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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.
The authors possess extensive knowledge of EPWH and have conducted research across diverse regions of the world. As well as its contribution to the field, it is a tribute to Wolf’s multi-scalar relational method of description and explanation. Patricia Torres Mejía, Ciudad de México
This is an indispensable book for those within and beyond the academy, troubled by the world we live in and concerned to make a difference. Gavin Smith, University of Toronto
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).
Luisa Steur is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam, and Lead Editor of Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. She has published extensively on capitalist restructuring of everyday life and the changing relationship of Communist politics to the struggles of durably oppressed people in the South Indian state of Kerala such as Indigenist Mobilization: Confronting Electoral Communism and Precarious Livelihoods in Post-reform Kerala (Berghahn 2017).