The Emergence and Persistence of Inequality in Premodern Societies

In this special section we propose an interpretation of the emergence and persistence of wealth inequality in premodern populations along with ethnographic and quantitative evidence exploring this hypothesis. The long‐term trajectory of inequality in premodern societies, we suggest, is based on the differing importance of three classes of wealth—material, embodied, and relational—together with differences in the transmission of these types of wealth across generations. Subsequent essays in this forum use data on individual and household wealth from 21 populations to evaluate this and related propositions concerning the interaction of wealth class, transmission rates, production systems (foraging, horticultural, pastoral, and agricultural), and inequality. Here we motivate our interpretation by applying our ideas to the Holocene transition from more egalitarian to more stratified societies, introduce key concepts that are developed in the subsequent essays, and comment on some of the limitations of our study.