What was the impact of military conflict on economic inequality? I argue that ordinary military conflicts increased local economic inequality. Warfare raised the financial needs of communities in preindustrial times, leading to more resource extraction from the population. This resource extraction happened via inequality-promoting channels, such as regressive taxation. Only in truly major wars might inequality-reducing destruction outweigh inequality-promoting extraction and reduce inequality. To test this argument I construct a novel panel dataset combining information about economic inequality in 75 localities, and more than 700 conflicts over four centuries. I find that the many ordinary conflicts — paradigmatic of life in the preindustrial world — were continuous reinforcers of economic inequality. I confirm that the Thirty Years’ War was indeed a great equaliser, but this was an exception and not the rule. Rising inequality is an underappreciated negative externality in times of conflict.

军事冲突对经济不平等有何影响？我认为，普通的军事冲突加剧了当地的经济不平等。战争在前工业时代提高了社区的金融需求，导致从人口中开采更多的资源。这种资源开采是通过促进不平等的渠道发生的，例如累退税。只有在真正的重大战争中，减少不平等的破坏才能超过促进不平等的开采和减少不平等。为了验证这一论点，我构建了一个新颖的面板数据集，结合了 75 个地区的经济不平等信息以及四个世纪以来的 700 多场冲突。我发现许多普通的冲突——前工业化世界生活的典型——不断加剧经济不平等。我确认三十年战争确实是一个伟大的均衡器，但这是一个例外而不是规则。在冲突时期，日益加剧的不平等是一种被低估的负外部性。