Escaping from inequality: Is Europe trapped by history?

On 5 May 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted a seminar on the long-run history and future prospects of economic inequality in Europe. Chaired by Timothy Garton Ash, the seminar featured Walter Scheidel of Stanford University, best known for The Great Leveler, on the historical forces that reduce inequality, and Escape from Rome, on how Europe’s fragmentation shaped its distinctive path to modernity. Garton Ash challenged Scheidel to combine the arguments of both books into a single account of whether Europe can escape inequality while remaining, in effect, trapped by its own history. Scheidel responded with a deliberately high-level overview, noting that precise measures of historical inequality remain elusive.

He began with the long arc of European inequality, which peaked just before the First World War after roughly four centuries of rising inequality following the Black Death. Within that period, he argued, the Thirty Years’ War was the only major interruption, illustrating his central thesis that only massive, usually violent shocks have historically produced significant levelling: mass-mobilisation warfare, communist revolution, state collapse and catastrophic pandemics. The great compression between 1914 and 1945, followed by further, gentler equalisation into the 1970s, was a semi-global phenomenon. East of the Iron Curtain it was driven by communism; in Western market economies by falling returns on capital, progressive taxation, unionisation and the post-war welfare state. Since the 1980s, however, deregulation, financialisation, automation and, above all, globalisation—which added roughly a billion low-income workers to the world economy—have reversed the trend, steadily increasing the share of income flowing to capital rather than labour.