Books, Arts & Manners

Europe and the People without History, by Eric R. Wolf California, 504 pp., $29.95 This is a Marxist effort to tell the history of the whole world, with special reference to the formation of the world as we have known it from 1400 onward. It is a bad and dangerous book: bad because masses of facts create the impression of a case not actually made at all, dangerous because it is so well written and amply researched that only a fairly careful reader will discover its profound untruth. Indeed, the reasonable and inviting tone—as well as the claim that all the author proposes to tell us is some facts about the “interconnected processes” of human history—conceals an invidious effort, disclosed only at the very end of the book. This is, as I say, a Marxist tract, but by no means a pure or simple one.

The author’s superficial message is that we need to learn the history of the peoples to whom, before our own day, we did not impute history, which means pretty much the whole of Africa and much of Asia and the rest. Who can disagree? And I cannot imagine any enlightened person who would not want to know about the European move into commerce and industrial capitalism. That leads us on into the book’s three major concerns: “connections,” on the eve of Europe’s expansion; Europeans’ forays in search of wealth (gold, fur, and slaves, mainly); and then capitalism, concentrating on the Industrial Revolution, “crisis and differentiation in capitalism,” “the movement of commodities,” and “the new laborers.”

JN

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Jacob Neusner

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Europe and the People without History, by Eric R. Wolf California, 504 pp., $29.95 This is a Marxist effort to tell the history of the whole world, with special reference to the formation of the world as we have known it from 1400 onward. It is a bad and dangerous book: bad because masses of facts create the impression of a case not actually made at all, dangerous because it is so well written and amply researched that only a fairly careful reader will discover its profound untruth. Indeed, the reasonable and inviting tone—as well as the claim that all the author proposes to tell us is some facts about the “interconnected processes” of human history—conceals an invidious effort, disclosed only at the very end of the book. This is, as I say, a Marxist tract, but by no means a pure or simple one.

The author’s superficial message is that we need to learn the history of the peoples to whom, before our own day, we did not impute history, which means pretty much the whole of Africa and much of Asia and the rest. Who can disagree? And I cannot imagine any enlightened person who would not want to know about the European move into commerce and industrial capitalism. That leads us on into the book’s three major concerns: “connections,” on the eve of Europe’s expansion; Europeans’ forays in search of wealth (gold, fur, and slaves, mainly); and then capitalism, concentrating on the Industrial Revolution, “crisis and differentiation in capitalism,” “the movement of commodities,” and “the new laborers.”