Research Economic History When an Empire Divides: Ancient Lessons on Ever-Menacing Inequality
What happens when an empire grows too large? When the central apparatus gets richer at the expense of outer regions, and inequality becomes structural? This is the question asked by Guido Alfani (Bocconi), Michele Bolla (Cambridge) and Walter Scheidel (Stanford), who in a recent paper. (A comparison of income inequality in the Roman and Chinese Han empires) published in Nature Communications have reconstructed with surprising quantitative tools the level of economic inequality in two of the greatest civilizations in history: the Roman Empire and the Chinese Han Empire.