At their apex, the Roman Empire and China’s Han Dynasty ruled over more than 120 million people combined. Their capitals bustled, their wealth swelled, and their armies stretched across continents. But how evenly was the wealth of these sprawling realms shared? And could those economic disparities have sown the seeds of their decline?

A team of historians and economic researchers — Guido Alfani, Michele Bolla, and Walter Scheidel — have turned this abstract question into a measurable one. In their new study, they constructed the most detailed estimates to date of income inequality in ancient Rome (circa 165 CE) and Han China (circa 2 CE).

A Tale of Two Empires, Unequally Told

On the surface, Rome and Han China had much in common. Both commanded vast territories and depended on intricate systems of taxation and governance. They kept rich records. They built roads and huge infrastructure works. But when the researchers dug into the economic skeleton beneath that administrative skin, stark differences emerged.

Rome, with a population of around 75 million, had an average income equivalent to about 2.25 times the subsistence minimum — roughly $900 per person in modern terms. Han China’s 57.7 million people lived on slightly less: about 1.88 times subsistence, or $750 per person.

Those numbers alone aren’t alarming. But what matters more than averages is how the wealth was distributed. And that’s where the empires diverged.

The Roman world, the study finds, was somewhat more egalitarian than Han China — though both were terribly unequal by any standard. The wealthiest 1% of Romans took home 19% of the total income. In Han China, the top 1% grabbed a startling 26%. The richest 5% in the Han Empire controlled 42% of income, compared to 37% in Rome.

Ancient Imperial Strategies

The differences in inequality can be pinned down to fundamental differences in imperial strategies.

All roads lead to Rome, they used to say. But the Roman Empire, scholars argue, actually practiced a kind of decentralized inclusivity — at least compared to the Han Chinese. It relied heavily on local elites — wealthy landowners and town officials — who were co-opted into governance from across the Mediterranean empire. Rome spread public spending more widely, especially to border regions where soldiers were stationed. That redistribution mattered: military paychecks became local economic lifelines.

Han China, in contrast, centralized both power and privilege. The ruling dynasty viewed regional elites with suspicion and forcibly relocated many to the capital region of Sili. Six such elite relocations occurred before the first century BCE alone. The aim was political control. The side effect was economic concentration. Sili grew rich. The provinces were left behind.

“The Han fiscal system appeared more uniform and advanced on paper,” the authors explain, “but in practice, their policies increased regional disparities.”

Military spending in Han China was also lower — at least by 2 CE — meaning fewer frontier outposts and less redistribution through garrisons. Instead, a large and well-paid bureaucracy, concentrated in the capital, absorbed much of the public budget. “This administrative elite,” the researchers note, “became the backbone of Han inequality.”

Measuring Inequality in the Ancient World

How does one even measure ancient inequality? The team employed a tool called the “social table.” It’s a kind of economic X-ray, categorizing households into elites, middle classes, commoners, and the poor — assigning estimated incomes to each group based on historical records, tax documents, and archaeological findings.

To compare inequality fairly, the team calculated Gini coefficients — a standard way economists measure inequality, where 0 represents perfect equality and 1 represents perfect inequality. Rome scored 0.46. Han China came in slightly higher at 0.48. For comparison, the modern United States hovers around 0.41.

But Gini scores alone can be misleading. An important metric is the inequality extraction ratio — a measure of how much an elite class extracts from the economy, relative to the maximum possible without pushing the poor below subsistence.

Rome’s extraction ratio was 69%. Han China’s: a steeper 80%. The Aztec Empire, studied by the same team previously, reached 89%. That higher figure, they argue, may help explain why some Aztec provinces sided with the Spanish when they arrived.

In the Han case, extreme extraction in outer provinces may have hollowed out resilience. “High internal inequality might help to explain the crisis faced by the Han dynasty from the first decade of the Current Era,” the researchers write.

Shortly after 2 CE, Han China descended into two decades of chaos. Famine, floods, and rebellion rocked the realm. A short-lived Xin dynasty briefly seized power, attempting ambitious tax and land reforms. They failed.

Peasant uprisings, like the Red Eyebrows, surged. The old order collapsed.

Was inequality to blame? It’s hard to say definitively, but the authors suggest a compelling connection. Economic fragility — especially in the provinces — left communities ill-equipped to cope with shocks. And when elites live far from the hardships of common life, their power may prove brittle.

Rome, by contrast, enjoyed relative peace in 165 CE. The Pax Romana held, at least for a while longer.

Political Power Was the Engine of Wealth

In 2016, one of the new study’s co-authors, historian Walter Scheidel of Stanford University, published a sweeping look at how political power, economic structure, and state violence intertwined to shape wealth distribution in Rome and Han China. From the outset, both empires funneled economic power to those closest to the state. In Rome, senators and governors enriched themselves through conquest, provincial extortion, and imperial favors.

“Governors received presents when they acted as judges; cities and client rulers offered donations when soliciting support,” Scheidel writes.

A lucky few, like Pompey and Caesar, returned from foreign campaigns with hundreds of millions of sesterces — equivalent to billions today.

China’s clientelism was remarkably similar. “In both environments, political power was a critical source of income and wealth,” Scheidel argues. Han officials earned modest official salaries but leveraged their roles into enormous private fortunes. The most powerful families received fiefs — clusters of taxpaying households — as imperial gifts. One official was paid by over 13,000 families, netting 10 million coins a year. But as in Rome, access to imperial favor was often fleeting.

“There was a constant churn,” Scheidel notes. Families who rose too high often fell just as fast. In the Han court, entire clans were purged in waves of political retaliation. “From 135 to 159 CE, the Liang family dominated the court… Yet even they succumbed to an alliance between the emperor and his eunuchs.” Their wealth and lives were confiscated, a fate shared by dozens of other elite lineages.

Peace and Inequality

Stability and peace, perhaps counter-intuitively, contributed to inequality in these ancient states. “The absence of major violent ruptures was a vital precondition of high inequality,” Scheidel writes.

In Rome, elite fortunes grew fifty-fold over two centuries. At its height, the richest one percent controlled more than a third of the empire’s total wealth. Emperors and their favorites became “replacement aristocrats,” in Scheidel’s words, manufacturing dynasties overnight through confiscations and handouts.

In Han China, inequality also surged during peacetime. Despite occasional reforms — land redistribution, limits on slave ownership, monopolies on salt and iron — the state failed to check elite power. Merchants, despite social scorn, amassed fortunes through speculation and long-distance trade.

“They make riches through secondary occupations [e.g., trade] and preserve them by the fundamental occupation [i.e., farming],” one ancient source observed. Even bans on landownership for merchants proved unenforceable.

But inequality didn’t rise indefinitely. Both systems had built-in mechanisms of “predatory redistribution” — violent episodes that seized elite wealth and spread it among rivals. Civil wars, palace coups, and legal purges repeatedly reshuffled the top of the pyramid. In Rome, emperors executed senators by the dozen. In China, reforms like those of Wang Mang aimed to nationalize land and abolish slavery — however unsuccessfully.

Lessons for Today?

These findings are rooted in history, but they resonate with contemporary debates. In both China and Rome, elite capture of political institutions led to vast wealth disparities — and to eventual instability. While today’s societies are different in many ways, the dance between political power and economic inequality runs parallel with today’s events. For instance, today’s United States is only slightly more egalitarian than Rome and Han China, both realms ruled by emperors and an army of bureaucratic lackeys.

In the ancient world, as in the modern one, wealth clings to power — and vice versa. But as Rome and Han China both discovered, no fortune, no matter how vast, is ever truly safe.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.