High inequality is not a characterising feature of industrial (and post-industrial) societies, but could emerge also in mostly agrarian contexts

See Wealth inequality in pre-industrial England: A long-term view (late thirteenth to sixteenth centuries) by Guido Alfani & Hector García Montero in the Economic History Review.

"Abstract

This article provides an overview of wealth inequality in England from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century, based on a novel database of distributions of taxable household wealth across 17 counties plus London. To account for high thresholds of fiscal exemption, a new method is introduced to reconstruct complete distributions from left-censored observations. First, we analyse inequality at the county level, finding an impressive stability across time in the relative position of the English counties, perturbed only by the tendency of the South and South-East to become relatively more inegalitarian. Then, we produce an aggregate distribution representative of England as a whole, and we detect an overall tendency for inequality to grow from medieval to early modern times due largely to North–South divergence in average household wealth. We discuss our results in the light of the recent literature on historical inequality."

Here is the last paragraph:

"Overall, our work on England sheds further light on the general tendencies of economic inequality across European history, helping to both expand and usefully nuance the picture. It provides support for the view that high inequality is not a characterising feature of industrial (and post-industrial) societies, but could emerge also in mostly agrarian contexts. It lends further credit to recent criticism of Kuznets’ hypothesis that the tendency for inequality growth was triggered by the Industrial Revolution.131 Finally, it provides an exemplary case of the interrelation between regional and national inequality, showing how some regional divides which create the most unease in today societies, and from which originates much of their overall inequality, can be traced back to remote times. As a consequence of this, such divides should be expected to be extremely difficult to erase – a problem with which not only England but much of the West will surely struggle in the upcoming years."