ABSTRACT
If wealth disparities did not emerge in cities, when and where did they come from? Just as Thomas Piketty’s theory explains why the first cities were egalitarian, so, too, does it explain why some settlements were not. In this chapter, we turn from cities to citadels, which we define as relatively small settlements that were built to funnel the products of labor to a small subset of people. They emerged as a result of low economic growth, a condition that, unlike high economic growth, can emerge almost anywhere humans can produce food. We review citadels from across the Mediterranean Basin, East Asia, and the Americas and consider the emergence of citadels on the periphery of the high growth economies we examine in Chapter 2. Citadels were not proto-cities, nor were they settlements that were necessarily on the way toward becoming cities. Rather, they were the outcome of a completely different economic dynamic.
