Walter Scheidel
Scheidel at theWorld Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions in 2012
Born	(1966-07-09)9 July 1966 (age 59) Vienna, Austria
Nationality	Austrian
Alma mater	University of Vienna
Scientific career
Fields	Historian
Institutions	Stanford University

Walter Scheidel (born 9 July 1966) is anAustrianhistorian who teachesancient history atStanford University,California. Scheidel's main research interests are ancientsocial andeconomic history, pre-modernhistorical demography, and comparative and transdisciplinary approaches toworld history.^[1]

From 1984 to 1993, Scheidel studiedancient history andnumismatics at theUniversity of Vienna, where he obtained his doctorate in 1993. In 1998, he completed his habilitation at theUniversity of Graz. From 1990 to 1994, he worked as an administrative and research assistant at the University of Vienna. As anErwin Schrödinger Fellow of the Austrian Research Council, he spent 1995 as a visiting scholar at theUniversity of Michigan inAnn Arbor. From 1996 to 1999, he wasMoses and Mary Finley Research Fellow in Ancient History atDarwin College, Cambridge. During this period, he also served as visiting professor at theÉcole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales inParis and theUniversity of Innsbruck.

Scheidel moved to the United States in 1999, where he initially held visiting positions atStanford University and theUniversity of Chicago. In 2003, he took up his current position in the Department of Classics of Stanford University, where he was promoted to professor in 2004 and received an endowed chair, the Dickason Professorship in the Humanities, in 2008. He is also a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Stanford's Human Biology program.

Scheidel has published six academic monographs and more than 260 papers and reviews and edited or co-edited 16 other books. He is co-editor of a monograph series forOxford University Press and was co-founder of thePrinceton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics,^[2] the world's first online repository for working papers in that field.^[3] In May 2012, Scheidel and Elijah Meeks launched the interactive website ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World.^[4] He has been awarded a New Directions Fellowship of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and aGuggenheim Fellowship and is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The Great Leveler was shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize 2017^[5] and for theFinancial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2017.^[6] One ofThe Economist's Books of the Year 2017,^[7] it was selected byMartin Wolf as hisFinancial Times Summer Book of 2017.^[8]William Easterly wrote in a review ofThe Great Leveler, which argues that violence is the main contributor to declines in inequality, that "the great virtue of the book is to present a lot of evidence on both sides for the readers to judge the thesis for themselves."^[9]

TheFinancial Times^[10] and theEvening Standard^[11] namedEscape from Rome one of their best books of 2019. In his review, Robert Colvile noted that although “Scheidel has to do an awful lot of heavy lifting” in his book, it “is a measure of Scheidel’s talent and dedication that, by and large, he succeeds.”^[12]Escape From Rome was panned by fellow historianFelipe Fernández-Armesto who accuses Scheidel of wholesale oversimplification, "cutting through the chaos of real life and dismissing its messiness."^[13] Paolo Tedesco of theUniversity of Tübingen, reviewing the book, described it as "stimulating [and] thought provoking", although he considered that its historical arguments were not convincing.^[14]

• Grundpacht und Lohnarbeit in der Landwirtschaft des römischen Italien, Frankfurt: Lang, 1994,ISBN 3-631-47904-2
• Measuring Sex, Age and Death in the Roman Empire: Explorations in Ancient Demography, Ann Arbor:Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1996,ISBN 1-887829-21-0
• Debating Roman Demography, Leiden: Brill, 2001 (editor),ISBN 90-04-11525-0
• Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt, Leiden: Brill, 2001,ISBN 90-04-12323-7
• Ostrakismos-Testimonien I: Die Zeugnisse antiker Autoren, der Inschriften und Ostraka über das athenische Scherbengericht aus vorhellenistischer Zeit (487–322 v. Chr.), Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, 2002 (co-editor),ISBN 3-515-07947-5
• The Ancient Economy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, and New York: Routledge, 2002 (co-editor),ISBN 0-7486-1322-6
• The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 (co-editor),ISBN 978-0-521-78053-7
• The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 (co-editor),ISBN 978-0-19-537158-1
• Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 (editor),ISBN 978-0-19-533690-0
• The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 (co-editor),ISBN 978-0-19-921152-4
• The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (editor),ISBN 978-0-521-89822-5
• The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013 (co-editor),ISBN 978-0-19-518831-8
• State Power in Ancient China and Rome, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 (editor),ISBN 978-0-19-020224-8
• Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (co-editor),ISBN 978-1-107-08920-4
• On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017 (co-editor),ISBN 978-1-119-16248-3
• The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017,ISBN 978-0-691-16502-8
• The Science of Roman History: Biology, Climate, and the Future of the Past, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018 (editor),ISBN 978-0-691-16256-0
• Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019,ISBN 978-0-691-17218-7
• The Oxford World History of Empire, 2 vols., New York: Oxford University Press, 2021 (co-editor),ISBN 978-0-197-53397-0
• What Is Ancient History?, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025,ISBN 978-0-691-23665-0

• Roman demography
• Roman economy

• Personal website at Department of Classics, Stanford University
• Stanford Profiles at Stanford University
• Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics – PDF papers on ancient demography and economy
• ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World

• 20th-century Austrian historians
• 21st-century Austrian historians
• Austrian classical scholars
• University of Vienna alumni
• University of Michigan faculty
• Stanford University Department of History faculty
• Writers from Vienna
• 1966 births
• Living people

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles with hCards