The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

521 Pages·2016·5.05 MB·English

by  Walter Scheidel

THE GREAT

LEVELER

Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from The Apocalypse,
1497–1498. Woodcut, 15¼ × 11 in. (38.7 × 27.9 cm).

THE GREAT

LEVELER

VIOLENCE AND THE HISTORY OF

INEQUALITY

FROM THE STONE AGE TO THE

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

WALTER SCHEIDEL

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William
Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Jacket art: Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from The Apocalypse, 1497–1498.
Woodcut, 15¼ × 11 in. (38.7 × 27.9 cm).

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-16502-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953046

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Garamond
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Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For My Mother

“So distribution should undo excess,

And each man have enough.”

Shakespeare, King Lear

“Get rid of the rich and you will find no poor.”

De Divitiis

“How often does God find cures for us worse than our

perils!”

Seneca, Medea

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables xi Acknowledgments xv Introduction: The Challenge
of Inequality 1

PART I. A BRIEF HISTORY OF INEQUALITY 23

1. The Rise of Inequality 25

2. Empires of Inequality 62

3. Up and Down 86

PART II. WAR 113

4. Total War 115

5. The Great Compression 130

6. Preindustrial Warfare and Civil War 174

PART III. REVOLUTION 211

7. Communism 213

8. Before Lenin 232

PART IV. COLLAPSE 255

9. State Failure and Systems Collapse 257

PART V. PLAGUE 289

10. The Black Death 291

11. Pandemics, Famine, and War 314

PART VI. ALTERNATIVES 343

12. Reform, Recession, and Representation 345

13. Economic Development and Education 367

14. What If? From History to Counterfactuals 389

PART VII. INEQUALITY REDUX AND THE

FUTURE OF LEVELING 403

15. In Our Time 405

16. What Does the Future Hold? 424

Appendix: The Limits of Inequality 445
Bibliography 457
Index 495

FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES

I.1 Top 1 percent income share in the United States (per year) and

references to “income inequality” (three-year moving
averages), 1970–2008

1.1 General form of the social structure of agrarian societies

3.1 Inequality trends in Europe in the long run

3.2 Gini coefficients of wealth distribution in Italy and the Low

Countries, 1500–1800

3.3 Ratio of mean per capita GDP to wages and real wages in

Spain, 1277–1850

3.4 Inequality trends in Latin America in the long run

3.5 Inequality trends in the United States in the long run

4.1 Top income shares in Japan, 1910–2010

5.1 Top 1 percent income shares in four countries, 1935–1975

5.2 Top 0.1 percent income shares in Germany and the United

Kingdom

5.3 Top 1 percent wealth shares in ten countries, 1740–2011

5.4 Ratios of private wealth to national income in France, Germany,

the United Kingdom, and the world, 1870–2010

5.5 Capital income share in total gross income for top 1 percent of

incomes in France, Sweden, and the United States, 1920–2010

5.6 The share of government spending in national income in seven

countries, 1913–1918

5.7 Top marginal tax rates in nine countries, 1900–2006

5.8 Average top rates of income and inheritance taxation in twenty

countries, 1800–2013

5.9 World War I and average top rates of income taxation in

seventeen countries

5.10 Top 1 percent income share in Germany, 1891–1975

5.11 Top 1 percent income share in Sweden, 1903–1975

5.12 State marginal income tax rates in Sweden, 1862–2013

5.13 Trade union density in ten OECD countries, 1880–2008

6.1 Military size and mobilization rates in years of war in great

power states, 1650–2000

6.2 Gini coefficients of income and top 0.01 percent income share

in Spain, 1929–2014

9.1 Median house sizes in Britain from the Iron Age to the Early

Middle Ages

9.2 House size quartiles in Britain from the Iron Age to the Early

Middle Ages

9.3 Gini coefficients of house sizes in Britain from the Iron Age to

the Early Middle Ages

10.1 Real wages of urban unskilled workers in Europe and the

Levant, 1300–1800

10.2 Real wages of urban skilled workers in Europe and the Levant,

1300–1800

10.3 Rural real wages measured in terms of grain in England, 1200–

1869

10.4 Top 5 percent wealth shares and Gini coefficients of wealth

distribution in the cities of Piedmont, 1300–1800

10.5 Gini coefficients of wealth in Poggibonsi, 1338–1779

10.6 Top 5 percent wealth shares in Tuscany, 1283–1792

10.7 Top 5 percent wealth shares and Gini coefficients of wealth

distribution in Lucca, 1331–1561

11.1 Real wages expressed in multiples of bare-bones consumption

baskets in central Mexico, 1520–1820

11.2 Daily wheat wages of unskilled rural and urban workers in

Egypt, third century BCE to fifteenth century CE

11.3 Changes in real prices and rents between 100–160s and 190s–

260s CE in Roman Egypt

11.4 Wealth inequality in Augsburg: number of taxpayers, average

tax payments, and Gini coefficients of tax payments, 1498–
1702

13.1 Gross National Income and Gini coefficients in different

countries, 2010

13.2 Estimated and conjectured income Gini coefficients for Latin

America, 1870–1990 (population-weighted averages for four,
six, and sixteen countries)

14.1 Counterfactual inequality trends in the twentieth century

15.1 Top 1 percent income shares in twenty OECD countries, 1980–

2013

A.1 Inequality possibility frontier

A.2 Estimated income Gini coefficients and the inequality

possibility frontier in preindustrial societies

A.3 Extraction rates for preindustrial societies and their counterpart

modern societies

A.4 Inequality possibility frontier for different values of the social

minimum

A.5 Different types of inequality possibility frontiers

TABLES

2.1 The development of the largest reported fortunes in Roman

society and the population under Roman control, second
century BCE to fifth century CE

5.1 The development of top income shares during the world wars

5.2 Variation in the rate of reduction of top 1 percent income

shares, by period

6.1 Property in 1870 relative to 1860 (1860 = 100), for Southern

whites

6.2 Inequality of Southern household incomes

8.1 Income shares in France, 1780–1866

11.1 Share and number of taxable households in Augsburg by tax

bracket, 1618 and 1646

15.1 Trends in top income shares and income inequality in select

countries, 1980–2010

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The gap between the haves and the have-nots has alternately grown and shrunk
throughout the course of human civilization. Economic inequality may only
recently have returned to great prominence in popular discourse, but its history
runs deep. My book seeks to track and explain this history in the very long run.

One of the first to draw my attention to this very long run was Branko

Milanovic, a world expert on inequality who in his own research has reached all
the way back to antiquity. If there were more economists like him, more
historians would be listening. About a decade ago, Steve Friesen made me think
harder about ancient income distributions, and Emmanuel Saez further piqued
my interest in inequality during a shared year at Stanford’s Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

My perspective and argument have been inspired in no small measure by

Thomas Piketty’s work. For several years before his provocative book on capital
in the twenty-first century introduced his ideas to a wider audience, I had read
his work and pondered its relevance beyond the last couple of centuries (also
known as the “short term” to an ancient historian such as myself). The
appearance of his magnum opus provided much-needed impetus for me to move
from mere contemplation to the writing of my own study. His trailblazing has
been much appreciated.

Paul Seabright’s invitation to deliver a distinguished lecture at the Institute

for Advanced Studies in Toulouse in December 2013 prompted me to fashion
my disorganized thoughts on this topic into a more coherent argument and
encouraged me to go ahead with this book project. During a second round of
early discussion at the Santa Fe Institute, Sam Bowles proved a fierce but
friendly critic, and Suresh Naidu provided helpful input.

When my colleague Ken Scheve asked me to organize a conference on

behalf of Stanford’s Europe Center, I seized the opportunity to gather a group of