200,000 Years of Stagnation, 150 Years of Growth - and Freedom's U-Turns

History's greatest mystery: Why did humans stay poor for thousands of years... then suddenly unlocked high growth starting around 1870? What changed that transformed both wealth AND freedom? The answers could be vital for navigating today's inflection point and keeping human progress from unraveling.

That long, flat road stretching toward a sudden climb tells only part of the story. Beneath this tale of economic takeoff lies an equally intriguing pattern: humanity's roller coaster ride between hierarchy and equality.

Humanity's Roller Coaster Ride

Ask someone to sketch humanity's journey toward freedom and equality, and you'll likely get a simple upward line - a tale of steady progress from caveman brutishness to enlightened modernity. The actual pattern is far more intriguing: a rollercoaster ride that tells us something profound about human nature, power, and the technologies that shape our social structures.

Ancestral Primate Groups: The Alpha's Kingdom

Our primate ancestors lived in a world that any despot would gleefully endorse: strict hierarchies, dominant leaders, and clear status markers. The evidence is striking: in contemporary primate societies, alpha males typically monopolize both resources and reproductive opportunities. Among chimpanzees, for instance, alpha males can father up to 50% of all offspring in their group. These weren't peaceful communes; they were autocracies enforced through coalition-building, intimidation, and strategic violence.

Primate social structures are remarkably sophisticated in their inequality. Studies of baboon troops show that even infants inherit their mother's social rank, creating multi-generational status hierarchies. This was humanity's starting point: a world where your birth position largely determined your life outcomes.

Foraging Tribes: The Great Leveling

Then something remarkable happened. Around 300,000-200,000 years ago, coinciding with the emergence of Homo sapiens, the archaeological evidence shows a striking shift. Human skeletal remains begin showing less dramatic sexual dimorphism. Stone tools become more standardized, suggesting shared knowledge rather than hoarded expertise. Human settlements show little evidence of status differences. This marked an exhilarating ascent on our Freedom's Rollercoaster, a period of relative equality.

What caused this radical departure from our primate inheritance? The key was likely the evolution of human language and what anthropologists call "reverse dominance hierarchies." Unlike any other species, human groups developed the ability to gossip, plan, and coordinate. This created something unprecedented: the capacity for weaker individuals to form coalitions against bullies.

The numbers tell an interesting story. Studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups—our best window into this period—show remarkably equal wealth distribution. The Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality where 0 is perfect equality and 1 is perfect inequality) in hunter-gatherer societies typically ranges from 0.17 to 0.29—more equal than any modern nation.

The critical technology here wasn't spears or fire—it was gossip (see The Chatty Ape). The ability to share information about others' behavior allowed groups to identify and suppress would-be dominators. Anyone getting too big for their boots could find themselves ostracized or worse. As anthropologist Christopher Boehm notes, hunter-gatherer groups have remarkably sophisticated methods for controlling ambitious individuals, from ridicule to exile to execution.

The Long Slog: Toiling Under New Management

The Return of the Kings

Then came the most dramatic reversal in human social organization since we left the trees. The first states that emerged around 3500 BCE didn't just create inequality—they institutionalized it at levels that would have been unimaginable to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The rise of the early states sent Freedom's Rollercoaster plummeting downward, plunging humanity into a long period of something akin to servitude.

The numbers are staggering. In ancient Mesopotamia, temple archives show that rations for elite priests and administrators could be up to 60 times larger than those of common laborers (a reminder that “divine favor” often comes with excellent fringe benefits). In ancient Egypt, a single pharaoh commanded the labor of hundreds of thousands of people. The Code of Hammurabi, one of our earliest legal codes, specified different punishments for the same crime depending on the social class of perpetrator and victim—a formalization of inequality that would have been alien to hunter-gatherer bands.

This wasn't just a matter of wealth concentration; it entailed a complete reimagining of human society. The first states created something unprecedented: hereditary inequality enshrined in law and religion. A peasant's child in Ur or Memphis wasn't just poorer than the ruler's child—they were legally and spiritually inferior, born into a different category of humanity. Early states created elaborate bureaucracies dedicated to measuring, recording, and controlling every aspect of human life. In ancient Sumer, there were over 60 different words for various types of administrative tablets. The very invention of writing was, in no small part, driven primarily by the need to track and control resources, debts, and obligations, as we saw in The First States.

The Religious Paradox

The emergence of universal religions around 500 BCE created an interesting tension. On one hand, religions provided divine legitimacy to inequality—kings ruled by divine right, social hierarchies were part of cosmic order. On the other hand, universal religions introduced something revolutionary: the idea that all humans were equal in some fundamental, spiritual sense. This added another layer of complexity to our Freedom's Rollercoaster, creating both opportunities for liberation and new justifications for inequality.

Religious institutions didn't just justify inequality—they sanctified it. The Indian caste system, reinforced by religious texts, created arguably the most sophisticated and durable system of social stratification in human history. The Christian Church's concept of the "Great Chain of Being" placed every creature in a divinely ordained hierarchy, and supported a social, political, and economic order that was stratified and resistant to change. Islamic societies, while theoretically emphasizing equality before Allah, developed elaborate systems of religious law that codified differences between believers and non-believers, free and enslaved, men and women.

Yet these same religious frameworks contained the seeds of their own subversion. While religious institutions often reinforced inequality, they also provided an intellectual framework for challenging it. The peasant revolts of medieval Europe often used Christian theology to challenge social hierarchies. The same pattern appeared in other civilizations—Buddhist concepts of universal Buddha-nature and Islamic ideas of equality before Allah created persistent tension with rigid social hierarchies.

This tension within universal religions had fascinating long-term effects. In medieval Europe, monasteries became centers of both hierarchy and equality—strictly ordered internally but often serving as society's only venues for social mobility. A peasant's son could, theoretically, rise to become a cardinal - though the odds were about as good as winning the lottery. In Song Dynasty China, Buddhist monasteries operated as proto-banks and social welfare institutions, creating economic networks that operated partially outside state control.

The Seeds of Human Rights

Even more significantly, universal religions created what we might call "moral jurisdiction"— the idea that even kings answered to a higher authority. When England's Henry II had to walk barefoot to Canterbury Cathedral in penance for the murder of Thomas Becket, it demonstrated something revolutionary: power could be held accountable to universal principles. Islamic scholars developed sophisticated legal theories about the limits of caliphal authority, while Buddhist concepts of dharma were used to critique unjust rulers throughout Asia.

Perhaps most importantly, universal religions created the intellectual framework for modern concepts of human rights. The idea that all humans possess inherent dignity and worth—regardless of their social position—has clear roots in religious universalism. When Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," he was drawing on a theological tradition that had spent centuries grappling with the contradiction between spiritual equality and social hierarchy.

The Long Stagnation

What's remarkable about the period from 3500 BCE to 1870 CE isn't just its inequality, but also its stability. Despite technological advances, empire building, and philosophical revolutions, the fundamental condition of most humans remained remarkably consistent: dire poverty, limited freedom, and rigid social hierarchies.

Economic historians estimate that average living standards in England in 1800 were roughly comparable to those in Roman Britain. The technologies changed, the empires rose and fell, but the basic social structure remained: a tiny elite commanding the labor and resources of the vast majority.

The Great Escape: The Growth Revolution

The transformation that began around 1870 wasn't just economic—it led to a fundamental restructuring of human social relations. For the first time since the advent of agriculture, ordinary people began experiencing sustained improvements in living standards. The numbers are extraordinary: global GDP per capita grew more between 1870 and 2000 than it had in all previous human history combined.

The timing and texture of this transformation varied dramatically across the globe. While northwestern Europe pioneered the initial breakthrough, other regions found their own paths to modernity. Japan's Meiji Restoration demonstrated that rapid modernization didn't require Western cultural values - just ask the Russian army that faced Japanese railways and weapons in 1905. China's trajectory offers an even more intriguing case: after missing the first wave of industrialization, it achieved in 40 years what took Britain 150. Meanwhile, areas like the Ottoman Empire showed how existing institutions could both enable and resist change - with the Janissaries starting as a key military strength, before becoming a liability with their fierce resistance to the modernization of the Ottoman army. The global South offers a particularly complex tapestry. While some regions, like Latin America, suggest that natural resources can be a double-edged sword (just ask the silver miners of Potosí, whose toil enriched Spain while their own land languished), others, like India, show how ancient institutions like caste could be both reshaped and sometimes reinforced by modernization – the British census system's rigid categorization of caste identities would have bewildered medieval Indian rulers with their more fluid social hierarchies. In short, the path to modernity was less of a common highway and more a series of winding, often bumpy, roads.

Pressure from Below

This material transformation enabled—though didn't guarantee—the expansion of human freedom, but the path was anything but straight. The early phases of industrialization actually worsened conditions for most workers. In 1840s Manchester, life expectancy dropped to just 28 years—making the medieval peasant's lot seem almost enviable. The Gilded Age saw unprecedented concentration of wealth alongside grinding poverty. Yet these very conditions sparked new forms of collective action. Workers gained power through unions and strikes. A new bourgeois class emerged that demanded political rights to match their economic clout. The expansion of suffrage and civil rights came not as gifts from enlightened rulers, but through sustained pressure from below. When British women gained full voting rights in 1928, it was the culmination of decades of militant suffragette activism, not a natural evolution of democratic ideals.

The Growth Enigma

The deeper mystery is why sustained economic growth emerged when it did, and how we achieved something that had eluded human societies for millennia. Despite decades of debate, there's no consensus among historians and economists about why humanity finally broke free from the Malthusian trap. (2) Was it the Scientific Revolution? The development of new financial institutions? The exploitation of fossil fuels? The emergence of inclusive political institutions?

This question becomes even more pressing as we face a period of profound turbulence that threatens the upward stroke of our U-shaped curve. After nearly 150 years of progress toward greater freedom and equality, we're seeing concerning reversals. The post-Cold War narrative—that globalization, technology, and liberal democracy would inevitably create a more prosperous and freer world—has fractured. Populist movements have gained strength across both developed and developing nations, fueled by people who feel that progress has left them behind. The humanist vision that helped drive the expansion of both prosperity and freedom seems increasingly under strain. Rising inequality within developed nations eerily echoes pre-modern patterns of wealth concentration, while new technologies threaten to create unprecedented forms of social control that ancient despots could only dream of.

A Broken Compass

It's as if we've lost our collective story about who we are and where we're going. Understanding what led to the growth revolution and how it transformed human society—not just economically but in terms of freedom and equality—is crucial for crafting a new and compelling narrative about human progress. Without this understanding, liberal democracies may struggle to prevent our U-shaped curve of freedom from bending back toward the patterns of hierarchy and control that dominated human history for thousands of years.

This question is all the more critical as we face challenges that could fundamentally alter our trajectory. Climate change forces us to rethink our relationship with fossil fuels —one of the possible key enablers of the growth revolution that helped expand human freedom. Rising inequality within developed nations suggests we may be reverting to pre-modern patterns of wealth concentration, threatening the broad-based prosperity that helped sustain democratic institutions. And the emergence of transformative technologies like artificial intelligence raises profound questions about power, control, and human agency in ways that could either amplify or undermine the freedoms gained since 1870. Without a clearer understanding of how we escaped both the Malthusian trap and the ancient patterns of despotic control, we risk losing the delicate balance that has allowed liberal democracies to combine unprecedented prosperity with expanding human freedom.

The stakes could not be higher: the next chapter in our U-shaped story of freedom will depend on how well we understand—and can preserve—the conditions that made its upward stroke possible in the first place.

Charting a New Course

These U-shaped patterns suggest something profound about human nature and society. We didn't evolve for hierarchy—we evolved for equality, then invented systems that created unprecedented inequality, and are now struggling to recreate equality with technologies and social structures our hunter-gatherer ancestors couldn't have imagined.

The challenge we face today is unique in human history: can we combine the egalitarian ethos of our foraging past with the technological capabilities of our present? Our hunter-gatherer ancestors managed remarkable equality with stone tools and shared gossip. We have artificial intelligence and global communications networks—and somehow find ourselves at risk of recreating the very hierarchies our ancestors worked so hard to suppress. There's a certain cosmic irony in that - a bit like inventing the internet and ending up with cat videos.

Breaking these patterns requires understanding how we got here, and why the path to freedom and equality has been anything but straight. History suggests that humans are remarkably good at creating hierarchies and remarkably bad at noticing they're doing it. Perhaps that's the first pattern we need to break.

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(1) Graph inspired by one by Peter Turchin's "zig zag of evolution" in his book UltraSociety. Some comments on my graph: the "Long Slog" part applies to those people living in a state - as we saw in the previous article, "barbarians" who lived outside the early states often had a much better life! The "Growth Revolution" part depicts a liberal democracy - there is no shortage of authoritarian regimes with far less freedom.

(2) Malthus's key insight was that population growth can be exponential, whereas the growth of the food supply is mostly linear. Any gains in the food supply were quickly swallowed by population growth, keeping living standards stuck as subsistence levels - the so-called Malthusian trap. Malthus wasn't wrong about the past, he had millennia of evidence on his side. The cosmic irony is that he published his universal law human misery in 1798, a few generations before pesky humans broke free from that seemingly iron law. Talk about poor timing! For further reference, see Malthusianism - Wikipedia