Paolo Tedesco teaches history at the University of Tübingen. His main research interests include the social and economic history of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, comparative agrarian history, the fate of the peasantry across different types of societies, and historical materialism.
After taking part in Italy’s radical left-wing upsurge, Franco Ramella turned to writing about the early history of Italian capitalism and working-class resistance. His brilliant work has strong echoes of E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.
Historian Jairus Banaji has developed a highly original perspective on the history of capitalism that stresses the importance of commercial capital. His work is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how the global economic system took shape.
Class societies didn’t begin with capitalism: the ancient and medieval worlds had their own systems of exploitation. Marxist historians have set out to explain how those systems worked — and what their eventual demise tells us about what might lie ahead.
Historian Walter Scheidel claims to have found the surprising secret of Europe’s rise to world domination: the collapse of the Roman Empire. Scheidel’s work is an impressive, globe-trotting feat of scholarship, but his argument ultimately fails to convince.