This book was conceived as a short essay but evolved, at Christie Henry’s editorial encouragement, into the larger argument you have before you. Inequality matters to all of us, and we all have something to gain by taking active measures to address it. The purpose of these pages has been to make the case both for why this is and for why we should not confine this discussion to the rich world alone.
Writing the book would have been impossible without the award of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2011, and I am extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting my work. The book was also shaped by an informative period attached to Columbia University’s Department of History and the Heyman Center for the Humanities in New York in 2013, funded as part of the Leverhulme programme of work. I thank in particular Mark Mazower and Eileen Gillooly for facilitating this. I am grateful as well to Fritt Ord and the Norwegian Authors’ Union for their support and to the staff of Oslo’s Litteraturhuset for providing me with a place to write. Like much else in my life of late, a good few parts of the book were written somewhere in the air between London and Oslo.
Whatever the book’s flaws, inevitable in so wide-ranging a disquisition, these are mine alone to answer for. Such worthwhile contributions as the book makes, on the other hand, have likely benefitted from the conversations and support I have received from numerous individuals, among whom I must mention in particular Jonathan Glennie, Håvard Friis Nilsen, Kristian Stokke, Kristoffer Lidén, Magnus Marsdal, Samuel Moyn, Partha Chatterjee, Ole Jacob Sending, and Stuart Corbridge, in whose classes on development studies at Cambridge University in the 1990s the political origins of my own interest in this topic are to be found. The final manuscript has benefitted from generous yet critical readings by Alan Lester, Danny Dorling, Alec Murphy, Jens Plahte, Ola Innset, Adrian Smith, Jane Wills, David Nally, Emma Mawdsley, Matt Sparke, Elizabeth Day, Alistair Taylor, and two anonymous referees. At University of Chicago Press I have again been hugely privileged to work with Christie Henry and her wonderful editorial team: Abby Collier, Amy Krynak, Katherine Faydash, and Melinda Kennedy. At Capel & Land I must again thank George Capel for helping bring the book to fruition.
I am grateful too for the assistance extended me in a range of other ways. Nicole Lieberman provided additional research support, efficiently tracking down and compiling obscure references during a period when work-life balance was a circle that could not go on being squared. Lars Gunnesdal produced the graphs in chapter 1. Ed Oliver redrew the map that is also found there, amended it innumerable times, and then promptly drew it all again from scratch at short call. Ed is testament to the intense collegiality with which the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London—my intellectual home the past ten years—is infused. Yet again I must express my gratitude at being part of the School of Geography’s wonderful community of scholars. I am no less grateful for the equally collegial home provided over the past few years by staff and colleagues at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. There I am especially indebted, for their friendship as well as their professional insight, to Kristoffer Lidén, Kristin Sandvik, Pinar Tank, Maria Gabrielsen, Kristian Hoelscher, and Jason Miklian.
Collegiality comes in many different forms, however, and some of the best of them are Mediterranean. For this I am grateful to Ritsa Balatsoura for a place to work in Pelion while finishing a first draft of the book, and to Ritsa Storeng, my mother-in-law, for her regular Sunday dinner table in Oslo, around which a growing family congregates. There it has been possible to take leave of the problems of an unequal world amidst the inventive inclusions of a Greek-Norwegian-British family. Like its author, this book owes most of all to my wonderful and brilliant wife, Katerini. It is written for our children, in the hope that they might one day know what is to be done. But it is dedicated to the memory of my father, whose books on the classics of political economy I first borrowed long ago, in search of answers myself.