This is a feisty and extremely intelligent book. It is urgent reading for anyone committed to understanding and improving the world.

- Immanuel Wallerstein, Fernand Braudel Center, Yale University,

A critical analysis of postmodernist and postcolonial thought and theories of globalization. Dirlik makes a powerful argument against both older social-science functionalism and current culturalism and stresses to what extent Eurocentrism is not just a discourse but is embedded in structures of economic, political, and social power. Without capitalism, Eurocentrism would have been just another ethnocentrism. Dirlik’s essays constitute an important corrective to aspects of recent postmodernist and postcolonialist literature.

- Georg Iggers, SUNY, Buffalo,