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.
