This book presents a model for explaining the development of power relations in human societies and then applies it to human prehistory and most of history too. This was not an uncommon enterprise among nineteenth-century writers, but in today's academe it seems absurdly ambitious. It would have seemed absurd to me early on in my career. My early work gave little hint that I might later engage in such an enterprise. My doctoral dissertation at Oxford had been an empirical study of a corporation relocating its factory within England. It involved interviewing 300 employees, twice. I followed this (in collaboration with Robert Blackburn) with a study of a labour market, the town of Peterborough in England. This involved a larger interview survey of more than 900 workers, as well as the construction of job evaluation scores based on my observation of their jobs. Both projects were contemporary, highly empirical, and quantitative. I then broadened my scope by writing a short book on class consciousness, the product of what was intended to be a large empirical study on labour relations in four countries, together with teams from three other countries. But this was not accomplished since research funds were not forthcoming.

But it was teaching sociological theory at Essex University that radically shifted my trajectory. Reading Marx and Weber carefully, a week or two ahead of the students, gave me the idea of comparing and critiquing their “three-dimensional” models of social stratification – Weber's class, status, and party and Marx's economic, ideological, and political levels (as seen through the eyes of the structural Marxists of the time).