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Eric Wolf’s magnum opus, Europe and the People Without History (1982), fundamentally challenged social and cultural anthropology’s ingrained problems of localism, synchronism, and culturalism. Against that, it provided a Marx-inspired, relational, processual, multi-scalar theory and method for studying interconnected societies in motion. Wolf’s vision has remained essential for grasping the uneven and combined surprises of global capitalism, including the dynamic “hidden histories” that fuel popular politics and imaginations. This book is an effort by over a dozen international “Wolfian” scholars to critically rethink this nearly fifty-year-old classic from the standpoint of a mightily and scarily accelerating 21st century.
Don Kalb is Professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen. He is a leading historical anthropologist of capitalism and author of Expanding Class (Duke University Press,1997) and Value and Worthlessness (Berghahn Books, 2025). Recent edited books are Financialization (ed. with Chris Hann; Berghahn Books, 2020); Insidious Capital (ed.; Berghahn Books, 2024); and Backlash: The Global Rise of the Radical Right (ed. with Walden Bello; 2026). He is Founding Editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, Focaalblog, and the Dislocations series (Berghahn).