Merchant, Soldier, Sage
A New History of Power
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A bold new interpretation of modern history as a struggle between three economic groups
We are now living in an age of merchants, but it was not always so. The history of civilization, in large part, is a story of a battle between agrarian aristocracy, the military, and a class of learned experts, or priests. Yet in seventeenth-century England and in the Netherlands, another group entered the mêlée for power: the merchants. For the last four decades, the merchant's power has been unfettered. In Merchant, Soldier, Sage, acclaimed Oxford scholar David Priestland proposes a radical new approach to understanding today’s balance of power, and analyzes the societal and economic historical conditions required for one of these three value systems to dominate. Priestland asserts that, in the wake of the Great Recession, the weakened and discredited merchant still clings to power—but the world is again in the midst of a period of upheaval.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Distinguished Oxford historian Priestland (The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World) offers a "big history" based on the power struggle between three different castes, each of which, he argues, embodies distinct "ideas and lifestyles, which they often seek to impose on others." Citing figures and events from antiquity through to the present, he explores how tensions among the three groups repeatedly rise to a fever pitch, and eventually transform their host society, and sometimes the world the most recent example of one of these "tectonic shifts" occurred with the financial crisis of 2008, when the exploits of the merchant short-circuited the global economy. Priestland predicts that in the future, the Great Recession will be classed among the great shakeups of the 20th century: WWI and II, the Great Depression, the fall of the Berlin Wall each of which he touches on. In the course of his "broad sweep," Priestland is consistently engaging, whether in his discussion of the marshaling of Confucius's teachings for political ends, or in pegging former President George W. Bush as a warrior. The author's project is necessarily exclusive what, for example, of the laborer or scholar, or mother for that matter? but it is also ambitious, well organized, and insightful, and will appeal to scholarly and popular audiences.
