1

Wolf, Eric R.  Europe and the People Without History.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.


     In Europe and the People Without History, Eric Wolf

demonstrates a method of understanding a culture that

involves understanding the interconnections and

interpenetrations of the temporally and geographic

neighbors.  The ironic title highlights European hubris of

assuming they were bringing culture to uncivilized,

primitive areas.  These indigenous histories interacted with

and shaped development after contact with Western Culture.

The economic aspect of Wolf's work is dialectic Marxian, as

might be expected from a work that centers on economic and

labor histories.  He combines this methodology with a keen

eye for the human and anthropological.  This combined

approach provides a useful way to describe the various

systems before and during European hegemony.  The result is

a careful piecing together of cultural interactions than it

is about the oppression brought on by Dead White European

Males.

     People Without History is a massive synthetic

undertaking and Wolf describes his bibliographic notes as a

form of "intellectual autobiography (393)."  The book reads

like the grand total of a lifetime of lectures, with the

influences so well-absorbed that it is difficult to tell

where the author starts and the (rather lengthy list of)

secondary sources begin.  The sources are well-distributed

between classic and modern anthropology, Marx and Marxian

writings, and more mainstream historiographies.  The

bibliographic notes could be the subject of a stand-alone

review.

     This book is divided into three major sections.  In the

first section, "Connections",  Wolf starts out in good

Braudelian fashion by discussing geography.  This gives Wolf

a chance to encourage his readers to think about

interconnected regions and cultures rather than isolated

ones.  He discusses the social and political ramifications

of social labor, and how various modes of production

(tributary, kin-ordered) illustrate this.  Capitalism is

introduced as a self-regulating, coercive mode of

production.

     Wolf describes the rise of Europe from a backwater to

an important locus of commerce after the ninth century, with

both the upstart merchant classes and the entrenched

tributary overlords energizing the region.  Wolf describes

the differing personalities of the Iberian, British, and

Northern European commercial growth, and the politico-

economic importance of Asian trade.

     In the second section, "In Search of Wealth",  Wolf

describes the Iberian efforts in the New World and the "soft

underbelly (156)" of the Caribbean.  Wolf describes the

tributary mode in which surplus was extracted from the New

World, and the adoption of commercial agriculture in the

plantation belt.  Indian cultures get treatment in the light

of their absorption into the fur trade.  African systems

adapt (or get dissolved) by the new divided labor systems

associated with capture, seasoning, and transportation of

slave cargo.  The final part of this section is concerned

with European barnacle-like attachment to the littoral

peripheries of Asia, and the position of India in Sino-

Indian trade.  Indian trade (and surplus) gets pulled into

the nascent capitalist system, because of her British

interconnection.

     In the third section, "Capitalism", Wolf reinforces his

interrelation thesis by describing the myriad dependencies

between commerce, technology, and labor in English

capitalism.  Wolf also describes the differences in various

national forms of capitalism (thereby distancing himself

from a more strict Marxist functionalism).  Wolf points to

national personality differences expressed through differing

class relations and differing access to extra-national

surpluses.  He describes the creation and manipulation of

the working classes which is always ongoing, and notes that

capitalist systems continually seek out new "markets" of

surplus and labor.

     People Without History is a daring and delightful

execution of World History, and it appears to have been a

seminal work in both the historical and anthropological

disciplines.  The massive scope is reminiscent of Meinig's

Shaping of America, although it hangs together better than

that work.  The focus on cultural interaction (rather than

oppressor-victim ideology) reminds the reader of the

Portuguese pragmatic tack observed in The Portuguese Empire.

I have given this work the grad student seal of excellence

by choosing to keep it rather than sell it back to the

bookstore.



jason carr