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

Livre 29 sur 58: The Princeton Economic History of the Western World

Scheidel, Walter

 
9780691271842: The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century
Couverture souple
ISBN 10 : 0691271844 ISBN 13 : 9780691271842
Editeur : Princeton University Press, 2025

Synopsis

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 civilization. Over thousands of years, 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.

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.

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À propos de l'auteur

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.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
Princeton University Press
Date d'édition
2025
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0691271844
ISBN 13 
9780691271842
Reliure
Broché
Nombre de pages
536
Coordonnées du fabricant
Princeton University Press
https://press.princeton.edu/books

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