(May Book-Blog) Where the Big Predators Roam: Market Forces as Alien Gods, inspired by Giovanni Arrighi's The Long 20th Century
Giovanni Arrighi's The Long 20th Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times is a book in the tradition of World-Systems Theory and economics (of the broadly Marxian lineage), chronicling how cycles of capitalist development have shaped economic and political structures over the six centuries prior to its 1994 original release. I didn't love it as a book, but hoo boy has it given me an idea. Post should be about 40 mins if you read it all, though a lot of the mechanics are probably skimmable unless you're using them in play. In a first for the book-blogs, this isn't the edition I read (the reprinted 2010 version with a Currier and Ives printing of the Brooklyn Bridge ) but the abstract Paul Klee art of the original cover fits the rather cosmic topic of this post better Arrighi argues at considerable and sometimes exhausting length - the book is quite dry - that there have been four great cycles in the growth of capital and the capitalist world-system. In each...
