Bio: (1937-2009) Italian political economist and sociologist. Giovanni Arrighi received his doctorate in economics from the University of Milan. He worked and taught in Africa from 1963 to 1969. While working in Africa, Arrighi met Immanuel Wallerstein, with whom he later collaborated on the topics of international capitalism and world-systems theory. After returning to Italy, he formed the Gramsci Group, and in 1979 became a professor of sociology at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economics, Historical Systems and Civilizations at the University of Binghamton, and in 1998 became a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

He wrote the book Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (1973) based on his experience in Africa. In this book, Arrighi developed the theory that labor supply and workers' resistance influenced colonialism and national liberation movements in Africa. Colonial capitalists could not force Africans to work as wage earners on plantations, in mines, or as market producers, as long as the domicile population owned the means of production, which allowed them to produce for their own needs. The colonizers, therefore, took away the land from the African population, forcibly forced it to work, and forced it to pay taxes in colonial currency.

In his book Geometry of Imperialism (1978), Arrighi states that imperialism, which is a war between capitalist countries, is a necessary consequence of the transformation of classical capitalism into monopoly and financial capitalism. Arrighi showed that at the end of the twentieth century, there was an increase in the working class at the world level, although, at the same time, there was a numerical decline in the working class in rich countries. Workers in developed countries are facing declining wages and increasing competition due to immigrants willing to work for lower wages.

In his book The Long Twentieth Century (1994), Arrighi deals with the history of international capitalism from the 14th century to the present day. He believes that financial capital has been a central component of the world system all that time. Current cash flows have the typical characteristics of very long "systemic cycles of accumulation". The new imperialism of rich states, which emerged in the twentieth century, contains two connected logics: the territorial logic of political power and the molecular logic of capitalist accumulation. That is why war is a means by which the United States ensures its hegemony over energy resources and thus increases its importance in the world economy.

Main works

Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (1973);

Geometry of Imperialism (1978);

Dynamics of Global Crisis (1982);

Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World System (1990);

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (1994);

Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-first Century (2007).