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The Great Leveler

Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
By Walter Scheidel
Series: Princeton Classics
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Brief Description
How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history. 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... Read More
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How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history.

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. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart 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 civilisation. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The 'Four Horsemen' of levelling—mass-mobilisation 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 civilisations 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.

An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.

Series: Princeton Classics

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780691271842

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 20 May 2025

Country: United States

Imprint: Princeton University Press

Illustration: 45 b/w illus.

Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Width: 133.0mm

Height: 203.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 536

Collections

Education & Reference Finance & Economics Finance & Investment Global History History & Archaeology History & Military Non-Fiction Science & Nature Series: Princeton Classics Walter Scheidel

About the Author

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. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

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