In 221 BCE, King Ying Zheng of Qin conquered the rival warring states and established the Qin empire as Qin Shi Huangdi (The First August Emperor of Qin). The Qin emperor centralized state ...

Rome, with a population of around 75 million, had an average income equivalent to about 2.25 times the subsistence minimum — ...

To find out how imperial structures contributed to levels of inequality, researchers writing in Nature Communications examined historical records from both empires at their peak (ca. 165 C.E. for the ...