The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
Although each nation in Europe retains its distinct cultural, social and political identity, the region as a whole is among the world’s most economically integrated zones. The open movement of goods, services, capital, people, and pollutants that we observe today was not, however, inevitable; instead, it was contested, challenged, and reversed at many points in the past.
The governance of Europe has constantly been reimagined, debated, and revolutionized. The Europe Center promotes scholarly, interdisciplinary research on the social, political, and economic processes, both historical and contemporary, that have driven the evolution of governance in Europe.
Every society has told stories about ancient times, but contemporary ancient history was the product of two main developments. The first was the invention of writing, which made scholarly study of the past possible, and the second was the explosion of knowledge about the world from the eighteenth century onward. Europeans responded to this explosion by inventing two main versions of antiquity: the first, an evolutionary model, was global and went back to the origins of humanity; and the second, a classical model, treated Greece and Rome as turning points in world history. These two views of antiquity have competed for two hundred and fifty years, but in the twenty-first century, the evidence and methods available to ancient historians are changing faster than at any other time since the debate began. We should therefore expect the balance between the two theories to shift dramatically. We close by considering some possible areas of engagement.
Building 110
450 Serra Mall
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.
The third annual Stanford Primary Source Symposium commemorates the 500th anniversary of the so-called Protestant Reformation by reflecting broadly on social, institutional, political, and intellectual re-formations from 600-1600 and across the world. The symposium will take place over 3 days, Nov. 10-12.
For further information, including the speakers and talk titles, please visit https://cmems.stanford.edu/primary-source-symposium
Co-sponsored by the Europe Center, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of History, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Department of Art & Art History, the Stanford Humanities Center, and Stanford University Libraries.
Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa St.
The third annual Stanford Primary Source Symposium commemorates the 500th anniversary of the so-called Protestant Reformation by reflecting broadly on social, institutional, political, and intellectual re-formations from 600-1600 and across the world. The symposium will take place over 3 days, Nov. 10-12.
For further information, including the speakers and talk titles, please visit https://cmems.stanford.edu/primary-source-symposium
Co-sponsored by the Europe Center, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of History, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Department of Art & Art History, the Stanford Humanities Center, and Stanford University Libraries.
Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa St.
The third annual Stanford Primary Source Symposium commemorates the 500th anniversary of the so-called Protestant Reformation by reflecting broadly on social, institutional, political, and intellectual re-formations from 600-1600 and across the world. The symposium will take place over 3 days, Nov. 10-12.
For further information, including the speakers and talk titles, please visit https://cmems.stanford.edu/primary-source-symposium
Co-sponsored by the Europe Center, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of History, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Department of Art & Art History, the Stanford Humanities Center, and Stanford University Libraries.
Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa St.
Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is “Yes.” Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Periods of increased equality are usually born of carnage and disaster and are generally short-lived, disappearing with the return of peace and stability. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.
Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent shocks have significantly lessened inequality. The “Four Horsemen” of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.
An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent—and why it is unlikely to decline any time soon.
Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of classics and history, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history.
Each summer, The Europe Center sponsors Stanford undergraduate students to complete internships with partner organizations in Europe. For summer 2016, TEC and the European Security Initiative sponsored two internships with the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS), a think-tank in Tallinn, Estonia, devoted to developing cutting-edge knowledge and analysis of international security and defense issues. During their time at ICDS, Caitlyn Littlepage and Sarah Manney worked on a project examining the implications of the U.S. presidential election for Transatlantic security relations. Based on this research, Caitlyn and Sarah wrote a policy analysis paper that was subsequently published by ICDS.
Executive Summary
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a maximalist both in political background and campaign rhetoric, is likely to maintain the status quo of U.S. NATO assistance and possibly increase allied presence along NATO’s eastern flank to deter Russian aggression. Surrounded by a team of hawkish foreign policy advisors and partnered with a traditionally pro-NATO Congress, the former Secretary of State should face few obstacles to advancing deterrence and responding decisively in the event of a crisis. In contrast, Republican nominee Donald Trump vacillates between two dangerous extremes: hair-trigger impulsivity and sycophantic flattery of Vladimir Putin. The former is an unfortunate personality quirk with the potential to spark international incidents without warning while the latter is actively encouraged by Trump’s entourage. The candidate and his core team of advisors share deep economic and personal interests in Russia and appear to prioritize the country over established U.S. allies. While Clinton presents NATO’s borders as inviolable, Trump indicates that anything is negotiable, putting the onus on NATO members to prove their worth rather than on Russia to justify its actions. The Kremlin appears to have received the message. When discussing the candidates, the Russian media primarily praises Trump and derides Clinton for their respective security policies likely because Trump’s enables Putin to more easily carry out his aggressive foreign policy objectives while they believe Clinton’s are more likely to tie their hands. For NATO members along the eastern border with Russia, a future with President Clinton is the preferable option. However, as the race is yet to be decided both these states and NATO as an entity must plan for the expected security implications of President Trump.
The full report is available for download on the ICDS website.
For more information about The Europe Center's Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe, please visit our website.
Please mark your calendars for a panel discussion featuring Nicholas Bloom (William Eberle Professor of Economics and Senior Fellow at SIEPR; Co-Director, Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at NBER) and Christophe Crombez (Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center; Professor of Political Economy at KU Leuven, Belgium).
Date: October 10, 2016
Time: 12:00PM to 1:30PM
Location: The Oksenberg Room, Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
RSVP by 5:00PM October 6, 2016.
What's next for the UK and Europe? One thing is clear: Brexit will have far-reaching political and economic consequences. Please join us for a panel discussion featuring Stanford faculty members Nick Bloom and Christophe Crombez who will lead a discussion about the future of the UK's relationship with Europe and Brexit's most important political and economic consequences. For more information about this exciting and timely event, please visit our website.
We would like to introduce you to some of The Europe Center’s faculty affiliates and the projects on which they are working. Our featured faculty member this month is Anna Grzymala-Busse, who is a Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Anna earned her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2000 and joined the faculty at Stanford University this year. In her research, Anna is interested in political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics. Her most recent book, Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy, Anna examines the conditions under which churches are able to exert influence on public policy. Using the cases of Ireland and Italy, Poland and Croatia, and the United States and Canada, she demonstrates that neither religiosity nor public demand for church influence in the state nor any of several alternative factors can explain why the church exerts strong influence on public policy in Ireland, Poland, and the United States, but not in Italy, Croatia, and Canada. Rather, she finds that churches are able to influence policy when they have direct institutional access. Gaining institutional access, however, requires that national and religious identities are intertwined such that the church is identified with the national interest. Such fusion between national and religious identities occurred where the church came to the defense of the nation, as the Catholic Church did in both Ireland and Poland. Anna won the 2016 Best Book Award for the European Politics and Society Section of the American Political Science Association for Nations under God. Anna is currently working on a project entitled “The Dictator's Curse? Authoritarian Party Collapse and the Nation State,” for which she received a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.
Grzymala-Busse, Anna. 2015. Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
We would like to introduce you to some of the graduate students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured graduate student this month is Lindsay Der (Anthropology). Lindsay earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology (Archaeology track) at Stanford University in summer 2016. She is currently working as a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and is a Researcher with the Çatalhöyük Research Project.
For more information about The Europe Center's Graduate Student Grant program, please visit our website.
Accepting Applications: September 26, 2016 - October 21, 2016
The Europe Center invites applications from graduate and professional students at Stanford University whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to prepare for dissertation research and to conduct research on approved dissertation projects. The Europe Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Additionally, funds are available for professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture; the latter may be used to support an internship or a research project. For more information please visit our website.
We are pleased to introduce Jaakko Meriläinen, a Visiting Student Researcher from the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Jaakko is a political economist who is interested in the relationship between political representation, political participation, and economics, economic and political history, and immigration. His current research concerns political careers, economic consequences of political representation, historical development of voting behavior, and the historical impact of time-saving technologies on women's participation in the labor force and in politics. Please join us in welcoming Jaakko to Stanford.
October 10, 2016
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Nick Bloom, Department of Economics
Christophe Crombez, The Europe Center
Brexit: What's next for the UK and Europe?
This event is now full. Please write to khaley@stanford.edu if you would like to be added to the wait list.
November 10, 2016
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Markus Tepe, University of Oldenburg
What's happening with Germany's party system? Exploring the emergence of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)
CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
RSVP by 5:00PM November 6, 2016.
Save the Date: November 14, 2016
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Yaniss Aiche, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter, & Hampton, LLP
Jacques Derenne, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter, & Hampton, LLP
The Future of Multi-National Corporate Taxation in the European Union: Impact of On-Going EU State Aid Investigations
Reuben Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
Save the Date: January 17, 2017
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University
The Oksenberg Room, Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
Save the Date: February 27, 2017
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Amie Kreppel, University of Florida
CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
Save the Date: April 3, 2017
11:30AM - 1:00PM
Guido Tabellini, Bocconi University
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West No RSVP required.
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
Save the Date: April 24, 2017
11:30AM - 1:00PM
Torun Dewan, London School of Economics
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West No RSVP required.
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
Save the Date: June 5, 2017
11:30AM - 1:00PM
Daniel Stegmuller, University of Mannheim
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West No RSVP required.
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
Save the Date: October 26, 2016
12:00PM - 1:30PM
John Emerson, United States Ambassador to Germany
RSVP by 5:00PM October 23, 2016.
Save the Date: November 10, 2016
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Sergei Kislyak, Russian Ambassador to the US
Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
Save the Date: January 26, 2017
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Andrei Kozyrev, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Russian Federation
Co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
Save the Date: April 10, 2017
Time TBA
Ivan Krastev, Center for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, Bulgaria
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.
What types of asylum seekers are Europeans willing to accept? We conducted a conjoint experiment asking 18,000 eligible voters in 15 European countries to evaluate 180,000 profiles of asylum seekers that randomly varied on nine attributes. Asylum seekers who have higher employability, have more consistent asylum testimonies and severe vulnerabilities, and are Christian rather than Muslim received the greatest public support. These results suggest that public preferences over asylum seekers are shaped by sociotropic evaluations of their potential economic contributions, humanitarian concerns about the deservingness of their claims, and anti-Muslim bias. These preferences are similar across respondents of different age, education, income, and political ideology, as well as across the surveyed countries. This public consensus on what types of asylum seekers to accept has important implications for theory and policy.