Morocco Shows How Migration Has Become Weaponized
John P. Ruehl – Independent Media Institute
08-15-2026 ~ Morocco’s pressure on Spain is the latest example of a growing form of political coercion Europe is particularly exposed to.
On July 30, 2026, enormous crowds crossed from Morocco into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta. Within hours, Spanish authorities estimated that roughly 72,000 had entered Ceuta, overwhelming a city of just 83,000 residents. Spain’s other North African enclave, Melilla, also experienced attempted crossings, albeit on a much smaller scale, and closed down its border crossing with Morocco later that day.
Madrid’s response involved roping in the police, military, and migrant services. Many who entered had little intention of remaining, with roughly 70,000 returning to Morocco over the next few days, leaving Spanish authorities to deal with hundreds of unaccompanied minors who stayed.
The “mass crossing” was preceded by several developments. Spain began the process of regularizing 500,000 undocumented migrants in April. And, in July, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that “migrants arriving by sea would not face immediate removal,” according to Euronews, which increased the country’s appeal as a destination for those looking to immigrate. “We discussed this ruling and its impact. We explained that this ruling was going to create a problem. And it did create a problem,” said a Moroccan senior official.
The incident, however, could not have occurred without at least the tolerance of Morocco’s government. Rabat denied involvement, while Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska Gómez, blamed “criminal mafias” for the crossings. Ceuta’s regional president, Juan Jesús Visas, however, claimed that the crossings were “if not orchestrated, at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco,” stated The Guardian.
Spain’s pledge on July 20 to rebuild ties and deepen cooperation with Algeria, Morocco’s regional rival, provided some incentive to fuel the crisis. On July 23, Spain also advanced a proposed legislation granting an expedited path to citizenship for Sahrawis born in Western Sahara when it was still a Spanish colony, before August 1977. The proposal would also extend to their descendants, further aggravating tensions between Madrid and Rabat.
Spain’s criticisms of Israeli and US military operations in the Middle East also strained relations with Washington, at a time when Morocco is assuming an important role in US regional diplomacy. Since joining the Abraham Accords in 2020, Morocco has developed close military, intelligence, and economic ties with Israel, while receiving US backing for its position on the Western Sahara. Spain has meanwhile emerged as one of Europe’s most vocal critics of Israeli policy in Gaza and has denounced the US and Israel’s war on Iran.
Meanwhile, the 2027 House Appropriations Committee report, accompanying a bill passed on July 15, gave credence to Morocco’s claims over Ceuta and Melilla, reinforcing Rabat’s confidence. Against this backdrop, the situation in Ceuta unfolded as tensions between Spain and an increasingly aligned Morocco, Israel, and the US were already mounting. Jerusalem and Washington had little incentive to defend Madrid as Rabat has become an increasingly important partner to both. Israeli and American figures subsequently seized on the Ceuta crisis to criticize Madrid’s “liberal migration policy” and the Sanchez government.
The episode, while another demonstration of how governments can employ migration as an instrument of statecraft, is consequently entangled in these tensions between Spain on one side and Morocco, Israel, and the US on the other. “When a state perceives shifts in the regional balance of power, borders often become the first arena through which strategic messages are conveyed,” stated The Jerusalem Post. The changing balance of power in the region has led to Ceuta emerging as more than a border city. “[I]t is one of the places where the future balance of power between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East is beginning to take shape.”
This isn’t the first influx of migrants from Morocco to Spain. In 2021, after Spain admitted the leader of a movement seeking independence for Western Sahara, Brahim Ghali, for COVID-19 treatment, Morocco relaxed border controls and roughly 8,000 people entered Ceuta over two days.
Spanish authorities labeled the move as “blackmail,” and as The New York Times noted at the time, “hours after the migrants began pouring into Ceuta, Spain approved 30 million euros, about $37 million, in aid to Morocco for border policing.” In 2022, Spain’s foreign minister was replaced, and Madrid reversed its longstanding position on Western Sahara, backing Morocco’s proposal. “Five years later, when a larger crossing occurred amid a different set of Spanish disputes, that structural vulnerability had still not been addressed. This does not mean 2026 repeated 2021’s mechanics. It means the vulnerability 2021 exposed was still there to be exploited, deliberately or not,” pointed out the Middle East Political and Economic Institute.
The latest crisis is far larger, and Spain is again negotiating with Morocco over migration and bilateral relations. But the consequences are not just for Spain. Although migrants arriving in Ceuta cannot automatically travel onward to mainland Spain or the wider EU, the enclave’s status makes these border crossings a European issue. Read more
Forget Climate Doomerism. We Know What We Must Do To Protect The Planet.
James K. Boyce – Photo by Matthew Cavanaugh
08-12-2026 ~ A group of climate experts have several game-changing policies to preserve our right to a clean, healthy environment.
2026 could turn out to be the hottest year on record. Yet, climate change is now on the back burner while the Trump administration intensifies its all-out assault on climate and environmental actions, as indicated by the president’s attack on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine for publishing what he called “fraudulent, biased, and misleading” material on climate change. Still, even the UN General Assembly recognizes that “a clean, healthy and sustainable environment” is a basic human right and this right must be defended.
In the interview that follows, author, naturalist, and a leading scholar of political economy and climate policy James K. Boyce spells out the game-changing policies needed to protect the environment and secure the future of the planet. His proposals are part of the Game Changers project launched by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Boyce is professor emeritus of economics and senior fellow at PERI. He is the author of many books, including Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change. He is also the recipient of awards including the 2025 Common Wealth Prize, the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award, and the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
[The interview that follows has been lightly edited.]
C. J. Polychroniou: On July 4, 2026, the United States turned 250 years old. Meanwhile, a record-setting heat wave disrupted celebrations of the event across the country, and this summer could end up as one of the U.S.’s hottest ever. An extraordinary heat wave also spread through Europe, triggering deaths and causing “severe infrastructure stress.” To say then that climate has reached the point of breakdown might be an understatement. Yet the Trump administration not only continues to treat climate change as a “hoax” but has launched an all-out assault on the environment, as if totally unaware of the fact that a “clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” is a basic human right. How do we translate this right into reality in the United States?
James K. Boyce: Rights never exist in the abstract; they are won and sustained through struggles. This is as true for environmental rights as it is for the rights to free expression, freedom of assembly, and free and fair elections. The constitutions of some U.S. states affirm the right to a clean and safe environment, and this right has been formally recognized by the United Nations. It is missing, however, from the U.S. Constitution. An important step for translating this right into reality would be a constitutional amendment that guarantees it, but this will take years. In the meantime, much can and should be done to secure a clean and safe environment for all.
For example, fenceline monitoring of air pollution from industrial facilities is now readily affordable. Monitors should be installed near significant pollution sources and their real-time readings made publicly available online. This is especially vital in communities currently overburdened with pollution, often from multiple sources, many of which are politically disadvantaged by race, ethnicity, and class. Information is a source of countervailing power.
There should also be a moratorium on the introduction of new pollution sources in communities already overburdened with pollution. A good model is the landmark environmental justice law passed in 2020 in New Jersey, which went into effect in 2023.
Overburdened communities ought to have priority in pollution abatement, too. Michael Ash and I propose a target of reducing pollution by 8 percent per year (a rate that would cut pollution in half in nine years) until the community no longer meets the criteria for being classified as overburdened. A similar policy for co-pollutants from fossil fuels is proposed in the Healthy Climate and Family Security Act introduced in 2024 by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) and Congressman Don Beyer (D-Virginia).
Many corporations are polluting the environment through destructive business practices and because they are simply greedy. Moreover, we have failed to hold such corporations accountable. How do we stop corporate polluters?
There are basically three ways to rein in corporate polluters. These are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they are mutually reinforcing. One is to make the invisible visible — reveal the sources of pollution and their human toll — through information, as in the pollution monitoring mentioned above. This alone would strengthen public pressure (and lawsuits) that can alter corporate behavior, a phenomenon known as “informal regulation.” The second is formal regulation: rules that mandate firms to curtail emissions or switch to cleaner technologies. Such rules require enforcement, and again this is facilitated by an informed public. The third is to compel polluters to pay for damages from the environmental harms they inflict. This gives them an incentive to do more than just comply with formal regulations by investing in R&D to find new and cleaner production methods.
We need to hold polluters to account for environmental damage they have inflicted in the past, too. This includes the escalating damages from extreme weather events due to climate destabilization. Today, the costs of disaster recovery and climate adaptation are seriously straining the budgets of households, businesses, and governments alike. The states of Vermont and New York have enacted climate superfund legislation to recover a significant share of these costs from fossil fuel producers based on their historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions. Michael Ash and I advocate this sort of policy at the national level to help fund the costs of recovery and adaptation.
The Trump administration’s policy toward the chemical industry is one of deregulation and rolling back limits on “forever chemicals” and other toxins. So much for a clean and safe environment. What’s the game-changing strategy when it comes to the chemical industry?
The chemical industry in the U.S. is currently stuck in outdated technologies of the past. Bold new policies are needed to break out of its toxic and fossil fuel-dependent impasse. The regulatory regime for chemicals in the U.S. is fragmented across multiple agencies; moreover, rather than encouraging improvements, it sometimes creates perverse incentives against them. For example, the Toxic Substances Control Act requires new chemicals to be screened for health and environmental effects prior to their introduction into the economy. This is a good thing, but the tens of thousands of chemicals already in use are not subject to comparable safeguards. In effect, the incumbents are presumed innocent until proven guilty, making it harder to replace them with safer substitutes.
Environmental health expert Joel Tickner proposes a comprehensive set of policies to create a cleaner, safer, and more sustainable chemical industry. These include the establishment of a single agency to coordinate national policy, as Sweden and the European Union have done, which will compile and distribute information on chemical safety, prioritize reductions in the most hazardous chemicals, and incentivize the adoption of superior alternatives.
To tackle the toxic legacies of the past, Tickner proposes to establish a National Remediation Fund financed by fees on the chemical industry to pay for clean-ups, site redevelopment, ecosystem recovery, and health cost reimbursement. He also proposes a National Transition Fund for Safer and Sustainable Chemistry to support R&D, pilot facilities, supply-chain reformulation, and just transitions for communities and workers in the industry affected by the changes. Read more
This Is How We Take Back What’s Ours
Roxanne D. Brown ~ Photo: USW.org
08-12-2026 ~ Tripling union membership would level the playing field for working people.
My mom was a single parent. She raised my brother and me, paid every bill on time, and bought a house of her own, breaking into the middle class with hard work and a union job.
She also showed me how to make my own way in the world, and now she’s preparing for a retirement she spent decades earning.
It’s the vaunted American success story. Or at least it used to be. We know all too well that the same mobility and security my mom has achieved are eluding countless others today because of a system stacked in favor of the rich.
Working people struggle to buy groceries, pay utilities, and purchase homes while the wealthy fritter away obscene sums just because they can. Here’s the good news: It isn’t too late to take back what’s ours.
Tripling the percentage of union workers nationwide is exactly what’s needed to reset the scales, rebuild the middle class, and reverse much of the inequality that’s divided America into haves and have-nots.
That’s the key finding of a new study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank in Washington, DC, that’s long worked alongside the United Steelworkers (USW) to deliver justice and opportunities for working people.
The study found that increasing the union membership rate to 30 percent would unleash a new era of collective power, forcing employers to come to the bargaining table and raise median wages by 14.5 percent.
That works out to about $7,700 more annually in a worker’s paycheck, or nearly $270,000 over the course of a 35-year career, enough to weather inflation, take vacations, buy a home, and still sock something away for retirement.
Let’s remember that ordinary Americans create wealth.
But the rich—CEOs, do-nothing shareholders, and the rest of the billionaire class—siphon it away. Ten percent of Americans control nearly 70 percent of the nation’s wealth, and believe me, these aren’t the folks showing up every day to do the tough, important jobs that keep America running.
Reclaiming our fair share of wealth is a first step. But a surge in unionization promises other sweeping gains, as EPI’s study points out.
For example, union members use our collective clout to win better working conditions. We fight discrimination and other unfair treatment on the job because solidarity, the source of our strength, renders an injury to one an injury to all.
We also wield our power to win paid sick leave, quality health care coverage, and other essentials that corporations and their cronies deny to other families.
Access to doctors is a basic need. Yet anti-worker members of Congress in 2025 gave billions in tax cuts to the wealthy, bloating their coffers even more, while simultaneously stripping struggling families of affordable health plans.
It’s within our means to end this kind of injustice once and for all.
A tripling of union membership would force employers to provide health care to many more workers, cutting the ranks of the uninsured by about 25 percent, according to EPI’s estimate. That means millions of people living better and longer.
Just as important, these kinds of changes pave the way to a bigger, stronger middle class with corresponding political power, seized from the rich. This rebalancing is the best way to keep Congress in check, ensuring it focuses on the common good and never again lines the pockets of the wealthy on the backs of everyone else.
Who, apart from the billionaires, would take issue with that?
Record numbers of Americans support unions and want to join one, signaling that the wave championed in the EPI study is already underway.
About 140 sawmill workers in Mississippi joined the USW in June, coming together despite the company’s nasty anti-union campaign to fight for brighter futures. Manufacturing workers, chemical workers, oil workers, library workers, animal rescue workers, and many others also joined our ranks over the past year, eager to realize the union difference.
Which boils down to this: We’re stronger together.
By Roxanne D. Brown
Author Bio: Roxanne D. Brown is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).
Credit Line: This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
Reading Ancient Signals In A Modern World
Irina Matuzava – Photo: The Observatory
08-03-2026 ~ The desire to stylize a mark is older than writing itself, and the typefaces of today shape what we remember, feel, and trust whenever we read.
The oldest known engravings consist of zigzag patterns and parallel lines, carved into freshwater mussel shells at Trinil on the island of Java, Indonesia. These grooves, made by Homo erectus, date to roughly half a million years ago. By around 100,000 years ago, early Homo sapiens at Blombos Cave in South Africa were carving cross-hatched patterns into pieces of ocher. Long before anyone wrote down a word, our ancestors made marks with evident care. Neither the engravings at the Trinil site nor those at Blombos Cave can be considered writing, but they seem to represent a desire to deliberately shape a surface and give these marks specific forms.
Writing is a much more recent development, having evolved at least four times within the last 5,000 years: in Mesopotamia around 3400–3100 BCE; in Egypt around 3250 BCE; in China around 1250 BCE; and in Mesoamerica around 600–300 BCE, including the Maya script that developed independently at around 300–200 BCE. According to Discover magazine, “The oldest surviving texts come from very specific contexts, such as economic transactions in Mesopotamia and divination rituals in China. The first characters were mainly pictographic signs, depicting exactly what they referred to.”
In evolutionary terms, the invention of writing is considered extremely recent, as our genus Homo has existed for around 2.8 million years, and our species Homo sapiens for at least 300,000 years. For the overwhelming majority of human history, no one could read or write. However, the cultures that eventually invented writing carried their aesthetics and preferred methods of stylization in the scripts they created.
Today, our lives and communication methods are saturated with a vast array of fonts and typeface styles that go beyond simply conveying written information, raising the question of what effects fonts can have on people.
Partially, the answer lies in what came before writing and the first carved mark. Long before humans developed writing and spoken language reached its modern complexity, we were communicating through visual signals. Much of the emotional content of a face-to-face interaction is not conveyed through spoken words, but through nonverbal cues. Posture, gestures, facial expression, gaze, and tone of voice all contribute to the communication of the message and the manner in which it is received.
Fluency in visual signals did not originate with humans, as reflected in the abilities of primates to produce and interpret visual communication. In 1872, Charles Darwin argued in his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, that human facial expressions share a common heritage with those of other animals. Following advancements in ethological analysis of primate facial and gestural communication in the 1960s, Frans de Waal proposed that the growing evidence of group-specific signaling conventions among primates strongly resembles, or can be considered, a cultural variation. Studies of orangutans and gorillas show that these apes use signals intentionally to attract the attention of others. In addition, they modify their signal depending on whether the recipient is watching, demonstrating an awareness that the communication is being seen and understood.
Katja Liebal and Linda Oña’s 2018 review of primate communication found a pattern: gestures are used flexibly. Their meaning shifts according to the situational context, in contrast to vocal calls, which tend to be more fixed. Meanwhile, Uwe Jürgens helped explain this contrast in primate vocalization in “Vocal Communication in Primates”: a call’s form is largely determined by genetics, while its meaning is acquired through repetition and context. A reader or listener does not determine a particular gesture, vocal call, or letterform, but instead, its meaning is learned and context dependent.
When writing emerged, it did so within a species already equipped with sophisticated visual communication systems sensitive to form, color, and deliberate marks, with a few patterns that could be identified in the origins and development of ancient scripts. For instance, many script inventions evolved within preexisting iconographic or hieroglyphic systems. Even as early scripts became more abstract and moved away from their pictographic origins, the shapes retained visual properties that readers processed alongside meaning. With the later invention of the printing press in the 15th century, typography created consistent cues for readers as characters became identical throughout a document, setting them apart from most visual experiences.
Research reveals that letters are actually not processed visually in the same manner as shapes. This distinction, revealed in a series of experiments by Isabel Gauthier and her coauthors, has significant implications for the impact of fonts. Our visual system develops cortical specialization for letters. Certain areas in the left occipito-temporal cortex respond more strongly to letters than to other stimuli, such as generic shapes. Gauthier proposes that font tuning is the driver for this specialization: similar to how the brain develops specialized processing of faces, it can recognize letters more promptly through increased exposure to print. According to a 2011 study by Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen, this is known as neuronal recycling: the reading brain repurposes the visual machinery that long predates writing.
A 2018 article by researcher Peter Walker also investigated whether the visual system becomes selectively tuned to specific fonts, and whether this tuning affects perception and performance. Walker’s framework proposes that readers maintain “a set of font-specific translation rules” in their working memory, which is directed by their “implicit knowledge” of the structural identity of each letter and symbol.
Capital H, for example, is always represented as two vertical strokes connected by a horizontal mark, but each typeface will structure the shapes of these marks differently. Well-designed fonts, whether made by master calligraphers or standardized for print, share a common style across all their characters. After seeing the first few letters of a text, a reader can predict the letters that will follow.
The evidence by Walker supports the account that font processing is rule-based rather than image-based, as switching fonts causes considerable slowdowns in processing time. These lags occur even with familiar typefaces and increase with the degree of dissimilarity between two fonts. Font-specific rules are quickly forgotten from working memory. When the repetition of a particular font becomes more probable, readers will implicitly hold on to the rules for longer.
The effects of typography, however, go beyond processing speed and reading efficiency; fonts also shape how we feel about what we read.
Typography, as typographer and poet Robert Bringhurst observed, gives letterforms “tone, timbre, character, just as words and sentences do.” Eva R. Brumberger’s 2003 study published in Technical Communication found “that readers do consistently ascribe particular personality attributes to particular typefaces and text passages.” She concluded that “visual language is analogous to verbal language in carrying connotations,” and that typefaces are not neutral messengers. Some read as more elegant, others come across as more direct, while others are characterized as friendly. These attributions are consistent across readers and stable enough to be mapped. Read more
India’s Gen Z Flexed Its Power—And Won
Sonali Kolhatkar
08-02-2026 ~ A nascent movement of young people, angry over a broken educational system, took on the ruling BJP government and forced the education minister to resign.
Young people across India recently made international headlines for mass protests over the recurring leaks of entrance exams that help students qualify for medical schools and highly coveted government jobs. The Gen Z protesters won a major victory within a matter of weeks when Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25, 2026, bowing to their demands.
The student movement was triggered by an inadvertent insult by India’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Surya Kant, who, in May, referred to unemployed Indian youth as parasites and cockroaches. Kant’s words caught the attention of a young Indian man in Boston, Massachusetts, named Abhijeet Dipke, who graduated from Boston University in 2025 with a master’s in public relations.
Dipke posted a question on X: “What if all the cockroaches come together?” Deploying his PR skills, he built an Instagram account under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party (“Janta” is Hindi for “the people”) and within days began to attract a following of disaffected Indian youth, angry over the reported leak of questions from the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET).
Illicit access to questions from the NEET medical entrance exam is part of a lucrative underground trade in a system designed to pit an estimated 2 million students against one another for only 130,000 available positions. When news of the leaks spread, an estimated 21 students took their own lives in despair rather than retake the exams.
Ahilya Majithia, a reporter based in New Delhi, documented the nascent movement and explained that while it began as an online protest, it quickly spread to the physical world, spurred by a sense of mass injustice felt by students. “It’s one of the most competitive exams in India,” she said during an interview with me. “It’s basically an exam to get into a medical college. So, it obviously requires a lot of preparation, and people study for years to just give this exam.”
As anger grew, Dipke’s CJP offered people an outlet for their frustrations, and the satirical party’s online following ballooned into the tens of millions. “I think it did catch a lot of momentum because of social media, and that’s how the Cockroach Janta Party was also conveying their messages: through X, through Instagram,” said Majithia.
Soon, Dipke, who was living in the United States, flew from Boston to Delhi in early June. He arrived at the airport holding aloft a copy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s autobiography, a legendary Dalit leader whose writings were central to the anti-caste movement in India. “Coming from a Dalit family, Dr. Ambedkar obviously had a huge influence on my life,” said Dipke in an interview with Frontline magazine.
Although Ambedkar was a left-wing socialist, Dipke’s political sensibilities are not necessarily reflected in the movement he helped to spark, one that moved at a ferocious speed. “This protest [gave] the people the sense of power that we can fight the government to change certain things,” said Majithia. However, she added, “I don’t think this protest was ever to weaken a government body or the BJP in particular; I think this was a very non-political issue.” Read more
Vicious Cycles: Autocracy, Inequality, And The Funding Of Government
Gary M. Feinman
08-02-2026 ~ As democracies around the world face mounting challenges and pressures, discussions about autocracy often focus on personalities and ideologies or tend to link governance practices to differences among specific cultural traditions. Yet a growing body of comparative historical research has provided evidence that a more fundamental question deserves attention: How was and how are governments funded?
Across thousands of years of human history, one of the strongest predictors of whether governance becomes concentrated in the hands of a few is not population size, technological development, cultural affiliation, or even geography. It is the degree to which governing institutions depend on revenues drawn from their citizens versus resources that rulers can control independently.
This finding is part of a March 2026 global comparative study of 40 historical cases spanning Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The analysis measured governance along a continuum ranging from more collective and inclusive systems to more autocratic ones. Contrary to long-standing assumptions, the authors of this study found only weak relationships between autocracy and population size, political scale, or hierarchical complexity; the strongest association, by far, was with revenue generation. Governments that relied heavily on externally controlled resources were much more likely to have power concentrated in the hands of rulers and narrow elites.
The logic is straightforward. When revenues come primarily from taxes on local production, labor obligations, or market activity, rulers depend on the cooperation of those who generate wealth. Revenue extraction becomes a negotiated process. Citizens, merchants, farmers, and producers gain leverage because governments need their continued participation and compliance. This encourages accountability, representation, and institutional checks on power.
The opposite dynamic emerges when rulers can finance themselves through resources that are easier to monopolize. Historically, these have included royal estates, slave economies, control of mines, long-distance trade routes, and war booty. In such cases, governing elites become less dependent on the broader population. If rulers do not need citizens to sustain their governments, they have fewer incentives to share decision-making authority with them. The public loses bargaining power precisely because it is less essential to state finances.
This relationship is hardly confined to the ancient world. Political scientist Margaret Levi famously argued that the history of governance is deeply intertwined with the history of revenue collection. The new comparative archaeological evidence supports that insight on a far broader temporal scale, extending the pattern across millennia and continents.
The implications extend beyond governance. The March 2026 study found a significant relationship between autocratic governance and higher levels of socioeconomic inequality. Societies in which power was more concentrated also tended to exhibit greater disparities in wealth, measured through differences in housing, access to valued goods, burial treatment, and other indicators. Conversely, more collective or democratic systems generally displayed lower levels of inequality.
These findings dovetail with a 2025 research examining economic inequality across deep history. Drawing on the largest global archaeological dataset of residential wealth disparities ever assembled, my coauthors and I found enormous variation in inequality across time and space. Importantly, inequality did not rise uniformly with social development, urbanization, or agricultural intensification. Rather, different societies followed different pathways, with governance being an important factor.
This conclusion challenges a deeply rooted narrative. For generations, scholars have assumed that larger populations inevitably required more centralized authority and that centralized authority generated greater inequality. The new evidence suggests otherwise. Large-scale societies have existed with relatively collective forms of governance, while smaller societies have at times exhibited striking concentrations of power and wealth. Neither autocracy nor inequality is an unavoidable outcome of scale or political complexity.
Instead, autocracy and inequality seem to reinforce each other through a series of feedback loops. Concentrated power facilitates privileged access to resources. Unequal access to resources strengthens the position of governing elites. Fiscal systems based on externally controlled revenues further weaken the bargaining capacity of citizens. Over time, these processes can become mutually reinforcing, resulting in societies that are simultaneously marked by political exclusion and economic disparity.
The lesson is not that economics mechanically determines politics. Nor is it that every society follows the same trajectory. The historical record is far too diverse for such simple conclusions. The evidence, however, suggests that political institutions and fiscal structures cannot be separated or analytically siloed. How governments obtain revenue shapes incentives of rulers, leverage of citizens, and ultimately the distribution of both power and wealth.
This may be the most important takeaway from the two comparative deep-time studies. Democracy and autocracy are not simply products of culture, geography, or historical destiny. Nor are high levels of inequality inevitable. Across human history, societies have repeatedly developed mechanisms that constrained rulers, broadened participation, and moderated disparities in wealth. They have also repeatedly moved in the opposite direction.
If there is a consistent message from the archaeological and historical records, it is that the distribution of power and wealth is intimately linked. And both are profoundly influenced by the ways governments finance themselves. Recognizing this connection may be just as important for the future of democracy as it has been for understanding its past.
By Gary M. Feinman
Author Bio: Gary M. Feinman is an archaeologist and the MacArthur curator of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.