Global Power and Local Struggles in Developing Countries: An Introduction

Abstract

This volume explains how global political and economic power influences local struggles and social organization in diverse sites in developing, or Global South, countries. It is inspired by the fortieth anniversary -2022 -of the first publication of the seminal Europe and the People without History (epwh) by Eric R. Wolf (Wolf 1982), while 2023 marks the centenary of Wolf's birth. The title 'Europe and the People without History' immediately provokes. When published, it challenged dominant contemporary thought that history was only made by powerful Europeans and forced answers to questions like: How can people not have history? What people are we talking about? And what role do people without history play in the making of our own understandings and histories of the world? The phrase 'People without History' consequently serves to alert and chastise established understandings, which for Wolf were enacted and supported by generations of public officials, traders, opportunists, and scholars across the social sciences. This mixed group tended to share a view that people in peripheral lands -a long way away from their own perceived centres of civilization -simply did not contribute to global progress and were thus insignificant in world history. Moreover, such people were not only geographically peripheral but occupied overshadowed and lesser positions in evolutionary terms than those enjoyed by their Western counterparts -who, in turn, enjoyed the privilege of writing history from their own perspectives. The title thus directly challenged ideas of modernization and global development that remain popular today, of 'the West versus the Rest' and the 'North versus the South' , where the West and North are understood as engines of global development, while the 'Rest' need to mimic the North/ West developmental trajectory to reach desirable Northern or Western levels of 'progress' . A key aim of this volume is to challenge such perspectives with a range of original ethnographic investigations from the Global South, and to explain how local, national, and global political and economic development produces, and is dependent on, diverse groups of 'People without History' .epwh was a ground-breaking scholarly enterprise for many reasons, not least because it situated local contexts and the agency of people in peripheral