Giovanni Arrighi - Biography

Biography

Arrighi was born in Italy in 1937. He received his Laurea in economics from the Bocconi University in 1960. Arrighi began his career teaching at the University College of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and later at the University College of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. During this period he developed arguments about how the labor supply and labor resistance affected the development of colonialism and national liberation movements. It was there that he met Immanuel Wallerstein, later a collaborator on a number of research projects. After returning to Italy in 1969, Arrighi and others formed the "Gruppo Gramsci" in 1971. In 1979 Arrighi joined Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins as a professor of sociology at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at SUNY Binghamton. It was during this time that the Fernand Braudel Center became known as the main center of world-systems analysis, attracting scholars from all over the world.

His most famous work was a trilogy on the origins and transformations of global capitalism, which began in 1994 with a book that reinterpreted the evolution of capitalism, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. The book is a classic in the field, published in at least ten languages. Giovanni completed a second edition of The Long Twentieth Century in 2009. In 1999, he published Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System with Beverly Silver, and in 2007, he published Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, comparing Western and East Asian economic development and exploring China’s rise as an economic world power.

Although in many ways intellectually close to Immanuel Wallerstein, Arrighi tends to ascribe greater significance to the recent shift in economic power to East Asia. He also emphasized his debt to Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi and Joseph Schumpeter.

Arrighi died in his home in Baltimore on June 18, 2009 at 11 a.m. He had been diagnosed with cancer in July 2008. He is survived by his wife and partner in scholarship, Professor Beverly Silver, and his son Andrea Arrighi.

A retrospective interview by David Harvey on his intellectual trajectory, The Winding Paths of Capital, was published in the March/April 2009 issue of New Left Review.