Eric Wolf

"Our methods were becoming more sophisticated, but their yield seemed increasingly commonplace. To stem a descent into triviality, I thought, we needed to search out the causes of the present in the pa…"

"The rise of industrial capitalism thus rested on the maintenance of slavery in another part of the world, even though that slavery was no longer dependent on the continuation of the slave trade."

"There may be "pie in the sky when you die" but how the pie is dished out on the ground has considerable existential relevance."

"Even the slave owner is restricted in his ability to manipulate his labor supply, for he must protect his investment in slaves by feeding them during times when they do not labor. In contrast, capital…"

"I acknowledge my debt to Marxian thought without apology."

"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 p…"

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

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