Europe and the People without History

Citation

Wolf, E. R. (2010). Europe and the People Without History (2nd ed.; foreword by Thomas Hylland Eriksen). University of California Press. (First published 1982.)

Chapter Summary

The book is in three parts and twelve chapters, with an afterword, bibliographic notes and a bibliography. The second edition adds a foreword by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and keeps the prefaces of 1982 and 1997; the publisher lists 536 pages with 35 maps. Its argument, as the publisher puts it, is that non-European peoples were not isolated and static before European colonialism but were already caught up in historical processes, and that Marxian concepts can be used to trace how, from about 1400, conditions arose in which capitalism became dominant. The summaries follow the published contents, the publisher's description and reviews.

Part One, Connections: Chapters 1–4

The first part sets out the approach and the starting point. The chapters are "Introduction", "The World in 1400", "Modes of Production" and "Europe, Prelude to Expansion". The introduction opens the argument against treating societies as bounded, timeless units; the chapter on 1400 surveys the world before the era of European expansion; the chapter on modes of production supplies the analytic vocabulary; and the last chapter turns to Europe itself before it expanded.

Part Two, In Search of Wealth: Chapters 5–8

This part follows the European search for wealth overseas through four cases: "Iberians in America", "The Fur Trade", "The Slave Trade" and "Trade and Conquest in the Orient". Each shows how local societies were drawn into long-distance trade and how they were changed by it.

Part Three, Capitalism: Chapters 9–12

The final part moves to industrial capitalism, in four chapters: "Industrial Revolution", "Crisis and Differentiation in Capitalism", "The Movement of Commodities" and "The New Laborers". It follows how capitalist production reshaped economies and then how commodities and labor moved across the world, so that new working classes took shape in many places.

Afterword

An afterword closes the book after the final chapter; the sources consulted do not describe its content.

Key Concepts

Part One: Connections

• Bounded units: the assumption, which Wolf criticises, that nations, societies or cultures are separate wholes with fixed boundaries.
• Modes of production: the analytical framework from Marxian thought that the chapter of that name uses to compare ways of organising labor, including tributary and capitalist forms.

Part Two: In Search of Wealth

• Mercantile expansion: the search for wealth through trade and conquest overseas (the Iberians, the fur trade, the slave trade, trade with the Orient).
• Incorporation: the process, shown case by case, by which local societies were tied into a wider system of exchange.

Part Three: Capitalism

• Industrial capitalism: the shift treated in the chapter on the industrial revolution.
• Commodity and labor movements: the circulation of goods and workers that formed new working classes.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A reframing with lasting influence. The publisher calls the book a foundational text on the development of the global political economy; its central challenge to the idea of isolated, static societies reshaped how anthropologists think about history.
• Breadth and balance. The American Journal of Sociology review quoted by the publisher calls the historical sweep and analytic breadth "astounding" and notes that Wolf gives roughly equal weight to historical "winners" and "losers"; Ethnos praises the range of the empirical knowledge.
• A tightly structured argument. Oceania, as quoted by the publisher, describes the book as tightly structured and elegant, and the three-part design (connections, the search for wealth, capitalism) makes the argument easy to follow.
• Written with a human touch. The Ethnos review adds that the book is well written, a notable quality in a work of this size.

Limitations

• Scale and density. The book runs to over 500 pages and moves across continents and centuries, so it demands sustained attention and some tolerance for large-scale generalisation. The Ethnos reviewer describes Wolf's method as a selection of phenomena meant to be representative of the whole, so many places are met only through selected cases.
• A Marxian frame. The book is built on Marxian concepts, especially modes of production. A reader who does not share that framework will need to read it as one analytical approach among others.
• Originally written in 1982. Although the second edition includes a new foreword and the 1997 preface, the analysis dates from the early 1980s, and later work on globalization and history has moved beyond it in various directions.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the introductory cultural anthropology course, Wolf's book is the most historically ambitious. Guest's Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age and Eriksen's Small Places, Large Issues are introductory textbooks that cover the discipline's concepts and topics, and Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa is an early ethnography of a single community. Barnard's History and Theory in Anthropology maps the discipline's theoretical schools. Wolf is not a textbook; it is a single sustained argument about how the world that anthropologists study came to be connected. It is best read after an introduction to the discipline, and it makes a useful counterpoint to bounded-community ethnographies such as Mead's.

How to Use This Book

The book suits upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in anthropology, history and development studies who already know the basics of cultural anthropology. Some background in world history helps, but is not required.

A practical plan is to read the 2010 foreword, then Part One in full, because the introduction, the chapter on modes of production and the chapter on the world in 1400 give the argument and the vocabulary. Part Two can be read selectively by case: pick the fur trade or the slave trade, or the Iberians, depending on your region of interest, and treat the others as supplements. Part Three is best read in order, since it builds from industrial capitalism to the movement of commodities and labor, ending with the new laborers. Keep a list of the connections between regions in each chapter, and note how the same analytic concepts recur. Use the maps to place the places named in the text.