iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

See my colleague Reviel Netz’s monumental Scale, Space and Canon (2020).

Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

The final 2011 version is a classic, and their concepts of IPF and IER (already acknowledged in Scheidel & Friesen) are of critical importance to our understanding of what inequality meant at very different levels of development: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Pre‐Industrial Inequality*

Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes as unequal as they are today? This article infers inequality across individuals within each of the 28 pr...

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Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Out now: What *is* ‘ancient history’? Why it is much bigger and more important than we might think, how generations of scholars have dismembered it, how we can do it justice – and why ‘Classics’ has run its course: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

press.princeton.edu

What Is Ancient History?

From one of today’s most innovative ancient historians, a provocative new vision of why ancient history matters—and why it needs to be told in a radically different, global way

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Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Sounds like my buddy Voltaire’s quip about the Holy Roman Empire not being holy, Roman or an empire. I’d see quite a big difference between post-Roman emperors in search of a functioning empire and what happened in China…

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Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

“Shaped” (a long time ago — 1900-1969), not “shapes”…

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Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

The “Air France Flight 4590 Effect”? (I still prefer Concorde effect to sunk cost, sounds much more elegant and, well, apt.)

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Walter Scheidel @walterscheidel.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

In WIAH I question the obsession with “mastery” as an obstacle to globalizing work; and what do I see in the fourth sentence of this review? “Mastery” and all the rest of it. Oh boy.

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