The Moral Ecology of Markets: Assessing Claims about Markets and Justice Book

This is a great work of history but I have some caveats. I have very little ill to say about anything actually contained in the volume, it was extremely insightful and as someone trying to develop a Marxist understanding of history it was invaluable work of historical materialism. Wallerstein is phenomenal at developing the concrete relationships and tensions that would drive the leading edge of the ascent of western Europe onto the course that we recognize today. He shows how economic pressures created drives that sometimes ran afoul of political or ideological complications and grand political politics either became mired in economic pitfalls or achieved at least a temporary coherence.

My biggest disappointment was with the lack of attention paid to the victims of exploitation and colonialism. It was especially disappointing because I knew that the author was supposed to be an expert on African independence movements and I expected substantially more development of at least the economic and political structures that were put into place in order to bring these populations into the European world economy. I'm certainly no historian so these may be the tics of an academic who doesn't want to retreat ground very familiar to more expert readers (and Wallerstein certainly doesn't seem to be particularly interested in expressing anything reminiscent of agitprop in his writing) but that seems to me to be more of a failure of a bourgeois academia, but whatever. In any case, I had the great fortune to be passed several chapters from Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism which were in a similar style of historical analysis but were much more satisfying in their treatment of the historical modes of oppression and colonialism. It is something I am very strongly considering tackling next.