The historical roots of global inequality

Introduction

The aim of this project is to understand the historical roots of global inequality. Specifically, it will address two questions:

1. Why did some regions experience an early start in the development of complex hierarchies?
2. How relevant is such an early transition in explaining current comparative economic development?

Theoretical Background

A series of theories, going back to the origins of the social sciences, emphasize the role of some crucial environmental factors in explaining the rise of the very first complex hierarchies.

Unfortunately, however, the scarcity of global datasets on natural environment and hierarchy, going back to the first human societies, has made it difficult to test these theories.

Partial empirical validation has come almost exclusively from either:

• Cross-sectional empirical studies, using data on the current environment to proxy for past conditions.
• Case studies focusing on a limited number of well-studied areas.

Project Goals

This project aims at filling this gap by combining new global panel data on:

• Ancient climate (a result of recent advances in paleoclimatology)
• Ancient migrations (reconstructed through archaeogenetics)
• Ancient societies (constructed from aggregating archaeological reports)

with advanced econometric techniques.

Lines of Research

The project comprises three lines of research:

1. Testing Environmental Changes: The first line will test a prominent theory that relates a series of changes in the natural environment with the emergence of intensive food storage and the subsequent rise of the first relevant socio-economic inequalities among hunter-gatherers.

2. Farming Societies and Trade: The second line will focus on farming societies and investigate the role of long-distance trade, spurred by the invention of bronze, on the rise of the first urban civilizations and new unprecedented economic inequalities among farmers.

3. Impact of Ancient Hierarchies: The third line will document the long shadow that ancient hierarchies (either among hunter-gatherers or farmers) have produced on current comparative economic development.