Cities and Citadels: An Archaeology of Inequality and Economic Growth published in 2023 by Routledge. The book was written over a period of 3 years between 2020 and 2023. As a multi-authored monograph, all authors share equal writing credit — Adam Green, Toby Wilkinson, Darryl Wilkinson, Nancy Highcock and Thomas Leppard. The work aims to renew the relationship between archaeology and economics through a series of lenses onto inequality and economic growth: the aim is to establish a new “critical palaeoeconomics”, in which the human economies of deep history and the modern world are treated seriously in conjunction. The chapters range in space and time over different archaeological case-studies and address important themes such as the pervasive myth of elite determinism, the egalitarian or inegalitarian nature of early cities, the emergence of unequal citadel societies, the role of measurement and money in establishing regimes of inequality, the emergence of merchant classes and affluent trading power, and finally the emergence of the billionaire classes in the 1st millennium BCE.
This website serves as a repository for associated information about the book and summary background about data, ideas and figures.