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

Description

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

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 seventeen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

"Shortlisted for the 2017 Cundill History Prize, McGill University" "Shortlisted for the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award" "strategy+business Best Business Book of 2017 in Economics" "One of The New York Times Deal Book "Business Books Worth Reading" 2017 (chosen by Andrew Sorkin)" "One of The Wall Street Journal's What Business Leaders Read in 2017" "Selected for The HCSS Bookshelf (chosen by Stephan De Spiegeleire) 2017" "One of BBC History Magazine's Books of the Year 2017" "One of the Microsoft Best Business Books of 2017" "One of Project Syndicate's Best Reads in 2017 (chosen by Dambisa Moyo)" "One of the Economist.com "2017 Books of the Year" in Economics and Business" "One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Books of 2017: Economics, chosen by Martin Wolf" "One of The Wall Street Journal's What Business Leaders Read in 2017, chosen by Mohamed A. El-Erian" "One of the CNBC 13 Best Business Books of 2017" "One of World's 2017 Books of the Year in "Understanding the World"" "Medium.com's Books of the Year 2017, chosen by Mark Koyama"