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.