Introduction: Wolf, Europe and people without history: Forty years on

Abstract

Europe and the people without history (EPWH), published in 1982, challenged anthropology's focus on localism, synchronism, and culturalism, providing a meticulous exposition of multiscalar social relationships in motion. Wolf's bundles of “key relationships” of accumulation and social reproduction formed a breakthrough for holistic relational and realist modes of explanation. Wolf's vision remains essential in capturing capitalism's ongoing uneven and combined concoctions. This theme section revisits EPWH's immanent possibilities – cut short by the “cultural turn” – through critical engagement with Wolf's intellectual toolkit and particularly by building on his analysis as practiced in EPWH. It thereby extends Wolf's vision to questions of political ecology, debt and financialization, hidden histories of class struggle, the contradictory unity of theory and practice, and “planning” as a distinct logic of organizing value.