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This article analyses the increasing socio-economic segmentation of rural society in Northern Italy in the early modern era. With a synthesis of the historiography on the Italian countryside plus original archival research, we reconstruct the political role and the socioeconomic basis of rural elites in the State of Milan and in the Republic of Venice. We argue that, in general, the growing importance and the establishment of the rural elites were the result of more and more exclusive management of the commons, the concentration of landed property, and a near monopoly in local manufacturing and the local credit market.
