ROOTS · The historical roots of global inequality

The aim of this project is to understand the historical roots of global inequality. Specifically, it will address two questions: Why did some regions experience an early start in the development of complex hierarchies? How relevant is such an early transition in explaining current comparative economic development. 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, or case studies focusing on a limited numbers of well-studied areas. 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) and ancient societies (constructed from aggregating archaeological reports) with advanced econometric techniques. The project comprises three lines of research. 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. 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. The third line will document the long shadow that ancient hierarchies (either among hunter-gatherers or farmers) have produced on current comparative economic development.