The death of American George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, USA, sparked widespread global protests and reactions, at a time of a pandemic that led to the loss of millions of jobs and thousands of lives, and shed light on centuries of racial discrimination and economic inequality.

In his valuable book "History of Inequality: From the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century" in which he monitors the nature of human relations since the Stone Age, Austrian historian Walter Scheidel - a professor at Stanford University - tried to explain the deep causes of social inequality, considering that previous epidemics had redistributed income It has been effective in reducing social and economic inequality, but the expected outcome of the Corona pandemic may be very different.

European fiefdoms

Scheidel says that the bubonic plague that tore through Europe and the Middle East in 1347 AD and continued for long decades, led to the end of feudal regimes and the outbreak of mass uprisings, but with a devastating cost estimated at a third of the population losing their lives.

The plague killed so many people that workers became extremely scarce, and the demand for land collapsed. This enabled the remaining workers to earn higher wages, while the landowners and feudal lords received less income and profits.

Thus the rich became less wealthy and the poor less poor.

The experience of the plague also undermined confidence in the administrative and religious authorities in Europe, and encouraged people to question the ruling power system and to think of alternatives.

Scheidel elaborates on what happened in Europe during the Middle Ages, saying that the nobles and landowners found it difficult to maintain their costly ways of life, and failed to enforce laws that compel workers to continue working for low wages, and the peasant uprisings ended in a settlement that forced the wealthy to bargain in Britain, But in Eastern Europe the upper class maintained a united position against the peasants, who were forced into submission without compromise.

He says that this indicates that the plague itself was not sufficient to bring about change and balance, as political and local power structures played a critical role in shaping the results.

Accumulation of wealth

In a report published in the French newspaper L'Obs, writer Veronique Radier says that the capital of the 60 billionaires who own half of the planet's wealth rose in 2020 despite the repercussions of the Corona pandemic, and this applies to all high-income families, while it ravaged Health crisis with the resources of the poor.

With renewed questions about the causes of social inequality in human societies and the failure of modern systems to solve this dilemma, the author sheds light on Walter Scheidel's vision.

In his book, Scheidel asserts that all civilizations throughout human history have witnessed an increase in the gap of social inequality between classes over time, trying to identify the mechanisms that perpetuated inequality in the history of human societies.

Scheidel - a specialist in ancient European civilizations - studied ancient human societies using the mechanisms that researchers in modern economic and social sciences rely on, and techniques used by some forensic scientists in the study of prehistoric structures.

"Because there were no statistics or opinion polls at the time," said sociologist Louis Scheufele, "because there were no statistics or opinion polls at the time," Scheidel traced the history of inequality by referring to scattered remains, ceramic pieces, real estate records, home space and life rates.

According to the author, Scheidel’s book provides a comprehensive and encyclopedic picture of the life of human societies in ancient historical periods.

Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st century

Scheidel believed that the process of evolution reduced the biological differences of human ancestors, and with the advent of weapons, skill became preferred over strength, and humankind experienced a long period of relative equality.

After that, Scheidel says, our ancestors formed small Bedouin groups that rejected any form of domination and authoritarian behavior and worked to equitably share surplus resources.

Scheidel adds that some families made fortunes in that historical period, which is evidenced by the graves of more than 30 thousand years old that were found in Russia, but that these riches were sporadic and rapidly decaying patterns.

But in the Neolithic period - about 10 thousand years BC - new hierarchies were formed with the emergence of sedentary lifestyles and agriculture, and then the first elites in history, according to the Austrian historian, appeared.

During the Roman Empire, the wealth of the richest families exceeded 1.5 million times the average annual income per capita.

Scheidel adds that crises, wars and revolutions have continually reduced social gaps, but without being able to completely eliminate inequality.

In the French Revolution, for example, the nobles lost only 10% of their land, which also happened during the Taiping Rebellion against the Qing Empire in China in the mid-nineteenth century.

Scheidel believes that modern democracies have not, in turn, presented any radical solutions to the problem of inequality and class, which led to the failure of the Latin American revolutions in the early part of this century.