Inequality always emerges from the same conditions throughout history

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The Fall of Phaeton — Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1605) Public Domain.

There’s a phrase that has been living in my head rent-free lately: “defensible clumped resources.” It comes from a paper I quoted in a recent post on the history of slavery, in which the authors investigated how a hierarchy can emerge in an otherwise egalitarian society. The study compared hunter-gatherer communities in the Pacific Northwest region of the Americas. Some of these societies exhibited strongly hierarchical, class-based systems, distinguished by hereditary wealth and power, while others were the more stereotypical egalitarian bands we normally associate with hunter-gatherers.

The study’s authors tested a few hypothesises to determine what was causing the difference in social structure in these communities. They found that previously touted theories like population pressure or inter-group conflict couldn’t account for the difference. Instead, the most likely predictor of inequality was the presence of what they called “defensible clumped resources”. In other words, there was something of value (often salmon), that was not evenly distributed across the territory, and was thus easily monopolised by a minority. Control over this resource allowed that minority to extract benefits from the others, giving rise to a stratified society comprising of elites, commoners, and slaves.

This is interesting not just because it shows that inequality did not begin with the adoption of agriculture, or the formation of states, or the emergence of complex commerce, as are often claimed, but because — and this is why it has been living in my head rent-free — it seems to offer a model for inequality everywhere.

If a resource (something valuable) is distributed unevenly across a territory (clumped), and has what they call in business-speak ‘a moat’ (defensible), we should expect a community’s interaction with that resource to warp its social organisation.

This precise pattern arose when I was researching the different social structures that emerged in the world’s first cities. Urbanisation led to highly stratified societies in Egypt and southern Mesopotamia, but didn’t in the Indus Valley or Andean highlands. What explains the difference? It seems “defensible clumped resources” played a role here too.

In Egypt, the narrow ribbon of fertile soil along the Nile River meant the land itself was the valuable resource in the region. Over time, as the area first urbanised, local chiefs steadily accumulated control over more and more of the land’s productive surplus, eventually leading to the incredibly stratified society of the Old Kingdom, in which the Pharaoh technically owned all the land in Egypt. In southern Mesopotamia, meanwhile, agricultural potential was more evenly spread over the country, but was only fertile when irrigated. Here, it was not land but water that became the defensible resource that the elites controlled to maintain their position. In the Andean highlands and the Indus Valley, meanwhile, the land was so bountiful that it was impossible to monopolise a particular resource, as it was equally abundant everywhere. Hence, these societies retained an egalitarian society with no elite class, no slavery, and little warfare.

Once noticed, this model of inequality seems to map elsewhere in history too.

In Classical Greece, for instance, the rich veins of silver at Laurion allowed a few entrepreneurs to get exceedingly wealthy, while the brutal work of digging and smelting the ore was done by slaves who saw none of the rewards. Laurion silver famously funded the Athenian fleet that defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis, but it also helped maintain inequality not just within Athens itself, but between city-states too. Athens’ great wealth allowed it to dominate the other cities in the Delian League.

We see something similar in the Central European Hallstatt culture (12th to 8th centuries BC) of the Late Bronze Age, where local, clumped abundance of salt gave rise to an elite class. These elites were able to trade salt as far south as Greek Massalia (Marseille), accumulating Mediterranean luxury goods that further entrenched their social position. Further north, Bronze Age Nordic societies followed the same pattern, but this time the monopolised resource was amber. The fossilised tree resin was an important commodity in the ancient world, and the Baltic and North Sea regions became the key source for the whole continent. Trading along the ‘Amber Road’ — which stretched from the Baltic to the Mycenaean Aegean — enriched the Nordic elites to the extent that we see sudden social stratification and wealth inequality in the archaeological record. Longhouse dwelling Nordic kings and queens were buried with a dizzying wealth of gemstones and precious metals, clearly made rich from the amber trade.

Both Republican and Imperial Rome had a notoriously stratified society, with patricians ruling over both plebeians and slaves. The Roman historian Livy recounts the popular story that the patrician class was descended from one hundred men chosen by Romulus, the city’s legendary founder, to rule the city. In reality, it’s more likely that the first patricians had managed to secure control over key resources like the most productive land and precious metal mines. The wealth and noble status were made hereditary by the codes of law (particularly the agrarian laws) that only patricians could write, and by the banning of marriage between patricians and plebeians (though this was eventually overturned). The Roman example shows that as societies grew more complex, the creation of laws — both concerning property rights and heritability — made clumped resources only more defensible over time.

Legal status was also key in entrenching inequality during the mediaeval period. Here the elite aristocracy maintained their position by monopolising land ownership, made more defensible through the deployment of expensive mailed knights. This is doubly interesting, because it seems that as military technology became more sophisticated — and therefore more expensive — violence itself became a ‘defensible clumped resource’ that could be used to defend other valuable resources. We see this too in feudal Japan, where the elite samurai used their monopoly of sophisticated weaponry to extract rice stipends from the peasant underclass, further entrenching their dominance in the social hierarchy.

During the Age of Discovery, the European empires used both violence and complex legal wrangling to wrest monopolies over key resources from local elites all over the world. The Dutch East India Company used their superior firepower to dominate the Spice Trade in the Far East, while the Spanish went to horrifyingly barbarous lengths to secure gold and silver mines in Central and South America. The Dutch in particular developed new financial instruments to ensure their resources were all that much more defensible.

We can also characterise Karl Marx’s famous critique of the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution as one of identifying the ‘defensible clumped resources’ of the period. In the factories of 18th and 19th century Europe, the ‘means of production’ — the newly invented industrial machinery, as well as financial capital — became a resource on which to build huge wealth, made defensible by patents, expense, and property laws.

It’s no surprise that the late 19th century explosion of inequality in the United States came when a new clumped resource began to be exploited. The oil and railway boom of the Gilded Age allowed figures like John D. Rockefeller and Andre Carnegie to accumulate wealth that would in today’s dollars amount to hundreds of billions, all while millions of other Americans remained mired in poverty. The ‘defensible clumped’ nature of oil and other mineral deposits across the world has allowed severe social stratification to emerge in countries like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Russia. Indeed, the ‘natural resource curse’ that afflicts developing countries endowed with mineral wealth can be explained by the clumped nature of their dispersal. The diamonds of Sierra Leone, cobalt of the DRC, and copper of Zambia are too easily guarded; the priority of these countries’ elites will always be to maintain control over the extraction of these valuable resources, rather than the effective and fair governance of their respective nations.

A significant part of the recent surge in Western inequality over the last few decades can be attributed to the rise of half a dozen or so tech companies. Here, Big Tech have monopolised not a physical resource, but human networks instead. The barrier to entry in search, social media, and online stores are not found in some tangible asset like silver or oil, but in the network effects of aggregating attention. The valuable resource making a few incredibly wealthy is us.

Similarly, across the Western World the generational wealth gap between the young and old can be largely explained by a dearth of housing. Prime real estate is clumped in a few popular urban centres — London, San Francisco, New York etc. — with existing stock defended by punishing planning laws that restrict the construction of new builds. Compare this with Tokyo, where planning regulations are much less onerous, and you can go some way to explaining the lower levels of wealth inequality in Japan, compared to other OECD countries.

The notion that inequality arises where resources are both unevenly distributed and defensible, suggests we should be able to predict its emergence in the future. A few candidates stand out.

As we speak, tech companies are rushing to build out AI infrastructure, constructing huge data centres at inordinate expense. If AI lives up to even a small part of its hype, then ‘compute’ could well be the key defensible clumped resource of the future.

Similarly, a few industrialists have made it known they would like to mine rare earth minerals from nearby asteroids. While this remains economically unviable at the moment, technology should keep improving to the point to make this feasible — possibly within decades. The great expense and incredibly sophisticated technology required for space travel will almost certainly act as a moat for these resources in the future.

Though we have come a long way since the first kings of Mesopotamia were able to amass great wealth upon ownership of irrigation canals, it seems water might once again become a source of inequality. As our planet gets warmer, dry regions may see increasing competition over scarce supplies of fresh water, and though abundant energy may allow for large-scale desalination plants to be built for the first time, those too would be clumped and defensible. Speaking of energy, the ongoing switch to green tech may allow sun-drenched countries like Spain to leverage their abundant solar energy to amass great wealth. Perhaps in the future, hapless politicians in Germany may make their nation dependent not on Russia for its energy, but Iberia. (If that doesn’t seem so bad, remember Philip II!)

Inequality, as we know, is incredibly destabilising to a society. As Peter Turchin has shown empirically, drastic rises in inequality correlate directly with social unrest, civil war, and civilisational collapse.¹ Indeed, our own era of rising inequality seems to go a long way in explaining the social ructions that have characterised the last decade or so in the West.² We allow its continuation at our peril.

That being the case, understanding the underlying causes of inequality are key. If indeed the model of ‘defensible clumped resources’ helps explain the emergence of social stratification everywhere — and I believe it does — then that gives us a clue as how to address the problem. Some resources are by their very nature unevenly distributed — this fact seems very hard to change. However, we can do something about their defensibility. Tax codes, patent regulations, property rights, and heritability laws are ours to make and change as we want.

Perhaps I should say at this point: I’m not an anti-capitalist. The last few centuries of economic development have led to hitherto unseen levels of wealth accessible to billions around the globe. It’s not evenly distributed, but the vast majority of us — from London to Bangkok — are much better off now than our ancestors just a few generations ago. However, it’s simply a fact of history that unmitigated profit-seeking leads to horrors of the highest order.

Capitalism is akin to Helios’ fire-breathing horses. Properly harnessed, it is capable of lifting us to heights unknown, but if the bridle comes loose it will scorch the earth and all upon it. Right now our grip appears to be slipping.

1. Coincidentally, Peter has recently joined substack. You should subscribe!

2. Alongside changes to the structures of our information networks.