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The great leveler : violence and the history of inequality from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century / Walter Scheidel.

by Scheidel, Walter, 1966-

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Princeton University Press, 2017.

Equality -- History.

Income distribution -- History.

Violence -- History.

Princeton economic history of the Western world.

9780691165028 (hc.)

Alternate title:

Violence and the history of inequality from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century

xvii, 504 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 457-493) and index.

Introduction: The Challenge of Inequality -- A Brief History Of Inequality. The Rise of Inequality -- Empires of Inequality -- Up and Down -- War. Total War -- The Great Compression -- Preindustrial Warfare and Civil War -- Revolution. Communism -- Before Lenin -- Collapse. State Failure and Systems Collapse -- Plague. The Black Death -- Pandemics, Famine, and War -- Alternatives. Reform, Recession, and Representation -- Economic Development and Education -- What If ? From History to Counterfactuals -- Inequality Redux And The Future Of Leveling. -- In Our Time -- What Does the Future Hold? -- Appendix: The Limits of Inequality.

"Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. This book charts the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling--mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues--have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. New insights about why inequality is so persistent--and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon. Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University.

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