Giovanni Arrighi

These essays, by two of the foremost scholars who worked in the Marxist tradition on African economic and social issues, offers an overview of socialism and economic development, and of nationalism and revolution in sub-Saharan Africa; of labor, peasantries, and populism. It includes case studies of Tanzania, Rhodesia, and Mozambique.

Building on an analysis of the dissenting movements to have emerged since the rise of modern capitalism, Anti-Systemic Movements uncovers an international groundswell of resistance still vitally active at the end of the twentieth century. The authors suggest that the new assertiveness of the South, the development of class struggle in the East and the emergence of rainbow coalitions in various regions hold fresh promise for emancipatory politics. Taking the year 1968 as a symbolic turning point, the authors argue that new anti-systemic movements have arisen which challenge the logic of the capitalist world-system.

Building on an analysis of the dissenting movements to have emerged since the rise of modern capitalism, Anti-Systemic Movements uncovers an international groundswell of resistance still vitally active at the end of the twentieth century. The authors suggest that the new assertiveness of the South, the development of class struggle in the East and the emergence of rainbow coalitions in various regions hold fresh promise for emancipatory politics. Taking the year 1968 as a symbolic turning point, the authors argue that new anti-systemic movements have arisen which challenge the logic of the capitalist world-system.

The Long Twentieth Century traces the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Arrighi argues that capitalism has unfolded as a succession of "long centuries," each of which produced a new world power that secured control over an expanding world-economic space. Examining the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English and finally American capitalism, Arrighi concludes with an examination of the forces that have shaped and are now poised to undermine America's world dominance. A masterpiece of historical sociology, The Long Twentieth Century rivals in scope and ambition contemporary classics by Perry Anderson, Charles Tilly and Michael Mann.

In the late eighteenth century, the political economist Adam Smith predicted an eventual equalization of power between the West and the territories it had conquered. In this magisterial new work, Giovanni Arrighi shows how China's extraordinary rise invites us to reassess radically the conventional reading of The Wealth of Nations. He examines how recent US attempts to create the first truly global empire were conceived to counter China's spectacular economic success Now America's disastrous failure in Iraq has made the People's Republic of China the true winner in the US War on Terror. China may soon become again the kind of noncapitalist market economy that Smith described, an event that will reconfigure world trade and the global balance of power.

Few terms in the vocabulary of politics are so confused as "imperialism." Does it refer essentially to colonial rule? Or is it primarily an economic phenomenon, connected to the export of capital? What is its relation to nationalism? Which societies, in the past or present, can be properly described as imperialist? Giovanni Arrighi resolves these ambiguities by the construction of a formal model that integrates all of them into a single structure. He shows how a coherent paradigm of imperialism can be derived from Hobson's classic study of imperialism at the turn of the century, and illustrates it with a series of geometrical figures. The genesis of English imperialism is traced, from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Then the pattern of German and American imperialism are compared and contrasted. Arrighi looks at the consequences of the rise of multinational corporations for the traditional versions of the concept of imperialism and concludes that they transform its meaning. In a new afterword, Arrighi responds to his critics and sketches a reconceptualized theory of "imperialism" as a struggle for world hegemony.