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“... but it is not an anomaly. Such massive inequalities are a global phenomenon. In 2015, Walter Scheidel writes in The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st Century, ‘the richest 62 persons on the planet owned as much private net wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion ...”

“... of the evidence. The point of reading (and writing) books of this sort – such as those by Walter Scheidel – is that they deal with topics you wouldn’t study in universities. Waters’s book is the former kind, and it gives a good sense of what it must be like to take a class with him at the University of Wisconsin. He doesn’t duck the gaps ...”

“... by murder, or by allegations of murder (witness the suspicious death of Caligula’s father). As Walter Scheidel has recently shown, the Roman Empire has a bloodier record in the transfer of power than any other monarchy in the history of the world. In fact there were allegations, true or false, that every single one of the first dynasty of Roman ...”