Elite Families in a Manufacturing Area

The Economic Stratification, the Rural Elites,
and Their Economic Activities
The Estimi and the Agricultural Sector
Given the context recalled above, it is not surprising that in Schio there
was a strong social and economic stratification: this is a long-run charac-
teristic of the local society, at least from the end of the fifteenth century
onward, asistestified bythelocal estimi (fiscal surveys). Looking to the
surveys dated 1579, 1643, and 1700 (ascs, b. 21, Estimo 1579–1582; b. 24,
Estimo 1643–1655; b. 27, Estimo 1700–1710) we can observe that at the end
of the sixteenth century the richest 30 families of the village (around 480
families) hold more than 46 per cent of the total wealth, 48 per cent in the
mid-seventeenth century (around 517 families), and more than 51 per cent
in 1700, when the total number of families exceeded 580.
In the following pages we will observe the economic context in which
these families strengthened their position and their assets, through in-
vestments in the primary sector, in the credit market, in the creation of
trade companies, and in the production of textiles. Here, we want only to
underline the strong continuity in the socio-economic structure and the
fact that many families maintained their economic predominance, togeth-
er with the political one (Ongaro 2011; Di Tullio and Ongaro 2020), for
more than two centuries.
Table 1.2 summarizes the names that appear in the various tax surveys;
thesamenames will recurfrequently in the following pages, being the
main protagonists of the manufacturing development of Schio, from the
sixteenth until at least the beginning of the nineteenth century. The table
clearly shows the continuity in the names of the urban and, mainly, rural
families that had relevant properties in the village: among 30 families, 10
appear in a more or less continuous way in the three surveys – or, at least,
both in 1579 and 1700.
The surnames will appear frequently in the following pages: Toaldo,
Zamboni, Baretta, Nicoletti, or Bologna, just to name some examples.
Other families in the table strengthen their position during the seven-
teenth century, being the protagonists of the manufacturing development
of Schio in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries. This is the case, for ex-
ample, of the Capra or Folco families. Finally, other families appear in the
sixteenth century survey and then disappear: in many cases, such as the
Lodi family for example, this is not the result of an economic downturn,
but of the urban drift of these families and of their capital, even if many

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