Página inicialGruposDiscussãoMaisZeitgeist
Pesquise No Site
Este site usa cookies para fornecer nossos serviços, melhorar o desempenho, para análises e (se não estiver conectado) para publicidade. Ao usar o LibraryThing, você reconhece que leu e entendeu nossos Termos de Serviço e Política de Privacidade . Seu uso do site e dos serviços está sujeito a essas políticas e termos.

Resultados do Google Livros

Clique em uma foto para ir ao Google Livros

Carregando...

Europe and the people without history

de Eric R. Wolf

Outros autores: Veja a seção outros autores.

MembrosResenhasPopularidadeAvaliação médiaMenções
674233,955 (4.14)5
Offering insight and equal consideration into the societies of the "civilized" and "uncivilized" world, Europe and the People Without History deftly explores the historical trajectory of so-called modern globalization. In this foundational text about the development of the global political economy, Eric R. Wolf challenges the long-held anthropological notion that non-European cultures and peoples were isolated and static entities before the advent of European colonialism and imperialism. Ironically referred to as "the People Without History" by Wolf, these societies before active colonization possessed perpetually changing, reactionary cultures and were indeed just as intertwined into the processes of the pre-Columbian global economic system as their European counterparts. Utilizing Marxian concepts and a vivid consideration for the importance of history, Wolf judiciously traces the effects and conditions in Europe and the rest of the "known" world, beginning in 1400 AD, that allowed capitalism to emerge as the dominant ideology of the modern era.… (mais)
Nenhum(a)
Carregando...

Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro.

Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.

» Veja também 5 menções

1)霍布斯邦《論歷史》第12章就是在講這本書,他認為本書是一本具有理論強度,且對於社會事實資料的收集充足生動的作品,乃馬克思死後一百年具原創性及影響力的作品;2)第一章對本書的撰寫之理論背景作回顧與批判,第二章對十五世紀的世界作全覽式介紹,第三章則是本書的分析方法(馬克思歷史研究法),第一篇的四章應詳細看,沒時間的話可快速瀏覽第二篇;3)若有空的話,我應該再重看一次(苦笑) ( )
1 vote maoozilla | Apr 2, 2019 |
This is a very broad yet detailed look at the history of the past five centuries, and the economic/materialist causes thereof. It combines anthropology with history, closely tying together societal and cultural organization with economic and historical factors.

'Globalization' is not new. Its speed and force have accelerated at an exponential pace since the end of the 20th century, but the very beginnings of this were beginning long earlier.

From 1400 or so onwards, the world, especially that of the Eurasian continent, was part of an interconnected global political economic system, and that very few 'isolated' systems existed. Even those societies and peoples on the American continent were able to keep in close contact with each other, or at least trade with each other.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, titled Connections, gives an astonishingly detailed and broad look the world at 1400, attempting to sketch out every single world region, including the American continents.

Already, he notes that the Europeans had a beneficial position and were making fortuitous choices. They had largely avoided the wave of Mongol Invasions and plagues of the 13-14th centuries and early 15th. The Spanish and Portugese, which were concluding their long Reconquista, began to make forays into North Africa and the Canaries and Azores, and thus stumbling upon the easterly winds which would take them to the Americas. The backwater states of the earlier periods were soon organizing into stronger centralized states which could afford the barest degree of security to the mercantile classes.

Wolf moves from here to the Middle East recovering from the Mongols and Tamerlane, then to Africa, where the organized tribal kingdoms were engaged in the vast global trade networks, South Asia, China, and then to the tributary empires of the Americas.

The second section uses four major case studies to illustrate the societal changes of the succeeding centuries. First, the Spanish/Portugese colonization of the Americas and their demolition of native societies to bring up the populace as forced labor, secondly, the expanded volume of slave trade, third, the fur trade in the northern tip of the American continent, and fourth, the European arrival in East and South Asia, including trading posts in India, Taiwan, and modern Indonesia.

One striking photograph is of a fur coat worn by a Tlingit tribesman in modern British Columbia. The coat is decorated and armored by Chinese coins brought by the Europeans.

The third and final grouping of the book concerns the rise of modern capitalist accumulation, industrialization, and the foundations of modern international trade systems.

What separates this system from other broad explanations of world history, like Ferguson's 'killer apps of the West' or Wallerstein's 'world-systems theory', are his description of a three-tiered system of modes of production - kin-ordered, tributary, and capitalist. The development of these systems is not linear. His materialist determinism is not limited solely to geography, as Jared Diamond's is. Each country is not a self-contained entity, and reacts to events as much as they are a determined cause. The economics is clearly influenced from Marxist views, but has a more subtle view on what existed before capitalism.

For a book which is so ambitious and so broad, it accomplishes its tasks well. Some grand myths of history are challenged here, and this is a book worthy of our consideration. ( )
2 vote HadriantheBlind | Mar 30, 2013 |
Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History is a massive theoretical and synthetic undertaking as he attempts to describe the global economy that existed from 1492 to the birth of industrial capitalism around 1800. In doing this Wolf, an economic anthropologist by training, examines how “primitive” peoples outside Europe, those “without history,” were indeed integral cogs in the machinery of a global economy. These “history-less” peoples were not untouched, pristine societies affected (and infected) by Europe, Wolf argues, but they too influenced the history of Europe. Wolf shows that the rise of European industrial capitalism (and its forerunner, merchant capitalism) was not achieved in a vacuum, that there were no racial or geographical reasons the Europeans would be world’s “winners” in 1800. Wolf looks at the world holistically and portrays the rise of the West not as a strictly European phenomenon synchronous with the rise of capitalism, but as a series of global linkages between a myriad of civilizations operating under various modes of production.

Wolf’s book is based on a multitude of secondary sources from across many disciplines, primarily those of anthropology, history, and economics (especially those of a Marxian bent). He synthesizes these works with aplomb and his arguments never want for supporting facts, the minor objections noted by William McNeill notwithstanding. Europe and the People Without History can be viewed as a primer for a holistic approach to global economic history because of its breadth and scope. Wolf ties the seemingly discrete regions of the globe together in a web of interconnectedness and bemoans the fact that historians study the “charmed circle of the single nation-state.” He also takes historians to task for studying cultures, believing that they stem from eighteenth-century European nations “striving for separate identities.” Although Wolf singularly moves the rise of capitalism up to about 1800, around the time of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, his work is definitely a standard work that others have branched out from. His friend and colleague Andre Gunder Frank’s last major work, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, is very similar to Wolf’s in structure and theme, though Frank is a bit more negative about the role the “West” has played on the world economy.

In the first section of Europe and the People Without History, Wolf begins with a region by region description of the world and its nascent global economy in 1400 (although the economy of the Americas is a closed system until 1492). This sets the stage for the rest of his work and illustrates how each region was affected by others and had commodities and resources desired throughout the globe. He then discusses his “trinity” of modes of production he uses to analyze his societies: the kin-ordered society, where kin groups are deferentially allowed access to most of the production because of their birth; the tributary mode, where powered groups extract wealth from laborers by force; and the capitalist mode; where monetary wealth was able to buy labor power. Wolf makes it clear that merchants who earned money by trading commodities were not capitalists, stating that they still operate in a tributary state. He also says that societies might not all fit into his three easy categories, leaving it open to the possibility that various modes of production may co-exist and co-operate at the same time. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall discusses similar two-tiered civilizations amongst the Bambara in Senegambia where villages were structured as kin-ordered communes managed by elders who in turn surrendered some of their grain to their national overlords. Wolf utilizes these models of production modes to discuss the connections and exchanges between various civilizations. In the final chapter of the first section Europe’s ascent from the middle age backwater of Eurasia to the merchant capitalist region on the verge of the fifteenth century age of discovery.

In the second section Wolf describe the various European expansions across the globe and their interactions with so-called “peoples without history” and how each society was changed by contact with the other. In the mining “highlands of Hispanic America,” Spain simply erected a new colonial superstructure on the ruins of the Amerindian tributary polities, a point reiterated by Irene Silverblatt concerning the Spanish incorporation of the Inca into the empire. In the islands of the Caribbean (Wolf’s American “littoral”) the kin-ordered societies were replaced by a tributary-style slave economy. The fur trade too, linked much of North America into the global economy, radically altering the native groups caught up in or allied with the trade. Many Amerindian groups in North America moved, disappeared, or mixed into new tribes but through it all adapted their kin-ordered economies to provide the European newcomers with furs and pemmican, becoming over time, in effect “subordinate producers rather than as partners.” The tribal and sub-tribal groups in seventeenth century New France too adapted in such ways, as noted by Allan Greer in Mohawk Saint, becoming primarily kin-ordered hunting bands to provide furs to the French in exchange for material goods manufactured in pre-capitalist, tributary mode Europe. The African slave trade too was not purely a European process, but involved numerous polities and trade networks in the African interior. The trade strengthened some pre-existing states, like Benin, caused others to disappear, and engendered the rise of others. Many new polities changed from “kin-ordered patrilineages” into tributary extracting states, although, as Hall noted above, some adaptations were not so clearly differentiated from one to the other. The British too adapted a tributary extracting society to their own will in India, turning hereditary tribute takers into landed proprietors, forming a quasi-capitalist economy in the process. The trade in Indian opium to the Chinese was instrumental to reversing the flow of specie from Europe into Asia and helped inaugurate the British textile industry, the catalyst to the birth of capitalism.

In the third section Wolf discusses the post Industrial Revolution spread of capitalism across the globe and describes the many interconnections between the societies of the world. His primary example is the growth of the British textile industry and the empire formation that marched along with it. Commodities from far-flung regions of the globe were traded and moved everywhere capitalism could profitably and successfully exploit them, thus rubber production spreads from Portuguese Brazil to Dutch Indonesia and coffee from Ethiopia and Yemen to tropical plantations around the sunny equator. Wolf peppers this section with countless such examples of how capitalist enterprises altered not only the environment and agriculture of “history-less” peoples, but their very economies and cultures (culture being the outgrowth of the capitalist modified mode of production). Concomitant with capitalism’s ever spreading system is the significant changes it made in societies near and far. Though kin-ordered societies and tributary extracting societies each engendered their own dialectical class strife, the capitalist mode pitted not only producers and laborers in capitalist nations against each other, but other “less-developed” societies against those operating under the capitalist mode.

Wolf’s work is a justifiable classic of world economic history that has been emulated. In his final section Wolf advocates that historians look at the world globally, an idea advanced by others, notably William H. McNeill in “Transatlantic History in Perspective.” Wolf’s primary contention is that the world has operated under a global economic system not only in the past two hundred years when Europeans were building land-grabbing empires, but from time immemorial, and that Europeans were integrated into a global economy from the time they “discovered” the world in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By taking a holistic approach to world history, Wolf believes, the various interconnections between diverse cultures are made readily apparent, and history is thus brought to those “without history.” ( )
1 vote tuckerresearch | Dec 4, 2007 |
Exibindo 3 de 3
sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha

» Adicionar outros autores

Nome do autorFunçãoTipo de autorObra?Status
Wolf, Eric R.autor principaltodas as ediçõesconfirmado
Bárcenas, AgustínTradutorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Diaz, Noel L.Ilustradorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Você deve entrar para editar os dados de Conhecimento Comum.
Para mais ajuda veja a página de ajuda do Conhecimento Compartilhado.
Título canônico
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Título original
Títulos alternativos
Data da publicação original
Pessoas/Personagens
Lugares importantes
Eventos importantes
Filmes relacionados
Epígrafe
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
FOR SYDEL
Primeiras palavras
Citações
Últimas palavras
Aviso de desambiguação
Editores da Publicação
Autores Resenhistas (normalmente na contracapa do livro)
Idioma original
CDD/MDS canônico
LCC Canônico

Referências a esta obra em recursos externos.

Wikipédia em inglês (1)

Offering insight and equal consideration into the societies of the "civilized" and "uncivilized" world, Europe and the People Without History deftly explores the historical trajectory of so-called modern globalization. In this foundational text about the development of the global political economy, Eric R. Wolf challenges the long-held anthropological notion that non-European cultures and peoples were isolated and static entities before the advent of European colonialism and imperialism. Ironically referred to as "the People Without History" by Wolf, these societies before active colonization possessed perpetually changing, reactionary cultures and were indeed just as intertwined into the processes of the pre-Columbian global economic system as their European counterparts. Utilizing Marxian concepts and a vivid consideration for the importance of history, Wolf judiciously traces the effects and conditions in Europe and the rest of the "known" world, beginning in 1400 AD, that allowed capitalism to emerge as the dominant ideology of the modern era.

Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas.

Descrição do livro
Resumo em haiku

Current Discussions

Nenhum(a)

Capas populares

Links rápidos

Avaliação

Média: (4.14)
0.5
1
1.5
2 1
2.5
3 5
3.5 3
4 11
4.5 3
5 12

É você?

Torne-se um autor do LibraryThing.

 

Sobre | Contato | LibraryThing.com | Privacidade/Termos | Ajuda/Perguntas Frequentes | Blog | Loja | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliotecas Históricas | Os primeiros revisores | Conhecimento Comum | 203,239,348 livros! | Barra superior: Sempre visível