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Michael J. Watts, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1583–1595, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy203
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Abstract
Reviewing James Scott’s Against the Grain and Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler is a salutary experience immediately bringing to mind Walter Benjamin’s famous remark that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Each book is civilizational in historical scope—both authors begins their account with the early human hunter gatherers-foragers who have traversed the earth for most of the 200,000 years in which it has been inhabited by anatomically modern humans—and in their abiding civilizational pessimism, whether it be the early agrarian city-states or twentieth-century modernity. Scott’s message is an echo of Jared Diamond’s famous assessment of the Neolithic Revolution (“the worst mistake in human history”). In sharp contrast to the plenitude, freedoms, and relative equality of foraging lifestyles, domestication of plants and animals and the birth of agrarian states brought drudgery, undernutrition, higher mortality rates, forced and slave labor, war, epidemics, and the threat of almost constant sociopolitical fragility and turbulence. In a similar register, Scheidel argues that the Holocene provided all the necessary preconditions for systematic inequality, conditions that have, in fact, now been fully globalized. Across 12,000 millennia, says Scheidel, the default position of economic history—technological development abetted by state formation—has been durable and deepening inequality. Periods of leveling—measured through material wealth and income compression—have been exceptionally rare, the result not of redistributive or ameliorative human interventions but of the catastrophic destruction of elite privilege and wealth. Historically, says Scheidel, all leveling has a “common root,” namely massive and violent disruptions of the prevailing political and economic order, typically by total war, state collapse, epidemics, or violent revolutionary transformation. This article assesses these arguments, their similarities and points of departures, and how they stand in relation to other accounts of historical inequality.
