In the year 1400, a 68-year-old scholar was lowered by ropes down the walls of besieged Damascus to meet the conqueror Timur face to face, not to beg for his life but to study the living proof of his theory. This deep dive follows Ibn Khaldun from a privileged childhood in Tunis, through the Black Death that killed his parents and teachers, into decades of political scheming, prison, exile, and diplomacy across North Africa and Spain.

We explore the three years of isolation in an Algerian fortress where he wrote the Muqaddimah, his concept of asabiyah or group solidarity, and his cyclical theory of how tough nomadic conquerors become the soft, heavily taxed elites who are overthrown in turn. We also cover his analysis of the division of labor and taxation centuries before Adam Smith and the Laffer curve, the shipwreck that killed his entire ...