Walter Scheidel

Walter Scheidel's research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare.

The world's most cited Roman historian in an active faculty position, Scheidel is the author or (co-)editor of 21 books, has published more than 260 articles, chapters and reviews, and has been invited to lecture in 35 countries. His most recent books are What is Ancient History? (2025), The Oxford World History of Empire (2 vols., 2021, co-edited with Peter Bang and the late Christopher Bayly), Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (2019), The Science of Roman History: Biology, Climate, and the Future of the Past (2018, ed.), The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (2017; 14 translations), On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (2017, co-edited with John Bodel), State Power in Ancient China and Rome (2015, ed.), and Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States (2015, co-edited with Andrew Monson). Other key publications include Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (2009, ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (2007, co-edited with Ian Morris and Richard Saller), and Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (2001). He has written for the New York Times, Financial Times, Atlantic, Economist, Le Monde, Foreign Affairs, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Spectator, and other media outlets.

Scheidel is working on a series of papers on the Roman imperial monarchy in global comparative context and on ancient slave prices, and is planning books on ancient demography, the ancient histories of the Americas compared to those of Afroeurasia, and counterfactual history. He launched a collaborative research initiative for the comparative study of ancient Mediterranean and Chinese empires, co-founded the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, created the interactive digital project Orbis: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, which has received millions of visits and attracted international media coverage, and is an editor of the monograph series Oxford Studies in Early Empires and a former editor of the journal Historia. For about a decade Scheidel taught as a Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Stanford's Human Biology program. In 2024 he developed the Future of Classics Initiative at Stanford. He was awarded a New Directions Fellowship by the Mellon Foundation and a Guggenheim fellowship, and is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.