Eric Wolf Quotes

Eric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology. Wikipedia  

✵ 1. February 1923 – 6. March 1999
Eric Wolf: 24   quotes 0   likes

Famous Eric Wolf Quotes

“I acknowledge my debt to Marxian thought without apology.”

Preface (1997), p. xi.
Europe and the People Without History, 1982

“If history is the working out of a more moral purpose in time, then those who lay claim to that purpose are by that fact the predilect agents of history.”

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 1, Introduction, p. 5.

Eric Wolf Quotes

“What his vision of free commodity exchange omits are the constraints that governed the selection of particular commodities, and the political and military sanctions used to ensure the continuation of quiet asymmetrical exchanges that benefited one party while diminishing the assets of another.”

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 11, The Movement of Commodities, p. 314.
Context: Where Adam Smith and David Ricardo had envisaged a growing worldwide division of labor, they had thought that each country would freely select the commodities it was most qualified to produce, and that each would exchange its optimal commodity for the optimal commodity of others. Thus in Ricardo's example, Britain would send Portugal its textiles, while Britons would consume Portuguese wines in turn. What his vision of free commodity exchange omits are the constraints that governed the selection of particular commodities, and the political and military sanctions used to ensure the continuation of quiet asymmetrical exchanges that benefited one party while diminishing the assets of another.

“Slaving gave rise to a division of labor”

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 7, The Slave Trade, p. 229.
Context: Slaving gave rise to a division of labor in which the business of capture, maintenance, and overland transport of slaves was in African hands, while Europeans took charge of transoceanic transport, the "seasoning" or breaking in of slaves, and their eventual distribution.

“The development of industrial capitalism did not move in a smooth ascending line.”

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 11, The Movement of Commodities, p. 311.

“The capitalist state exists to ensure the domination of one class over another.”

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 10, Crises and Differentiation in Capitalism, p. 308.

“Everywhere in this world of 1400, populations existed in interconnections.”

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 2, The World in 1400, p. 71.

“In order to understand what the world would become, we must first know what it was.”

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 2, The World in 1400, p. 24.

“There may be "pie in the sky when you die" but how the pie is dished out on the ground has considerable existential relevance.”

Preface (1997), p. x.
Europe and the People Without History, 1982

“To understand how caste works concretely, one must, however, look beyond kinship organization and ritual idiom to the political economy of caste.”

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 2, The World in 1400, p. 46.

“Man rises up against nature by means of what we would today call culture.”

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 3, Modes of Production, p. 73.

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