This paper adds to a growing literature that charts and explains inequality levels in pre-industrial societies. On the basis of a wide variety of primary documents, the degree of inequality is estimated for 32 different residencies, the largest administrative units and comparable to present-day provinces, of late colonial Indonesia. Four different measures of inequality (the Gini, Theil, Inequality Extraction Rate and Top Income Rate) are employed that show consistent results. Variation in inequality levels across late colonial Indonesia is very large, and some residencies have much higher levels of inequality (with, for example, Ginis above 60) than others (with Ginis below 30). This suggests that even within a single colony, levels of inequality may vary substantially and this puts some doubts on the representativeness of using a single number to capture the level of inequality in a large economy. In order to explain the variation across residencies and over time, this paper investigates the role of exports and plantations, so frequently mentioned in the literature. It is shown that both explain a part of the variation in levels of inequality across colonial Indonesia, but that only the rise of plantations can explain changes in inequality levels over time. This points to the importance of the institutional context in which global export trade takes place for the rise of inequality.

本文增加了越来越多的文献，这些文献绘制并解释了工业化前社会中的不平等程度。根据大量的原始文件，估计了32个不同居所的不平等程度，是印度尼西亚后期殖民时期最大的行政单位，可与当今的省份相提并论。采用了四种不同的不平等衡量标准（基尼系数，泰尔系数，不平等提取率和最高收入率），它们显示出一致的结果。印度尼西亚后期殖民时期的不平等程度差异非常大，有些居民的不平等程度（例如，吉尼斯（Ginis）高于60）远高于其他居民（吉尼斯（Ginis）低于30）。这表明，即使在一个殖民地中，不平等程度也可能有很大差异，这对使用单个数字来捕捉一个大型经济体中的不平等程度是否具有代表性表示怀疑。为了解释不同居所之间的差异以及随着时间的推移，本文研究了出口和种植园的作用，这在文献中经常提到。结果表明，两者都解释了整个印度尼西亚殖民地地区不平等水平变化的一部分，但只有人工林的崛起才能解释不平等水平随时间的变化。这表明了全球出口贸易对于不平等现象加剧的体制背景的重要性。