A splendid introduction to the study of inequality is Milanović, B., Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2005). It is worth looking at Milanović’s homepage and his blog http://glineq.blogspot.com/. Milanović’s more recent books, The Haves and The Have-Nots (Basic Books, 2012) and Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Belknap Press, 2016) continue and deepen the story. His Visions of Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2023) explores the history of economic thought on inequality.

Good overviews of the evolution of top incomes and the rich are Atkinson, A. B., Piketty, T. and Saez, E., ‘Top incomes in the long run history’, Journal of Economic Literature 49(1) (2011), 3–71, and Alfani, Guido, ‘Economic inequality in preindustrial times: Europe and beyond’, Journal of Economic Literature 59(1) (2021), 3–44. Piketty, Thomas has written a nice summary of his work, A Brief History of Inequality (Belknap Press, 2022). Alfani’s recent book, As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West (Princeton University Press, 2023), is the result of decades of work on the rich in pre-industrial times. Goldin, C. and Katz, L. F., The Race between Education and Technology (Belknap, 2010) helps to understand the forces shaping wage inequality.

There are a number of historical gender gap studies for Britain, most recently Humphries, J. and Weisdorf, J., ‘The wages of women in England, 1260–1850’, Journal of Economic History 75(2) (2015), 405–47. Keniston McIntosh, M. takes a similarly long view in Working Women in English Society 1300–1620 (Cambridge University Press, 2005). For studies on key time periods see Whittle, J. and Hailwood, M., ‘The gender division of labour in early modern England’, Economic History Review 73(1) (2020), 3–32; Horrell, S. and Oxley, D., ‘Bargaining for basics? inferring decision making in nineteenth-century British households from expenditure, diet, stature, and death’, European Review of Economic History 17(2) (2013), 147–70, and ‘Measuring misery: body mass, ageing and gender inequality in Victorian London’, Explorations in Economic History 46(1) (2009), 91–119; Boot, H. M. and Macdonald, J. H., ‘New estimates of age- and sex-specific earnings and the male–female earnings gap in the British cotton industry, 1833–1906’, Economic History Review 61(2) (2008), 380–408, and Burnette, J., Gender, Work and Wages in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2008), a provocative and well-researched study. The author overstates when she argues that practically no gender gap can be explained by discrimination, but it is a useful reminder that to a considerable extent wage gaps can be explained by differences in skills, physical strength and formal or informal schooling.

For the US and for the general framing of the literature on gender inequality, Goldin, C.’s Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (Oxford University Press, 1990) is essential reading. Her Richard T. Ely Lecture ‘The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family’, American Economic Review 96(6) (2006), 1–21 and her book Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity (Princeton University Press, 2021) update this research.

Other recent studies which were referred to are van Zanden, J. L., Baten, J., Foldvari, P. and van Leeuwen, B., ‘The changing shape of global inequality 1820–2000: exploring a new dataset’, Review of Income and Wealth 60(2) (2014), 279–97; Scheidel, W., The Great Leveler (Princeton University Press, 2017); Beltrán, F. and Szołtysek, M., ‘Inferring “missing girls” from child sex ratios in historical census data’, Historical Methods 55(2) (2022), 98–121 (and references therein); Björklund, A., Roine, J. and Waldenström, D., ‘Intergenerational top income mobility in Sweden: capitalistic dynasties in the land of equal opportunity?’, Journal of Public Economics 96(5) (2012), 474–84; Björklund, A. and Jäntti, M., ‘Intergenerational income mobility and the role of family background’, in Salverda, Wiemer, Nolan, Brian and Smeeding, Timothy M (eds), Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2009), 491–521.