3,257
edits
Changes
→Top Ten List
6. Scheidel, W. (2016) <i>The great leveler: violence and the history of inequality from the stone age to the twenty-first century</i>. The princeton economic history of the western world. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. A large part of inequality is how violence both shapes it and is a result of it. Violence in the ancient and modern worlds has shaped how societies enabled some groups to be in greater power, while it has also resulted from an over concentration of power in given groups or individuals.
7. McAll, C. (1992) <i>Class, ethnicity, and social inequality</i>. Montreal; London, McGill-Queens University Press. This volume looks at how class, ethnicity and social inequality interplay, historically and in more recent events. Class develops from power concentration, but ethnicity can be a way in which power is reinforced in ruling groups or in class that have greater access to wealth.
8. Hurst, C.E. (2013) <i>Social inequality: forms, causes, and consequences</i>. 8th ed. Boston, Pearson. While social inequality often deals with access to wealth, social inequality can also be related to race, prejudices, access to power, gender, sexual orientation, and other factors. Historically, these factors have been present, but often less investigated and how societies develop laws or social customs that often have prohibited a large number of people from having equal access to social resources or even status in society.
9. Joseph S. Tulchin & Amelia Brown (eds.) (2002) <i>Democratic governance and social inequality</i>. Boulder, L. Rienner Publishers. In more recent history, democracies have spread globally. However, in many of these democracies, large and widespread social inequality is evident. How modern states address social inequality often also means these states must address the development of social inequality from the past, such as class, gender, and race and other forms that have historical roots.
10. T. Douglas Price & Gary M. Feinman (eds.) (1995) <i>Foundations of social inequality </i>. Fundamental issues in archaeology. New York, Plenum Press. Societies with different forms of social governance have demonstrated widespread social inequality. The work looks at the origins of social inequality from simple social groups, the fact that social inequality can be easily present even in small groups such as through age or gender, and how it can develop more rapidly as social systems expand and develop widespread social networks. Examples come from foraging groups to agriculturally-based societies from the Old and New Worlds.
