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The Concentration of Wealth: Some lessons from antiquity?

The Concentration of Wealth: Some lessons from antiquity?

By Adrastos Omissi

The Byzantinist, Issue 3 (2013)

 Banquet scene, fresco, Herculanum, Italy.

Several weeks ago, Oxfam reported that the income of the world’s hundred richest people, an income estimated to be in the region of $240 billion, would be sufficient to end world poverty four times over. It was a shocking statistic and a powerful reminder of the fact that wealth, even in the modern world, is still organised along strictly hierarchical lines; to the smallest group goes the greatest portion. Indeed, so the article goes on to point out, the global financial crisis has accelerated this process, rather than slowing it, and the income of the world’s richest one per cent has increased by something like 60% in the last twenty years.



Shocking as this situation is, it need not surprise the Byzantine scholar, since similar forces were at work during the last two centuries of the Western Roman Empire. In the third century, the Empire had experienced its own ‘global’ financial crisis, with increasingly vast portions of the imperial fisc being auctioned off to pay for a state system whose books evidently did not balance. The third century even saw its fair share of ‘quantitative easement’, and look how that went. The silver currency completely collapsed and with it went the economy that was based upon it. Brutal financial reforms and the creation of a gold currency to replace the silver one never truly remonetised the economy, and payment of both taxes and salaries in kind became standard under the late Empire.

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