Empire, Inequality and the Architecture of Collapse

A terrific new study that has got me thinking

In the early years of the first millennium, two great empires cast long shadows across the earth. Rome, encircling the Mediterranean like a bronze ring, stretched from the rainy hills of Britain to the sands of Syria.

To the East, the Han dynasty ruled over a vast realm of rice paddies and river valleys, orchestrating a courtly ballet of taxation and administration from its heart in Chang’an/Xian. Separated by geography and culture, they are often held up as the twin pillars of early imperial statecraft—sophisticated, resilient, and, for a time, enduring.

But empires are not merely about borders and battles. They are architectures of extraction - of resources, labour, and loyalty.

I’ve been pouring over a fascinating new study that has just been published in Nature Communications. It was written by two historians whose work I greatly admire - Guido Alfani and Walter Scheidel - along with Michele Bolla, a PhD student at Cambridge.

The paper compares income inequality in the Roman and Han empires.

And as the study reveals, beneath the majestic facades of Roman marble and Han palaces lay structures of staggering economic inequality, with consequences that continue to echo today.

The twin questions posed in the paper are deceptively simple: how unequal were these two ancient superpowers - and why does it matter?

The findings are startling. Despite assumptions that early imperial states functioned similarly in economic terms, the Han Empire was significantly more unequal than its Roman counterpart in the 1st-2nd centuries - roughly when both were at their peak. The difference was not merely in wealth distribution among elites, but in the structure and intent of imperial governance itself.

To measure this, the authors move beyond traditional ‘social tables’ (that divide society into bands of wealth and status) and into a more nuanced approach—accounting not just for inequality within regions (say, rich elites versus poor farmers in Gaul or Gansu), but also between them. The implications are profound: inequality is not simply about how wealth is distributed within a single city or province, but how imperial systems concentrate advantage or deprivation across vast geographies.

In Rome, the state relied heavily on cooperation with local elites. Officials and elites managed cities, collected taxes, and in return enjoyed status and relative autonomy. This created what a lateral model of power diffusion: resources flowed to the capital, of course, but the Roman system redistributed a significant portion, through military spending, infrastructure, and a pragmatic reliance on the provinces. This was empire by accomodation.

In China, the Han dynasty operated in a different way. Deeply suspicious of regional power centres and of autonomy, emperors forcibly relocated wealthy families to the central province of Sili. The bureaucracy was large and centralised, staffed with officials who owed their status directly to the court. While this produced a powerful administrative core, it also siphoned talent and wealth away from the provinces. Public spending was concentrated near the capital, with less military deployment (and thus less fiscal redistribution) by the frontiers.

The result? A far starker divide. Per-capita income in Sili reached more than three times subsistence levels, meaning it was far wealthier than other provinces; but many other regions languished far below that. The authors use what they call the ‘inequality extraction ratio’ - a measure of how much of the possible surplus an elite actually manages to absorb. The Han’s ratio? A staggering 80%, compared to Rome’s 69%.

The Mexica/Aztec Empire, used as a comparator, hit an even more extreme 89% - an a result of the fact that its leaders oversaw a period of territorial expansion, military conquest and the submission of peoples in the valley of Mexico: there’s no better way to do that than by crushing local resources and wealth.

Why should any of this matter today?

Well, for one thing inequality is not merely a moral or economic issue. As the authors argue, it is also a political one: high extraction correlates with fragility.

Just as some Aztec/Mexica leaders saw the arrival of people from Spain as a chance to shake off the overwhelming demands of Tenochtitlán in the 1520s, so too did regions of Han China erupt into rebellion when ecological disaster struck and food supplies failed. The infamous Chimei revolt (赤眉 or Red Eyebrows) - one of history’s great peasant revolts that took place in the 1st century AD - did not emerge in a vacuum. Such rebellions showcased how systems that are too top-heavy struggle to survive shock.

Rome, by contrast, though hardly egalitarian, was better insulated against uprisings. Military redistribution helped shore up frontier loyalty; while the fact that regional elites had a stake in the system meant that they not only benefited from peace but stood to lose out in the event of unrest. The imperial centre might have loomed large, but the strength of the empire was to be found in its sinews - not in its brain. Durability came from the strength of those sinews; fragility came from the centre.

What this study does so brilliantly is situate inequality not as a by-product of empire, but as a central pillar. Empire is often described in terms of conquest or administration. But perhaps the better question is: how do empires decide who eats, who pays, and who serves?

The resonance with our own times is uncomfortable. Consider the economic map of Britain today, where London and the southeast enjoy prosperity far beyond the north. Or the United States, where debates over federal redistribution echo ancient tensions between core and periphery. Indeed, the “geography of discontent”—a term often used to describe the political fallout from economic divergence—could just as easily be applied to Han China as to modern-day England.

There are deeper lessons here, too. Inequality is often framed as a static condition, a measurement on a graph. But it is dynamic, systemic, and historical. It reflects decisions, deliberate or otherwise, about how societies are structured. And like the Han and Roman empires, modern states must reckon with the political consequences of their distributional choices.

As I’ve written before, history is not a distant mirror. It is a prism, one that refracting light from one age into another, allowing us to see with greater clarity the forces shaping our own time.

The collapse of ancient empires is often portrayed as the result of plague, invasion, or hubris. But perhaps we should look, too, at the balance sheet, and at how power extracted wealth from the many for the benefit of the few, and what happened when the margins grew too wide.

We live now in an age of rising inequality, of renewed questions about the legitimacy of the state, of discontent that simmers beneath the surface.

To read this study is not simply to learn about two ancient worlds. It is to be reminded that the fate of empires - then as now - may hinge not just on their military strength or administrative skill, but on how evenly they distribute the burdens and benefits of rule.

This is all of interest for my own work, both becuase I look at parallel structures, but also because much of my time at the moment is on resilience planning and benchmarking vulnerabilities for the present and the future.

Where better to start, then, than by looking to the past….

More soon.