"The essence of capital is its ability to mobilize social labor by buying labor power and setting it to work. This requires a market in which the capacity of human beings to work can be bought and sold like any other commodity: buyers of labor power offer wages, which sellers accept in return for a commodity, their own labor."

“In order to understand what the world would become, we must first know what it was.”

“To understand how caste works concretely, one must, however, look beyond kinship organization and ritual idiom to the political economy of caste.”

“The development of industrial capitalism did not move in a smooth ascending line.”

“Before capitalist relations could come to dominate industrial production, a set of related changes was required to guarantee the new order. The state had to be transformed from a tributary structure to a structure of support for capitalist enterprise.”

“Wealth in the hands of the holders of wealth is not capital until it controls the means of production, buys labor power, and puts it to work, continuously expanding surpluses by intensifying productivity through an ever-rising curve of technological inputs.”

“Although I wrote as an anthropologist rather than as a professional historian, I think history matters. It is also important to understand how an why these systems develop and extend their sway over people, and I located the rationale in the ways power and the economy sustain and drive each other on.”