History is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind", Edward Gibbon famously wrote — and then proceeded with relish to recount a tale replete with such evils (Gibbon 1995, 102). One major reason why the historical record makes such grim reading is, of course, the pervasive presence of various kinds of social inequality which have — for the past few millennia anyway — locked the majority of humankind into structures of domination and subordination.