Giovanni Arrighi (1937–2009)

Abstract

Giovanni Arrighi (1937–2009) was a prolific political economist who integrated social, historical, and political perspectives to explicate economic processes from the local to the global level. His most well-known works include “Labour supplies in historical perspective: A study of the proletarianization of the African peasantry in Rhodesia” (1970), which challenged the neoclassical model of rural labor supply by bringing in socio-political analysis, and The Long Twentieth Century (1994), which integrated the theory of capital accumulation with the international relation theory of world hegemony to unveil the pattern of world capitalist development and financialization from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. He also pioneered in empirically measuring the persistent stratification in the world economy and explored the different trajectories of world capitalist development in the twenty-first century.