Timothy Earle is an economic anthropologist at Northwestern University. He is the author of How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory and The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State (with Allen Johnson).
From chiefs and kings to billionaires today, a small handful of humans over thousands of years have figured out how to amass tremendous power and wealth. We talked to an anthropologist about how the ruling class got started.