One of the more telling features of the present conjuncture is the scarcity of analyses able squarely to place today’s global turbulence in geohistorical perspective.footnote¹ In his sustained examinations of the longue durée of capitalism, from its late medieval and early modern origins right up to the present, arguably no intellectual has developed a more formidable analysis of the current crisis than Giovanni Arrighi. Along with Immanuel Wallerstein and the late Terence Hopkins, Arrighi was one of the originators and foremost proponents of the world-systems analysis of European domination, global capitalism, world income inequalities and ‘development’.footnote² The world-systems perspective itself—challenging the dominance of post-war modernization theory—came out of the movements of the 1960s and brought together a fruitful synthesis of Marxism, Third World radicalism and critical currents in social science, from the work of the French Annales geohistorians to that of the German historical school.footnote³ Wallerstein and Hopkins, sympathetic to the students who took over Columbia University in 1968 (both served on the ad hoc faculty committee), later migrated in the 1970s to Binghamton University in New York, which became for a time the centre of world-systems studies. Arrighi joined the faculty in the late 1970s and played an instrumental role in both the graduate programme and the related Fernand Braudel Center, as well as running various collective research groups.

The range and scope of Arrighi’s work—from his analysis of settler capitalism in Southern Africa to Adam Smith in Beijing, which traces the rise of Chinese-led East Asia as the new workshop of the world—is an astonishing achievement. Moreover, this analysis was accompanied by a generosity of spirit towards his intellectual interlocutors that had few equals: Giovanni thrived on spirited discussion and debate, within a framework of mutual solidarity. An inspiration to many, it was thus with great sadness that the news of his passing on June 18, 2009, after a year-long battle with cancer, was received by scholars, activists, friends, former students and associates around the world.

Born in Milan in 1937, Giovanni’s political trajectory was decisively shaped by the anti-fascist attitudes of his family, in a period that included the Nazi occupation of northern Italy, the emergence of the partisan resistance and the arrival of the Allies. Originally trained in neo-classical economics in Italy and then employed in a series of different business enterprises, he set out for what was then Rhodesia in the early 1960s. As William Martin noted in an essay underscoring the importance of scholars from C. L. R. James to W. E. B. Du Bois in adumbrating the perspective, ‘world-systems analysis, like the capitalist world-economy, has deep African roots’.footnote⁴ Arrighi’s migration to Africa was, in his own words, ‘a true intellectual rebirth’; it was where he began his ‘long march from neo-classical economics to comparative-historical sociology’.footnote⁵ Here, along with John Saul, Martin Legassick and others, he developed a pioneering politico-economic analysis focusing on the contradictions engendered by the proletarianization and dispossession of the Southern African peasantry.

Rhodesia was also where Giovanni also met his student—subsequently a friend and colleague—Bhasker Vashee, an African of Indian descent who later became a long-time director of the Transnational Institute. Indeed, Giovanni and Bhasker were cellmates, jailed for their anti-colonial activities; the former was deported about a week after his arrest, the latter only freed from solitary confinement after a year-long campaign to secure his release. By 1966 Giovanni had moved to Dar es Salaam, at a time when Tanzania was hosting national liberation movements from all over Africa. Here, Arrighi’s colleagues included a wide range of radical scholar activists, including Walter Rodney, Saul and Wallerstein.

Giovanni subsequently returned to Italy to teach and was involved in autonomista movements, helping to found Gruppo Gramsci. By the late 1970s he had turned his sights towards the analysis of imperialism, completing The Geometry of Imperialism in 1978; it was republished with a new postscript in 1983. It was around this time that Giovanni began to reconceptualize this work as a bridge towards what would become arguably his most significant book, The Long Twentieth Century (1994)—widely considered the most important contemporary work devoted to the longue durée of world capitalism. Here, drawing on the work of Smith, Marx, Gramsci, Polanyi and Braudel—including the latter’s notion of capitalism as the anti-market—Arrighi argues that capitalism evolved over a series of ‘long’ centuries, within which recurrent combinations of governmental and business organizations have led successive systemic cycles of accumulation. These cycles are characterized by material expansions of the capitalist world-system; when these reach their limits, capital moves into the realm of high finance, where interstate competition for mobile capital provides some of the greatest opportunities for financial expansions.

The obverse side of such expansions has been the reciprocal stimulus of military industrialization and haute finance in the restructuring of the world-system that accompanies the ‘autumns’ of cycles and the hegemonic structures of which they are a part. Financial expansions initially lead to a temporary efflorescence of the declining hegemonic power. Eventually, however, they give way simultaneously to increasing systemic chaos and to organizational revolutions in a newly emerging hegemonic bloc of business and governmental institutions. These are ‘endowed with ever-more extensive and complex organizational capabilities to control the social and political environment of capital accumulation on a global scale’; a process which, as Arrighi noted, has clear ‘built-in limits’.footnote⁶

Of particular significance here is the fact that, unlike Wallerstein but like Braudel, Arrighi located the origins of world capitalism not in the territorial states of Europe during the long sixteenth century, but in the Italian city-states of the thirteenth and fourteenth, in what was a regional forerunner of the modern world-system. He then traced the alliance of Genoese capital and Spanish power that produced the great voyages of discovery, before going on to analyse the changing fortunes of Dutch, British and us hegemonies, their respective systemic cycles of accumulation and, finally, the challenges posed to us power by the East Asian economic renaissance, today joined by China. In a series of subsequent works that completed what Arrighi called an unplanned trilogy—Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, co-written with Beverly Silver, and Adam Smith in Beijing, as well as in a series of articles and an updated version of Long Twentieth Century, Arrighi carried this powerful analysis forward to the present. footnote⁷