W. Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1918.

Walter Scheidel is an Austrian historian who teaches history at Stanford University, California. His original specialty was ancient Greek and Roman economic and social history; this led to such works as Quantifying the Source of Slaves in the Early Roman Empire (1997) and Human Mobility in Roman Italy (2004-5). In this volume, representing Book 69 of The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, he aims much higher. The series’ title notwithstanding, he extends his reach so to devote at least some space to almost all periods and all continents. To be sure, the availability or lack of it of source material has caused some of those periods and some of those continents to be covered more thoroughly than others. Still within its special point of view, The Great Leveler comes as close to universal history as any work any single author can reasonably be expected to produce.

The way Scheidel sees it, the history of human economic inequality has run as follows. Starting some 30-40,000 years ago, some graves indicate that, even at that time, in at least some societies, some individuals owned or commanded resources—such as foodstuffs, ornamental objects, and weapons—others did not. Confirmation comes from a number of very simple near-present day societies spread through Africa, Asia, and Latin America some of whose members used to enjoy preferential access to food; and who, as a result, grew taller and stronger and were able to have and raise more offspring than others.

When agriculture started taking the place of gathering, hunting, gardening and herding about twelve thousand years ago, the gap between haves and have nots grew drmatically. In this, a particularly large role was played by the idea of property, the ability to transform it into a source of unearned income, and the possibility of leaving it to one’s heirs. As a general rule, the larger and more powerful a community the more conducive it was to the creation of such gaps. And the closer the gini coefficient, to the extent that modern scholars can calculate it, moved towards the magic—magic, because in practice it could never be attained—number 1. Beginning at least as far back as the earliest known settled civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China, wealth came to depend on political power and political power, on wealth. Which explains why, from Egypt’s Pharaohs to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the very richest men—very rarely, women—have always been those who managed to combine the two in their own person.

So far, nothing that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing a quarter millennium ago, and Thomas Piketty, whose work was published just a few years before Scheidel’s, could not have agreed with. Where Scheidel really breaks new ground is by asking, not how inequality originated and what its effects were—though that question, too, takes up a great many pages in his book—but which factors have delayed it and, on occasion, put it into reverse gear. From the beginning, four such factors are identified. The first is mobilization warfare, AKA total warfare, of the kind that pits not just armies but entire societies against each other and, should the contest be prolonged, may well result in a large percentage of both sides’ populations being killed, taken prisoner, or, in antiquity as well as under Stalin, exiled. The second is attempts, the most important of which were those made first in the Soviet Union and then in China between 1917 and 1979, to “compress” (an excellent metaphor Scheidel often uses) economic inequality by finishing off the richest individuals and groups in a given society and distributing their assets and their rights among a much larger number of people.

The third is state collapse, anarchy, and the waning of civilizations. Of the kind, to mention the best-known example first, that took place in late antiquity and finally put an end to it. Other examples are the disappearance of the Minoan civilization around 1100 BCE, that of the T’ang Empire around 900 CE and that of the Maya civilization from 1200 CE on. Today something similar may be observed, albeit on a much smaller scale, in several present Asian and African states (Afghanistan, the Sudan, Somalia, Zaire, and others) in particular, The fourth is natural disasters as exemplified by the plague that swept away perhaps ten percent of the population of the Roman Empire round 180 CE and the Black Death which killed an ever larger proportion in fourteenth century. They are what the author, using another successful metaphor, calls the horses of the apocalypse.
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To what extent have the attempts, whether manmade or natural, to rein in the horses and reduce inequality been successful? Always taking the long view, and basing himself on a truly enormous scholarly apparatus, Scheidel argues that the answer is, not very. To pick but a few examples, the two World Wars of the twentieth century did cause inequality to be compressed. Especially in the countries that waged them, they continued to make their effects felt for years after the ended in 1945. However, by the late 1970s the impetus was spent; many measures (in particular, near-confiscatory taxation) began to be abolished, or mitigated, or simply circumvented. “Stand on your own feet” (the slogan of Margaret Thatcher) and “let’s get government off our back” (that of Ronald Reagan) rang around the world.

Both the Soviet and the Chinese attempts by taking the lives of tens of millions succeeded in leading to gini coefficients as low as 0.2-03. Doing so they turned the great majority of their citizens into beggars who lived not far from the subsistence level, causing them to be abandoned after a few decades. The same applies, albeit in a much attenuated form, to the welfare states that, in the West between about starting about, began to choke off growth and led to inflation. Whatever may have happened in the past, today anarchical conditions of the kind Hobbes wrote about seldom last for more than a few decades, after which a dictatorship of some kind is likely to emerge and start increasing inequality once again by rewarding its supporters and penalizing or exterminating everyone else. Finally, one of the greatest and most durable recorded example of levelling was not manmade but a result of the Black Death. Starting in 1348, it killed about one third of Europe’s entire population before it abated. Only a century and a half later were its effects completely overcome; today, however, given the progress that has taken place in medicine, the possibility that such a disaster could recur seems unlikely. As Charles de Gaulle once put it, an all-out nuclear war might well leave behind a world in which there are neither powers, nor laws, nor cities, nor cultures, nor cradles, nor tombs; short of that, however, the prospects of suppressing inequality appear, let us say, dim. 

Swhat are we—meaning, humanity as a whole—to do? For Piketty the most important answer is to impose a universal wealth tax. Needless to say, Scheidel is aware of that possibility. Utopian as it may be, he does include it in a long list of other kinds of progressive taxes other scholars have suggested. Nor is he in principle averse to some of them, as well as various subsidies to the less well to do, being instituted in some places and under some circumstances. What he does warn against, and emphatically so, is following the Soviet and Chinese, and Cambodian (“The Killing Fields,” for those who have forgotten), and Zimbabwean, examples by going too far too fast. “All of us,” Scheidel says, “would do well to remember that, with the rarest of exceptions, [greater equality] was only ever brought forth in sorrow.” Hence his advice: “Be careful what you wish for.”

Within the limits imposed by the book’s size—it is over 500 pages long—Scheidel is nothing but thorough. Reading it, one sometimes gets the impression that there is not a period, not a country and not an upheaval so small and so unimportant that he does not have at least something to say about the development of inequality in it. He covers the oldest known societies as well as the newest ones. The mighty U.S draws his attention—given it size and its role as the hub of the capitalists system, how could it fail to do so?—and so does the central Italian city of Prato during the Renaissance. Throughout all this, politics, economics, social affairs, and technology are all woven into his account, often in ways that can only be called masterful. Even religion is included, at least to the extent that it involves wealth. All this is done neither in the thunderous prose of many other would-be reformers nor in the breezy tones of a gadfly; but in a serious and dignified way which reminds one that the author’s roots are, after all, in academia.

In the face of such excellence, there are just two problems that seemed to me at all serious. The first is that the book is organized “horseman” by “horseman.” Though probably inevitable, that arrangement often leads to chronological somersaults even inside individual chapters and sometimes makes the text harder to follow than, perhaps, it could have been made. The second is the enormous mass of detail, which, at places, I found tedious and even intimidating.

All in all: magnificent.