Europe and the People without History by Eric Wolf

The central assertion that Eric Wolf makes in this book is that the expansion of European societies during the Modern Era affected not only the societies that Europeans encountered, but also their own. During the past two hundred years scholars have tended to divide the world into different societies and look at non-European peoples as non-participants in the development of history, as if they were from unchanging cultures. This is the reason why they were left out of the Eurocentric construction of history and, thus, referred by Wolf as “people without history.”

Wolf starts the first chapter by examining sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics as disciplines that have tried to explain how individuals and groups function. He outlines the capitalist and mercantile development processes and follows their effects on the populations studied by ethnohistorians and anthropologists. Wolf also looks at history as an analytical account of the development of material relations progressing together on the macro and micro levels. He first presents the world in 1400 before European world-wide dominance and then he goes on to look at some theoretical constructs to allow us to understand the determining factors for the emergence of capitalism. He proceeds to show how European nations expanded globally and the impact of capitalism on the world “periphery” that supplied resources to the industrial centers. Wolf’s aim is to show that “both the people who claim history as their own and the people whom history has been denied emerge as participants in the same historical trajectory” (p.23).

Wolf presents the world in 1400 in detail. He includes the political geography of the Old World, explaining the trade routes and the peoples who used them and lived along them. Then he goes on to present the Near East and Africa. He explains that each region was dominated by elite of intermarrying families, comprising landowners, merchants, state officials, heads of guilds, and the religious leaders of mosques, schools, and charitable foundations. The maintenance of power in these territories depended on keeping control of the region through its elite and on the alliances with pastoral groups who could defend them. It is interesting to see that today in certain parts of the world, such as in Latin American, the maintenance of power is still done in a very similar fashion, through its elites and in alliance with the disenfranchised who, very often, exchange their votes for material resources. He also presents the history of South and East Asia, and the New World. At the end of the chapter, Wolf once again asserts that “Everywhere in this world of 1400, populations existed in interconnections” (p.71). Thus, Wolf, concludes that “the social scientist’s model of distinct and separate systems, and of timeless ‘precontact’ ethnographic present, does not adequately depict the situation before European expansion” (p.71).

Wolf also examines the modes of production: the capitalist, the tributary, and the kin-ordered. He concludes that both the tributary and the capitalist modes require mechanisms of domination to ensure that surpluses are transferable from one class to the other. For Wolf, these modes of production are established as constructs with which to conceive certain strategic relationships that bring together the terms under which human lives are conducted. They are instruments for understanding the central connections build up among the expanding Europeans and the other peoples of the globe. In chapter four, Wolf introduces Europe in its prelude to Expansion.

In summary, Wolf presents the world as a changing interconnection of parts rather than as a stable unity. He shows through insurmountable amount of information and details that societies, cultures, and peoples were constantly changing in a world that was in a process of expansion. In an interview with American anthropologist Jonathan Friedman in 1987, Wolf said: "My primary interest is to explain something out there that impinges me, and I would sell my soul to the devil if I thought it would help." He, indeed, puts great effort in trying to explain that the world has always been interconnected and that relationships between peoples occurred under exploitation and domination.

Neda Bezerra