This book argues that inequality is not just about numbers, but is also about lived, historical experience. It supplements economic research and offers a comprehensive stocktaking of existing thinking on global inequality and its historical development. The book is interdisciplinary, drawing upon regional and national perspectives from around the world while seeking to capture the multidimensionality and multi-causality of global inequalities. Grappling with what economics offers ¿ as well as its blind spots ¿ the study focuses on some of today¿s most relevant and pressing themes: discrimination and human rights, defences and critiques of inequality in history, decolonization, international organizations, gender theory, the history of quantification of inequality and the history of economic thought. The historical case studies featured respond to the need for wider historical research and to calls to examine global inequality in a more holistic manner.

Singles out some of the most pressing themes in historical research on global inequality today

Chapter 1 Histories of Global Inequality: Introduction, Christian Olaf Christiansen & Steven L. B. Jensen.- Inequality in the History of Economic and Political Thought.- Chapter 2 Historicizing Piketty: The Fall and Rise of Inequality Economics, Eli Cook.- Chapter 3 The Demise of the Radical Critique of Economic Inequality in Western Political Thought, Michael J. Thompson.- Chapter 4 Products before People - How Inequality was Sidelined by Gross National Product, Philipp Lepenies.- Chapter 5 Inequality by Numbers: The Making of a Global Political Issue, Pedro Ramos Pinto.- Inequality, Discrimination and Human Rights.- Chapter 6 Inequality and Post-war International Organisation: Discrimination, the World Social Situation and the United Nations, 1948-1957, Steven L. B. Jensen.- Chapter 7: "A pragmatic compromise between the ideal and the realistic": Debates over human rights, global distributive justice and minimum core obligations in the 1980s, Julia Dehm.- Chapter8 Inequality in Global Disability Policies since the 1970s, Paul van Trigt.- Chapter 9 Protection and Abuse: The Conundrum of Global Gender Inequality, Sally L. Kitch.- Inequality in an Age of Global Capitalism.- Chapter 10 Brewing Inequalities: Kenya's Smallholder Tea Farmers and the Developmentalist State in the Late-Colonial and Early-Independence Era, Muey Saeteurn.- Chapter 11 Challenging Global Inequality in Streets and Supermarkets: Fair trade Activism since the 1960s, Peter van Dam.- Chapter 12 Partnerships Against Global Poverty: When 'Inclusive Capitalism' Entered the United Nations, Christian Olaf Christiansen.- Chapter 13 Third World Inc.: Notes from the Frontiers of Global Capital, Ravinder Kaur.