The State, Civilization, and Extreme Inequality

Abstract

Agriculture set the preconditions for metallurgy and sophisticated military organization, facilitating the rise of the state and civilization about 5,500 years ago. Whereas earlier stone weapons, available to all, served to preclude the formation of elites and inequality, expensive metal weapons, superior organizational skills, and ideology enabled elites to subjugate all others and extract their surplus, leaving the latter with bare subsistence. This elite formed the state, that social agency with a comparative advantage in violence. Social hierarchy became hereditary and increasingly rigid, and inequality became extreme. Elites gained highly disproportionate sexual access to women, often enclosed in harems. Understandably, rulers would strive to appease potential internal usurpers by protecting their property rights and ability to extract surplus from their subordinates. Until the rise of capitalism and a bourgeoisie in Western Europe, this appeasement of potential usurpers and elites generally precluded robust and sustainable economic dynamism.