Introduction

The Long Twentieth Century is one of those classics that one "reads af' rather more than one "reads through." It is a book that one never really finishes reading. The present collection of essays is testament to this. Giovanni Arrighi always sought to answer the big questions of modernity -of civilizations, of world power, of class struggles, of capital -and he always sought to pose more questions than any single text, indeed any one scholar, could ever answer. Not for nothing did the subtitle of his greatest work immodestly read: money, power, and the origins of our times. "We cannot do everything at once," he observes in the opening of the Long Twentieth Century (1994:25). Far from a banal statement, Arrighi's powerful contention is that rigorous and sophisticated world-historical research involves constructing partial totalities that necessarily lop off important aspects of reality. Reviews of The Long Twentieth Century often zeroed in on these apparent omissions (Moore 1997), noting especially the book's relative neglect of class struggles and core-periphery inequalities. Arrighi of course knew what he was doing. An earlier plan for The Long Twentieth Century was a three-part structure of world power, capital accumulation, and class struggles. And yet, it was impossible to move in all directions at once. If Arrighi was often criticized for important omissions, I slowly arrived at the opposite conclusion, won gradually over subsequent years of reading at The Long Twentieth Century. Far from obscuring class struggle, imperialism, and other dynamics, Arrighi's model (itself a partial totality) in fact created new possibilities for a holistic analysis of capitalism's dynamic contradictions

Art history · Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism · History · Political Economy and Marxism · World Systems and Global Transformations

• How China benefits from “conveyor belts” of ecologically unequal exchange

  Open Access•Paul K Gellert•International Journal of…•2025

  Add to list

• Spatial and Other Fixes of Historical Capitalism

  Open Access•Giovanni Arrighi•Journal of World-Systems Research•2004

  Add to list