Eric R. Wolf (1923–1999)

Rated for my enjoyment factor, not for any scientific value. I am not qualified to rate that. Overall, it was interesting to read about the geologic and cultural history of middle-north America. I had to skim some of the beginning, but about the time of the Spanish invasion it began to be more interesting for me. The details of the politics and beliefs in Spain which led to the invasion and how that affected Spain as well as the new world was something I had not read about before. Also the show more examples of why the new world was not like Spain, even though the Spanish were the conquerors. This book was written in the 1950s, so I was a bit surprised that there was so little modern history in it. show less

Estudio comparativo clásico sobre las revoluciones campesinas del siglo XX. Wolf analiza los procesos sociales, económicos y políticos que originaron las rebeliones rurales en México, Rusia, China, Vietnam, Argelia y Cuba. Con enfoque marxista y antropológico, muestra cómo las estructuras agrarias, el poder local y la cultura campesina interactúan en los grandes movimientos de transformación social.

Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History is a massive theoretical and synthetic undertaking as he attempts to describe the global economy that existed from 1492 to the birth of industrial capitalism around 1800. In doing this Wolf, an economic anthropologist by training, examines how “primitive” peoples outside Europe, those “without history,” were indeed integral cogs in the machinery of a global economy. These “history-less” peoples were not untouched, pristine show more societies affected (and infected) by Europe, Wolf argues, but they too influenced the history of Europe. Wolf shows that the rise of European industrial capitalism (and its forerunner, merchant capitalism) was not achieved in a vacuum, that there were no racial or geographical reasons the Europeans would be world’s “winners” in 1800. Wolf looks at the world holistically and portrays the rise of the West not as a strictly European phenomenon synchronous with the rise of capitalism, but as a series of global linkages between a myriad of civilizations operating under various modes of production.

Wolf’s book is based on a multitude of secondary sources from across many disciplines, primarily those of anthropology, history, and economics (especially those of a Marxian bent). He synthesizes these works with aplomb and his arguments never want for supporting facts, the minor objections noted by William McNeill notwithstanding. Europe and the People Without History can be viewed as a primer for a holistic approach to global economic history because of its breadth and scope. Wolf ties the seemingly discrete regions of the globe together in a web of interconnectedness and bemoans the fact that historians study the “charmed circle of the single nation-state.” He also takes historians to task for studying cultures, believing that they stem from eighteenth-century European nations “striving for separate identities.” Although Wolf singularly moves the rise of capitalism up to about 1800, around the time of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, his work is definitely a standard work that others have branched out from. His friend and colleague Andre Gunder Frank’s last major work, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, is very similar to Wolf’s in structure and theme, though Frank is a bit more negative about the role the “West” has played on the world economy.

In the first section of Europe and the People Without History, Wolf begins with a region by region description of the world and its nascent global economy in 1400 (although the economy of the Americas is a closed system until 1492). This sets the stage for the rest of his work and illustrates how each region was affected by others and had commodities and resources desired throughout the globe. He then discusses his “trinity” of modes of production he uses to analyze his societies: the kin-ordered society, where kin groups are deferentially allowed access to most of the production because of their birth; the tributary mode, where powered groups extract wealth from laborers by force; and the capitalist mode; where monetary wealth was able to buy labor power. Wolf makes it clear that merchants who earned money by trading commodities were not capitalists, stating that they still operate in a tributary state. He also says that societies might not all fit into his three easy categories, leaving it open to the possibility that various modes of production may co-exist and co-operate at the same time. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall discusses similar two-tiered civilizations amongst the Bambara in Senegambia where villages were structured as kin-ordered communes managed by elders who in turn surrendered some of their grain to their national overlords. Wolf utilizes these models of production modes to discuss the connections and exchanges between various civilizations. In the final chapter of the first section Europe’s ascent from the middle age backwater of Eurasia to the merchant capitalist region on the verge of the fifteenth century age of discovery.

In the second section Wolf describe the various European expansions across the globe and their interactions with so-called “peoples without history” and how each society was changed by contact with the other. In the mining “highlands of Hispanic America,” Spain simply erected a new colonial superstructure on the ruins of the Amerindian tributary polities, a point reiterated by Irene Silverblatt concerning the Spanish incorporation of the Inca into the empire. In the islands of the Caribbean (Wolf’s American “littoral”) the kin-ordered societies were replaced by a tributary-style slave economy. The fur trade too, linked much of North America into the global economy, radically altering the native groups caught up in or allied with the trade. Many Amerindian groups in North America moved, disappeared, or mixed into new tribes but through it all adapted their kin-ordered economies to provide the European newcomers with furs and pemmican, becoming over time, in effect “subordinate producers rather than as partners.” The tribal and sub-tribal groups in seventeenth century New France too adapted in such ways, as noted by Allan Greer in Mohawk Saint, becoming primarily kin-ordered hunting bands to provide furs to the French in exchange for material goods manufactured in pre-capitalist, tributary mode Europe. The African slave trade too was not purely a European process, but involved numerous polities and trade networks in the African interior. The trade strengthened some pre-existing states, like Benin, caused others to disappear, and engendered the rise of others. Many new polities changed from “kin-ordered patrilineages” into tributary extracting states, although, as Hall noted above, some adaptations were not so clearly differentiated from one to the other. The British too adapted a tributary extracting society to their own will in India, turning hereditary tribute takers into landed proprietors, forming a quasi-capitalist economy in the process. The trade in Indian opium to the Chinese was instrumental to reversing the flow of specie from Europe into Asia and helped inaugurate the British textile industry, the catalyst to the birth of capitalism.

In the third section Wolf discusses the post Industrial Revolution spread of capitalism across the globe and describes the many interconnections between the societies of the world. His primary example is the growth of the British textile industry and the empire formation that marched along with it. Commodities from far-flung regions of the globe were traded and moved everywhere capitalism could profitably and successfully exploit them, thus rubber production spreads from Portuguese Brazil to Dutch Indonesia and coffee from Ethiopia and Yemen to tropical plantations around the sunny equator. Wolf peppers this section with countless such examples of how capitalist enterprises altered not only the environment and agriculture of “history-less” peoples, but their very economies and cultures (culture being the outgrowth of the capitalist modified mode of production). Concomitant with capitalism’s ever spreading system is the significant changes it made in societies near and far. Though kin-ordered societies and tributary extracting societies each engendered their own dialectical class strife, the capitalist mode pitted not only producers and laborers in capitalist nations against each other, but other “less-developed” societies against those operating under the capitalist mode.

Wolf’s work is a justifiable classic of world economic history that has been emulated. In his final section Wolf advocates that historians look at the world globally, an idea advanced by others, notably William H. McNeill in “Transatlantic History in Perspective.” Wolf’s primary contention is that the world has operated under a global economic system not only in the past two hundred years when Europeans were building land-grabbing empires, but from time immemorial, and that Europeans were integrated into a global economy from the time they “discovered” the world in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By taking a holistic approach to world history, Wolf believes, the various interconnections between diverse cultures are made readily apparent, and history is thus brought to those “without history.” show less

Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century studies revolutions in Mexico, Russia, China, Vietnam, Algeria, and Cuba in an effort to formulate some opinion about the origins and effects of peasant uprising. Published in 1969 and written by a professor, Eric R. Wolf, who was admitedly part of the teach-in movement protesting the war in Vietnam, the book could be expected to have a radical feel to it. Any such expectations are firmly off the mark. Through extensive research and analysis, all of show more these rebellions are put into historical context, with an examination of population, socio-ecionomic strata, political perspective, religious movments, etc. With such exhaustive detail, the case studies end up functioning more as an historical abstract for each country.

Though the title of the book might suggest some Marxist or socialist conclusion in the making, the history of these events are not so easily pigeon-holed. Ultimately, Wolf sees the history of these countries largely in the context of major social dislocation, set in motion by wholesale societal change towards industrialization and capitalism. Each country is seen to move more and more towards a perspective of viewing people and land as individual commodities rather than as community wide resources. Such a persxpective resulted in the breaking of more traditional social ties in favor of individual economic interests.

This is an interesting and thought provoking book. Though, be warned, this is not an easy read by any means. Wolf's training as an anthropoligist and his bent for statistics often make for a dense read. But, even for the casual history buff, each chapter offers unique insight into the history of a nation.

Recommended for anyone with an interest in cultural studies or history.

3 1/2 bones!!! show less