"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....

Different ways of estimating the Gross Domestic Product of the Roman Empire in the second century CE produce convergent results that point to total output and consumption equivalent to 50 million tons of wheat or close to 20 billion sesterces per year. It is estimated that elites (around 1.5 per...

Reflecting current concerns about economic inequality, scholars who study the pre-modern past are increasingly addressing this issue. The obstacles to measuring the distribution of income or wealth in the ancient Roman world are formidable. Only a few highly localized datasets are available. Any...