Notes on Richard Drayton's "European Empires and the origin of modern inequality"

Wonderful talk by Richard Drayton​ at CUNY Graduate Center (the Advanced Research Collaborative, which seems to be as cool as its name) yesterday afternoon. Some notes follow: 

1. Global history looks beyond the spatial and temporal scales of much history-writing: The 10-100 year window into an ethno-national group's activities. Instead, it looks for multiple time scales, up to the "deep history" (see also) Drayton evoked in his discussion of Neolithic state-formation. And it looks to multiple spatial scales, such as the pan-European inheritance of Roman imperial practices. It is not that the local and short-term are not important, Drayton explained, but they can't be our sole focus -- while it is true that you can't see a forest if there are no trees, we do know what happens to our vision when we see *only* trees. 
2. Along with the multiple spatial and temporal scales, Drayton had recourse to a multi-disciplinary matrix of research in archeology, primatology, ethnography, political science, and economics, as well as history from Roman to modern European times.
3. Drayton referenced Christopher Boehm's work on "reverse dominance hierarchies," or the economy of violence that maintains egalitarian social relations. I have a short post here on this aspect of Boehm's work, and he appears in this paper, where I contrast his notion of intra-group anti-state violence to the inter-group violence that Clastres investigated. Drayton noted, correctly IMO, that such pre-state anti-hierarchical practices can be genealogically traced in various contemporary resistance practices.
4. Another Drayton reference was to Susan Ousthuizen's 2013 paper on common property rights (those rights that allow control of what Elinor Ostrom dubbed common pool resources), which, once beset by dominance hierarchies, involve "nested" regimes of exclusive and common control. I have some notes on Ostrom's work here involving the ongoing struggle between collective control and "policies that crowd out reciprocity and collective action."
5. Another theme in Drayton's talk was the stacking of egalitarian levels within hierarchical structures. In the discussion, the topic of "military egalitarianism" came up, the notion that citizenship is extended to the lowest common denominator of the leading military formation: hence -- using Athenian examples -- the "hoplite revolution" taking over from aristocratic calvary and in turn leading to citizenry dropping to the level of the trireme rowers. (Here's a video of a presentation of mine that touches on this notion; here's the power point.)
6. The egalitarian / hierarchical struggle of course brings up "the Spinoza question": "why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their freedom?"
7. Finally, a question that went unasked, but I think might be relevant to Drayton's insistence on repeated practices of violence installing and maintaining dominance relations: Could it be that longue durée domination involves epigenetic transmission of trauma?