Merchant, Soldier, Sage

A gripping, argument-led history … dazzling … here, at last, is a work that places the current crisis in a longer history of seismic shifts in the balance of social power – Frank Trentman * BBC History Magazine *
Stimulating … In illustrating these larger processes of caste conflict and caste collaboration, the author offers crisp portraits of entrepreneurs, economists and warriors … Sparkling prose and … arresting comparisons – Ramachandra Guha * Financial Times *
Concise but extremely ambitious … well worth pondering and reflecting on … among the many contributions to the dissection of our current predicament, this is surely one of the most thought-provoking – Sir Richard J Evans * Guardian *
Lively and opinionated * Economist *
An intriguing way of analysing society … This is a refreshing description of society, and a thought-provoking one … it a real attempt to break out of established ways of thinking, and should be applauded * Mail on Sunday *
Diverting and provocative – Dominic Sandbrook * Sunday Times *
Very readable … [Priestland’s] studies of Communism have given him an enviable grasp of 19th- and 20th-century developments across the globe, and he writes with such verve … Priestland casts an intriguing glimmer of light on what may be ahead * Independent Radar Book of the Week *

David Priestland is the author of the widely-praised and internationally acclaimed The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World. While researching The Red Flag it became clear that it was neither Marx’s ‘classes’, nor Huntingdon’s clashing civilizations, nor even Fukuyama’s competing ideologies that drove historical change, but ‘caste struggle’. Merchant, Soldier, Sage is the result. He teaches history at Oxford University and is a Fellow of St. Edmund Hall.

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