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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DTL Humanities 2020
• VerfasserIn: Scheidel, Walter,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2018]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: The Princeton Economic History of the Western World ; 69
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (528 p.)

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 it never dies peacefully. 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. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling-mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues-have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures and tables -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The challenge of inequality -- Part I. A BRIEF HISTORY OF INEQUALITY -- The Rise of Inequality -- Empires of Inequality -- Up and Down -- Part II. WAR -- Total War -- The Great Compression -- Preindustrial Warfare and Civil War -- Part III. REVOLUTION -- Communism -- Before Lenin -- Part IV. COLLAPSE -- State Failure and Systems Collapse -- Part V. PLAGUE -- The Black Death -- Pandemics, Famine, and War -- Part VI. ALTERNATIVES -- Reform, Recession, and Representation -- Economic Development and Education -- What If? From History to Counterfactuals -- Part VII. INEQUALITY REDUX AND THE FUTURE OF LEVELING -- In Our Time -- What Does the Future Hold? -- Appendix: The Limits of Inequality -- Bibliography -- Index