Walter Scheidel

Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. He works on premodern social and economic history and the comparative world history of labour, state formation, inequality and human welfare. In 2017, Princeton University Press published his book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. His latest book, Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (2019), explores the emergence of the modern world.