![cartographer hand of fate 2 cartographer hand of fate 2](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KncnIEqbUCk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Arrighi joined the faculty in the late 1970s and played an instrumental role in both the graduate programme and the related Fernand Braudel Center, as well as running various collective research groups. footnote 3 Wallerstein and Hopkins, sympathetic to the students who took over Columbia University in 1968 (both served on the ad hoc faculty committee), later migrated in the 1970s to Binghamton University in New York, which became for a time the centre of world-systems studies.
![cartographer hand of fate 2 cartographer hand of fate 2](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c7/73/ce/c773ceccd3f082c666e8178920b3feaf.jpg)
![cartographer hand of fate 2 cartographer hand of fate 2](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/POc5o0JUE1M/maxresdefault.jpg)
footnote 2 The world-systems perspective itself-challenging the dominance of post-war modernization theory-came out of the movements of the 1960s and brought together a fruitful synthesis of Marxism, Third World radicalism and critical currents in social science, from the work of the French Annales geohistorians to that of the German historical school. Along with Immanuel Wallerstein and the late Terence Hopkins, Arrighi was one of the originators and foremost proponents of the world-systems analysis of European domination, global capitalism, world income inequalities and ‘development’. footnote 1 In his sustained examinations of the longue durée of capitalism, from its late medieval and early modern origins right up to the present, arguably no intellectual has developed a more formidable analysis of the current crisis than Giovanni Arrighi. O ne of the more telling features of the present conjuncture is the scarcity of analyses able squarely to place today’s global turbulence in geohistorical perspective. Future generations will look back on him as one of the finest lights of the period through which he lived. Moving and challenging, it makes clear why he is mourned by friends, colleagues, pupils and admirers from all over the world-East Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and North America. Conducted by David Harvey, it was made possible with the help of his companion Beverly Silver, co-author of Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, the second volume of his trilogy on the origin of our times, and can be read as his testament. In the final months of his life, he composed a striking Afterword to the new edition of The Long Twentieth Century, out in early 2010, and offered a panoramic view of his ideas, and his life, in the magisterial interview we published in the January–February issue of this year. He faced that prospect with an unsurpassed calm, energy and courage. In the autumn of last year, he learnt that, in all probability, he was mortally ill. Personal friendship and political loyalty were unshakeable values for him. Scanning one decade after another came ‘The Political Economy of Rhodesia’ in the mid sixties ( nlr i/39) ‘Towards a Theory of Capitalist Crisis’ in the seventies ( nlr i/111) the arresting paradoxes of ‘Marxist Century, American Century’ at the close of the eighties ( nlr i/179) his famous analysis of ‘World Income Inequalities and the Future of Socialism’ in the nineties ( nlr i/189) and his return to the fate of Africa in this decade ( ‘The African Crisis’, nlr 15), when ‘Political Economy of Global Turbulence’ ( nlr 20) and ‘Hegemony Unravelling’ ( nlr 32 and 33) became central parts of his last book, Adam Smith in Beijing. His texts in nlr are so many landmarks in the history of the journal. A thinker of exceptional warmth, integrity and largeness of spirit, Arrighi drew on personal experience of struggles in both the Third and First Worlds-the movements for national liberation in Africa, and the great labour insurgencies of Italy-in the sixties, and subsequent deep engagement with the trajectory of the two leading powers of the present global order, America and China. We publish below a tribute to him from a pupil, Tom Reifer, which gives a measure of his achievement. Of the minds produced by the international left in the second half of the twentieth century, few have been the equal, in historical imagination, architectonic scope and conceptual clarity, to Giovanni Arrighi, whose work will be read and reflected on for the rest of this century.