#timothy earle

[raul-soria]

Four illustrations for the current issue of Jacobin, accompanying an interview with Timothy Earle about the origins of inequality.

[eelhound]

"[Jacobin:] There’s a passage in one of your books that really stuck with me: 'In any community some individuals, especially men, seek dominance over all others. Such aggrandizers generally are willing to take substantial risks of physical harm in aggressively establishing and defending their dominance.'

[Timothy Earle:] Yes. These are sometimes called 'triple A' personalities: aggrandizers, accumulators, acquisitors. They have a desire for power and consider themselves important people. It’s probably biologically rooted, but it is highly variable. Some people have that drive, and some people do not. The question is, do they come to power, or are they resisted?...

[Jacobin:] But an individual chief obviously can’t physically control or defend the land by himself. To take power, he needs the support of others.

[Timothy Earle:] Yes. In my book on how chiefs come to power, I identify three primary sources of power. One is the economy, of which property rights is the basis. The second is military power — the warriors. And the third is religion or ideology, which provides legitimization.

The chief has specialists in each area. So, in economy, he has land managers. In warfare, he has warriors. And in religion, he has priests. These are what I call 'attached specialists.' They are power specialists who are attached to a chief’s network. All three types are critical, but I see the economy as the bedrock.

Take the example of warriors. The question is, how can you control the warrior? You control the warrior by controlling the political economy. He is your man. He receives his weaponry from you, he receives a piece of land to support himself with slaves through you.

Or look at religious leaders. They require facilities, churches, temples, religious monuments. They require ceremonies — and ceremonies don’t just happen; they are extraordinarily expensive. Somebody has to pay for that. Somebody has to put on the feast, to pay for all of the ritual paraphernalia. Religion is expensive, warriors are expensive. It’s the ability to control the political economy that allows you to control these sources of social power centrally.

[Jacobin:] Can you give an example of how that process played out?

[Timothy Earle:] Well, my classic case is Hawaii. Hawaii and the other Polynesian islands started to become settled about 1,500 years ago by populations that moved out of Melanesia, the area around New Guinea. They brought with them a sophisticated boat technology, which allowed them to get to the island, and they brought irrigation technology.

And what you see is that, on some islands, the irrigation is relatively minor and results in nothing unusual, but in other situations, like Hawaii, they were able to develop extensive irrigation. The degree to which irrigation was developed, and the ability to extract a surplus from it, is what allowed for the creation of a warrior elite attached to the chiefs.

Once the chiefs gained ownership of land through conquest, they supplanted any local leaders by appointing land managers — known as konohiki — to administer local people. The phrase in Hawaii is, 'The konohiki put us to work.' And from there, we can watch the whole progression of these irrigation systems and the development of social stratification…

With the development of chiefdoms, you always see the progressive separation of the leader from his group. In the Hawaiian case, and in some of the other cases in Polynesia, the chiefs are no longer of their local communities. They are considered to be of a separate race; they’re considered to be gods. They’re different. And that’s one of the key aspects of class formation — this ability to separate yourself ideologically and be demarcated materially from the hoi polloi."

- Seth Ackerman, from "The Invention of Inequality: An Interview with Timothy Earle." Jacobin, Spring 2021.