Origins of inequality beyond agriculture

Is it time to overhaul the way we study and teach ancient history? Are we limiting our ability to understand fully how the past informs the present in ways like inequality if we keep these disciplines siloed?

Walter Scheidel is a professor of humanities, classics, and history at Stanford University. He’s the author of more than a dozen books, including What Is Ancient History? and The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.

Walter and Greg discuss methodological divides between departments studying ancient history, the relevance of the Classics today, and the case for a new discipline on “foundational history.” They also explore the origins of inequality and how war, plagues, and technological advancements are the primary drivers for equality shifts. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How ancient innovations still shape the modern world

13:37: People face similar challenges, and they should be studied accordingly. And we should try to understand how people, at the time of many thousands of years ago, put all kinds of innovations in place and bundled them together in very specific ways that really create our world—in terms of material culture, in terms of social arrangements, institutions, cognitive frameworks, if you will. Writing and literature and world religions and other belief systems, and so on, are still very much with us. They really shape everything that we do today. So the world we inhabit today is like a supercharged version of what people set up in this formative period. But they did it all over the place.

Why ancient studies need a paradigm shift

10:08: Unless there is some major paradigm shift or some major other shock to the system, there's really no sufficient force to reconfigure the way we approach the study of the ancient world.

Redefining ancient history beyond Greece and Rome

03:03: If you're a historian, you may want to ask, well, why isn't ancient history, like Roman history, part of our history patterns more generally? And to go beyond that, what do we mean mostly by Greece and Rome when we say ancient history? I think we mean two things when we evoke ancient history. One is Greeks and Romans, maybe Egyptians and Nas if you're lucky, but not, you know, Maya or early China and that sort of thing. Or, more commonly, you refer to something you think is irrelevant and obsolete. You say that's ancient history whenever you want to dismiss something—it's like, that's ancient history. So my book is about both of these meanings and why neither one of them really does any justice to the subject matter and to what our understanding should be of this particular part of history. I want to redefine it as a truly transformative, foundational phase—not so much a period, but a phase of human development that unfolded on a planetary scale and needs to be studied accordingly.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Gini coefficient
• Branko Milanović
• Kuznets curve

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Stanford University
• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on X

Guest Work:

• What Is Ancient History?
• The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century 
• Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
• Part of: The Princeton Economic History of the Western World (55 books)
• The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy (Cambridge Companions to the Ancient World)
• Part of: Cambridge Companions to the Ancient Athens (17 books) 
• The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World by Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, et al.
• The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford Studies in Early Empires)

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