It is forty-two years ago that Eric Wolf published his pathbreaking Europe and the people without history (1982); almost half a century, that is. Wolf's masterpiece gave an anthropological account of five hundred years of European capitalist imperialism as viewed from the periphery. This was anthropology's most robust response to the rise of Marxism and World Systems Theory in the prior decades. EPWH was a profound assault on the discipline's ingrained bias toward synchronism, localism, and culturalism, certainly in its dominant US version. The book crystallized multiple debates in anthropology, history, and social theory, marking the turbulent 1960s and 1970s as left-wing scholars engaged with the urban rebellions in the Global North, and peasant wars, revolutions, and decolonizations in what was then called “the Third World.” The academic and policy orthodoxies of modernization theory and structural functionalism were collapsing, as were methodological nationalism and individualism.

Major scholarly debates of the times were addressed and clarified in EPWH: issues of materialism and idealism; the relation between historical, multiscalar, and ethnographic methodologies; idiography versus comparison; the power and problems of Marxist analysis, of the concepts of class and social labor; the promises and pitfalls of the culture concept; the possibilities and drawbacks of world systemic and mode-of-production approaches; the role of commodities and agricultural labor in development; the variable logics of social and political history in regions and cultures outside the West before the mid-twentieth century, and their adequate modes of explanation; the European transition to capitalism; the world before capitalism; questions of the longue durée and the conjuncture—it was all there. The book also invited some major discussions, both in anthropology and outside.¹

There were interesting contrasts among and within disciplines in how the book was received. Anthropologists tended to appreciate Wolf's chapters on the preindustrial period for the holism they demonstrated—the chapters following the industrial revolution were centered on commodities and value chains rather than individual societies and deployed a more restricted definition of the capitalist mode of production informed by the work of Robert Brenner. Some historians tended to be more critical of these first chapters as they found numerous “half-truths” (McNeill 1984: 661), biased toward bolstering a larger theoretical argument. For historical geographers, the merits of the book lay in its demonstration of how for centuries already “the life of societies was changed by imperfectly understood economic forces emanating from distant cities” (Galloway 1984: 114). Theoretically important disagreements between Immanuel Wallerstein and Wolf on whether or not the industrial revolution makes a qualitative difference for how we conceive of capitalism, however, were mostly ignored (ibid.). An emerging global anthropologist like Jonathan Friedman (1987), in contrast, appreciated Wolf's book precisely for providing an alternative to world systems scholars like Wallerstein whose global perspective was, unlike Wolf's, unable to concretely come to grips with the changing structures of societies and culture. Friedman emphasized that “it is not necessary to argue that local structures of social life determine and are not determined by the larger system to realize that a global perspective must account for specific concrete social forms and their transformation” (idem: 84).

Our take is that Wolf's meticulous exposition of what we would now call multiscalar social relationships in motion, Wolf's bundles of “key relationships” of accumulation and social reproduction, as well as his conception of power, were important breakthroughs for holistic relational and realist modes of explanation. Those Wolfian bundles were composed of variable but systematic sets of political, economic, and ideological forces, anticipating what Wolf in an important keynote to the American Anthropological Association (Wolf 1989) would later call the four modes of power (Wolf 1990)—structural, tactical, interpersonal, and willpower. Wolf argued that while these relationships were steadily interlinked and interwoven in time and space, they had to be analytically distinguished. We hold that this vision remains a powerful anthropological promise for understanding a human world in motion on planet earth that is now much more dominated by capitalism in its uneven and combined concoctions than at any moment in Wolf's time.

Of all the major anthropologies of the 1970s and 1980s, it was Wolf's EPWH that captured our imaginations most when we started Focaal in the Netherlands in 1985. Wolf's vision in EPWH is also reflected in Focaal's subtitle: journal of global and historical anthropology. It is therefore appropriate that we return to EPWH forty years later as we celebrate issue number 100.²

Paradoxically, while EPWH had positioned anthropology robustly for dealing with a new cycle of capitalist globalization—which was on the horizon in the early 1980s but not truly visible for most of us yet—the immanent possibilities of EPWH were almost immediately cut short, in anthropology as well as other social disciplines. 1982 was truly wrong timing. Poststructuralism, postmodernism, and “thick description” would soon combine in the cultural (U-)turn to destroy systemic, global, and historically explanatory accounts (Harvey 1989; Kalb and Tak 2005; Sewell 2005). The revolutionary tide in the world had passed, and neoliberalism was coming into its own. Explanatory ambition and analysis of power structures were cast aside and actively condemned as “grand narrative,” which was now seen as a typically modernist form of violent totalizing reason. Explanation was now left, perversely and disastrously, to the positivist social sciences, which were allowed to monopolize the associated prestige, power, and resources. The rift between poststructuralism and postmodernism in the human disciplines, on the one hand, and positivist social sciences led by economics and psychology, on the other, was boosted by the descent of the once rebellious “Third World” into a fragmented pool of indebted “emergent economies” competing with each other for injections of Western capital, “scientifically” supported by the World Bank and other institutions dominated by neoclassical economists. The collapse of “really existing socialism” in the second world, meanwhile, had killed the idea that there were viable alternatives to capitalism. Social democrats and leftist nationalists almost everywhere succumbed to the uniform dictates of private accumulation (“the Third Way,” etc.) and set about canceling themselves. The whole of Eurasia, the big mass of humanity that in the course of the twentieth century had colored deep red on the world map, began inserting itself again into the Western-dominated order of capital, as before 1917. The post-1989 period celebrated itself with slogans as “the Third Wave of democratization” (Huntington 2012). This, however, was a subdued and shallow type of democracy, unwilling to confront a range of key contradictions the ramifications of which were increasingly obvious—rising inequalities, rising plutocracy, ecological destruction, accumulation for accumulation's sake. For these, no straightforward technological and technocratic fixes existed. Accumulation, however, was not going to be democratically controlled. The state, dream target of revolutionary ambitions in the preceding period, had thoroughly lost its aura as the vehicle for popular sovereignty on behalf of the many. Governmental and intellectual elites began actively convincing electorates that the world of capital was in the end the best of all possible worlds.

So we got the “unipolar world” of Bush Senior and the Clintons, and the “flat world” of New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman. Anthropologists in the 1990s and 2000s both resisted and acknowledged these realities by celebrating cultural difference and hybridity within a basically Western-led liberal capitalist world of expanding commerce and aspiration. The space for revolution and socially progressive reformist thinking beyond liberal economism, on the one hand, and culturalism (consumption, affirmative action), on the other, had dramatically shrunk. Francis Fukuyama's “End of History” reigned, even though that was an even grander vision of history. Neoliberal hegemony in academia and the wider world expressed itself in a tenuous balance between the rational actor, on the one hand, and an idea of culture as individual or group-based cultural preferences, authenticity, and belonging, on the other, thus aligning itself “naturally,” and in seemingly humanist ways, with liberal capitalism. This tenuous balance also allowed for a multicultural cosmopolitanism for the most dynamic territories and classes in the system and it provided intellectual space for decolonial negotiations with rising Global South elites while those poised, after decolonization, to continue to mobilize demands for distributive justice—within nation-states or at a global scale—could be systematically culturalized and monitored as “violators of neoliberal market rules,” a violation ascribed not to a political program but to racialized cultural dispositions (see Kundnani 2023: 242).

In anthropology the new orthodoxy aligned smoothly with early twentieth-century anthropological notions of cultural difference, relativism, and perspectivism, almost as if nothing had happened in between. It also revitalized anthropology's twentieth-century definition of itself as a discipline steeped in fieldwork and local ethnography. The “writing culture” moment of the mid-eighties, and the post- and decolonial developments that followed it, gave to all this a semblance of non-Eurocentric liberation and emancipation. In the discipline there was a visceral turn away from relationally realist and comparativist explanation in time and space toward a synchronic empiricism of cultural difference, sometimes spiced up by sparks of universalist philosophizing in idealist mode (“what it means to be human,” “speaking with a mountain,” etc.). Whereas the critical interventions of EPWH latently helped shape the new academic consensus on the complexities of the culture concept and the fact of global interconnectedness, more radical and explicit references to EPWH became rare. As Paul Stacey (2022: 5) rightly notes, reflecting on EPWH forty years on, the book has a “paradoxical legacy” of underusage despite significant influence (Stacey 2022: 5).

Some of the possibilities of Wolf's work, however, were conserved and further developed in the 1990s under the guises of “anthropology and history” and “anthropological political economy” (see, e.g., Kalb et al. 1996; Kalb and Tak 2005; Narotzky 1997; Nugent 2002; Roseberry 1989; Sider and Smith 1997; Susser 2012). They began regaining new life from the 2000s onward, as a younger generation of anthropologists began to grapple with a neoliberal capitalism that became ever more crisis prone and new cycles of global and local contestation emerged, first with the alter-globalist movements, then with the imperial wars in the Middle East and the worldwide mobilizations of the 2010s and 2020s, both on the Left and the Right (Kalb and Halmai 2011; Kalb and Mollona 2018; Kalb forthcoming). During this time, Focaal continued to nurture Wolf's vision of a global and historical anthropology, for instance, in theme sections on a “transnational theory of power” for grasping localized conflict and protest (Glick-Schiller 2006 in theme section by Halleh Ghorashi, and Marja Spierenburg); a critical examination of the politics and economics of the (re)production of activism, particularly regarding the “class configurations of contemporary global diasporas” (Gardiner Barber and Lem 2008); and an analysis of “projects of culture” to confront the ubiquity of “culture talk” and the phenomenon of culture turning into an “authoritative arbiter of rights” (Soysal 2009 in the theme section by Mary Taylor).

Following Wolf's lead into questioning capitalism as an all-round anthropological object, new work focused on, among others, labor, class, surplus populations, postdevelopment, postsocialism, postcolonialism, racial-capitalism, austerity, new capitalist extractive and oppressive social forms, finance, migrations, and the associated social contestations. This led to a reuniting of political, economic, and cultural inquiry under a larger vision and method, with a renewed interest for Marxian, including Gramscian, approaches in anthropology next to the anarchist, Maussian, Polanyian, and postcolonial/decolonial ones that had become popular among the anthropological Left in the 2000s. While the mode of production concept had somewhat lost its spell (note: but see Neveling and Trapido's 2015 Focaalblog feature and recently Mau 2023; Tilzey et al. 2024), anthropologists in Wolfian mode would be interested in materialist historicization, periodicity and conjunctures, and by the modes in which their subjects and locations reproduced themselves via labor, care, collaboration, and organization within and against the larger forces of history. Those larger forces were often conceptualized, like Wolfian “manifolds,” in combined and uneven ways, by the imperatives and relationships of capital accumulation.

Eric Wolf, like many of his left-wing scholarly contemporaries, had a keen sense of the possibilities of subaltern people making history through revolution and reform. In the 1960s and 1970s, the sense of the need to confront power and capture the state for the emancipation of the masses was still alive and vibrant. This sense profoundly informed Wolf's writing, even though EPWH was already more reticent on revolutionary opportunities than Wolf's earlier Peasant wars (1969; see Steur, this theme section; Binford et al. 2020; Smith 2020). In the 1970s, as Gavin Smith emphasizes (2020), there was a keen concern with the possible strategies and tactics for mass subaltern mobilization. In the neoliberal global conjuncture, this gave way to a politically stripped-down interest in social movements within an undisputed and presumably stable capitalist world order. The Trotskian and Leninist interest in power and counterpower, and in Gramsci's “war of maneuver,” that had characterized Eric Wolf as a scholar (more in Peasant wars than in EPWH) would in the new period shift toward “mere” wars of position and toward objects such as civil society, human rights, humanitarianism, governmentality, and the vicissitudes of often middle-class-dominated urban protest. Rather than an interest in confrontation with the state, or even with capitalism as such, recent interest in “antipolitics,” among rebels as well as among anthropologists, looked for spaces of autonomy and solidarity, cultural and spatial niches for egalitarian self-realization outside the mainstream system—see the success of the work of David Graeber. This often made culture, desire, and intentional communities seem more profoundly political than “the movement,” “labor,” or “the party,” which were seen as bureaucratic, nonauthentic, and “far away.” This also served to elevate anarchism and Marcel Mauss in the intellectual rank orders of the Left in the anthropology discipline. Within these shifts, however, a Wolfian perspective kept making a difference. It did so by taking hegemony and confrontation seriously, by looking at structural and tactical power, at divisions between and among classes, and by placing popular politics within the wider rhythms of the reproduction of capitalism (see, e.g., Kalb and Halmai 2011; Kalb and Mollona 2018; Narotzky 2002; Neveling and Steur 2018; Nonini and Susser 2006; Smith 2006; Steur 2017; Susser and Tonnelat 2013; Vetta 2019).

Our papers for this festive theme section in Focaal number 100 are a first installment of a larger book project on Eric Wolf and EPWH, based on conversations that started in 2022 at the University of Bergen.³ We are interested in the immanent possibilities of Wolf's approach and concepts; in current research on topics singled out by Wolf forty years ago; in competing alternative lines of inquiry; and in critique of the Wolfian opening with an eye on the needs of the present and the perceivable future. What is the Wolfian take on Marx, and where lies its exact value? What ought to be the role of history and comparison in the anthropological endeavor? What is the value of archival and secondary sources in anthropological research and theory next to ethnography? If we take the Wolfian agenda seriously, what sort of questions would a Wolfian anthropology pose in the current world? If we compare the Wolfian approach to big anthropological history with other large-scale historical visions in anthropology, what specificities emerge? Which elements of the Marxian vision of EPWH require urgent renewal? While we cannot deal with all those questions in the five articles in this theme section, it is useful to know that they have been produced in the context of this larger conversation.

When we take the five articles in this theme section together, it is striking that though each is appreciative of Wolf's conceptual toolkit as sophisticated and powerful, they also emphasize that what has truly withstood the test of time are Wolf's concrete anthropological histories, the case studies through which his larger agenda was executed. It is precisely in the empirical chapters of EPWH that Wolf demonstrates the potential of his vision and method, which every time seems to exceed his explicit theorizing. If this is often considered the hallmark of good anthropology—“show, don't tell”—then Wolf certainly excels in this. One thing to consider then as we take Wolfian anthropology forward is to keep going back to Wolf's method as demonstrated in his concrete anthropological analyses and not merely rely on the theoretical syntheses he formulated. Indeed, where all articles find something to critique in what Wolf says he does, it is difficult to find fault with the analytical, methodological, and indeed political-intellectual moves Wolf actually performed. Our endeavor, thus, is somewhat of an ode to Wolf's multiscalar relational modes of description and explanation.

Antonio Pusceddu—the first article in this theme section—shows that it would be disingenuous to claim Wolf as a founding figure of political ecology just because he coined the term, only to subsequently add little in terms of engagement with the field of political ecology, which indeed claimed Wolf as a “forefather.” The article argues that Wolf's lack of attention in EPWH to the environmental crises inherent in the capitalist mode of production reflects a broader neglect of ecological dimensions in Marxian theory during Wolf's time. Ecological issues do come up in EPWH, obviously, as in the chapter on commodities where the major coffee disease wiping out complete plantations in the Dutch Indies is mentioned, or in Wolf's spot-on intuition that any bout of capitalist development always quickly depletes the natural and human resources on which it is based, after which capital just moves on and leaves ruins behind. But these flashes of insight remain isolated examples and appear without the kind of careful dialectical consideration that Wolf gives, for instance, to the “cultural” formations that he so powerfully shows to be products of the unfolding history of world capitalism. Yet Pusceddu also argues that Wolf's vision and method in EPWH remain crucial for developing a political ecology of value that integrates anthropological analysis with systemic critiques of capitalism's ecological impact. Despite its limited theoretical reach on ecology and relative negligence of ecology as an empirical issue, EPWH offers an enabling framework to explore the socioecological contradictions of capitalism through a nondeterministic approach to the variable articulation of modes of production and a dialectical strategy of linking local relational dynamics to broader systemic processes.

Theodora Vetta and Irene Sabaté’s article subsequently argues that considering how the weight of financial debt has fundamentally increased in the world after the publication of EPWH, it is time to more explicitly theorize debt as a specific kind of social and economic relationship. Doing so, they find ample inspiration in EPWH's concrete anthropological histories where the role that debt played in the expansion of the capitalist mode of production—prompting new frontiers of accumulation ranging from military campaigns to financial bubbles and major infrastructures—is repeatedly highlighted. Following the exploration of debt and its functions in EPWH, Vetta and Sabaté build a critical Wolfian intervention in current anthropological scholarship on finance and debt, directing it beyond its preoccupation with consumption and aspiration toward confronting the way that credit takes advantage of manifold relational mechanisms, market expansions, the deepening of capitalist extraction, and the mobilization of labor. In doing so, they also push Wolfian theorizing on capitalism further in the direction that Wolf was no doubt venturing toward and where Marxist feminists and recent political-economy anthropologists went more clearly: beyond narrow conceptions of production, labor, and class, toward conceiving of production as one of various fields in which value is extracted and toward including nonmarket forms of labor mobilization taking place within households and communities in the core of the analysis (Federici 2012; Hann and Kalb 2020; Kalb 2024, forthcoming; Mies 2022; Vogel 2013; Weiss 2019).

Next, Natalia Buier's contribution proposes a critique of Wolf's theorization of class struggle and the origins of capitalism. She does so not through the standpoint of Wolf's chosen intellectual opponent on the issue—Wallerstein and his World System Theory—but rather through that of Robert Brenner, who shared Wolf's conviction that the origins of capitalism lie not in the beginning of European merchant and circulating capital but in the emergence of the capitalist mode of production in English agriculture. Bringing Brenner into further dialogue with Wolf yields a greater emphasis on class struggle as the concrete way that the structural contradictions developing within a mode of production propel historical change. Adopting this perspective to analyze the agro-industrial crisis in Huelva—a leading strawberry-producing area in Spain that depletes the water of the bordering Doñana National Park—and to discern the limits of the politicization of this crisis, Buier demonstrates that this enhanced theorization fits perfectly with Wolf's overall vision in EPWH: as in the book, Buier's analysis ends up revealing the hidden history of “people without history.” As in EPWH, hers is not a merely descriptive intervention but one that fundamentally alters the way we understand the processes that anti-capitalist ecological struggles are up against. At the same time, Buier's article shows that situated ethnography and the extended case study remain pivotal methods for engaging in a Wolfian-type anthropology that accounts for how historically specific relations are generated within wider global historical forces.

Following this thread of critical engagement with Wolf's theory and method, Luisa Steur's article looks at the way Wolf in EPWH explicitly defends a “Marxian” positioning in anthropology as distinct from a real-world “Marxist” politics. She is puzzled by this distinction precisely because Wolf has shown himself to be a committed socialist in practice, not adverse to real-world politics. To make sense of Wolf's stated “Marxian” commitment, Steur situates it in the historical and academic context in which Wolf operated, and where it made sense. To follow not Wolf's comments but his example regarding how to navigate the dilemmas of political commitment and professional scholarship, Steur argues that we may in the present context leave Wolf's insistence on the term “Marxian” behind but can draw ample inspiration from Wolf's “Marxian Marxism,” also when it comes to researching actually existing Marxist politics in places such as Cuba and Kerala.

Jeremy Rayner's contribution, finally, experiments with reconceptualizing Wolf's three modes of production away from reification and toward a set of verbs that more easily capture the varied relational mechanisms that we can see in EPWH as they operate across places while directing the flow of value. The multiscalar character of these relational mechanisms is all the more visible nowadays as we have, in the four decades since EPWH's publication, witnessed a shift in the empirical and intellectual obviousness of the “labour theory of value” to a world where the “value theory of labour”—a globally operating “insidious” law of value—is impossible to ignore (see Kalb 2022, 2024). Instead of Wolf's capitalist, tributary, and kin-ordered modes of production, Rayner proposes: “making,” to direct our attention to appropriation happening within production processes; “taking,” to capture the value extractions occurring through extra-economic or rentier means; and “relating,” to point to the forms of labor mobilization and social collateral that take place through kinship and other dense, multifaceted relationships. We can then see that these processes operate in intersecting and alternating ways, including in core capitalist accumulation nodes. Particularly exciting about Rayner's intervention is that he also corrects for an empirical and theoretical hiatus in Wolf's work that was pointed out by various anthropologists involved in our discussions on EPWH (see also Steur, this theme section): EPWH's silence on actually existing socialism and “modern” forms of labor struggle. To expand EPWH's scope, Rayner proposes that we also need to add a fourth verb, namely “planning,” as a distinct logic of mobilizing labor and generating and appropriating value, characterized by an explicit sense of public use value with an eye on a common future. Recalling Pusceddu's article on EPWH and political ecology that started the theme section, “planning” is an indispensable concept if we want to take control over the brakeless train of human and planetary destruction that humanity is on.