This is an admirable book that will be engaging to a wide audience, perhaps even a wider one than the author anticipated. Gregory Williams has written a joint intellectual biography of two of the major scholars of the Left who explored the origins of the global capitalist economy and the politics of its maintenance after World War II. Immanuel Wallerstein and Perry Anderson were big thinkers, and the author places the stories of their work in the context of current debates within the discipline of international political economy over the value of large questions and grand theory. Williams also addresses a larger group of scholars on the Left who will be interested in the contrasting conclusions that Anderson and Wallerstein reached, not only about the origins of globalizing industrial capitalism but also about the most effective ways it could be resisted and about the limits of the more humane futures that might be achieved. Activist scholars across the political spectrum will be interested in the book’s discussion of the opportunities for an engaged scholarly life in a period when the expectations and norms of the academy were similar to those today but other opportunities were quite different. Even though Anderson is still active in his eighties, and Wallerstein died only in 2019, their world was one of traditional print media and the habits of engagement that they encouraged. That difference from the internet age, in itself, makes their stories fascinating.

Williams begins in the 1930s, the interwar decade when both men were born, Wallerstein first: he was born in New York, the rising capital of the economic world. For that reason, even though he never strayed long from the city of his birth, the world came to him. Wallerstein was born into a Jewish family, and to be Jewish and to be from New York in the years after Hitler was to be on the Left and to be concerned with the oppressed everywhere. That is what put Wallerstein on a plane to Dakar for the 1951 World Assembly of Youth, the first of many trips to the continent.

Anderson’s internationalism had a different source. Even though he was born in the world’s previous capital, London, his family and his childhood residences were as polyglot and international as Wallerstein’s New York: he lived in China, California, and Colorado—all before returning to Britain for boarding school at the end of World War II. If the Anderson family had any national allegiance, it was to Ireland, and that was really just his father’s allegiance to the radicalism of Sein Fein; in William’s words, “British Marxism, not nationalism” (p. 24).

Williams continues chronologically through seven chapters, each with separate sections on his two subjects. This format helps emphasize the fact that, despite the similarity of the intellectual communities that influenced them, the intellectual questions and moral purposes that motivated them, and the events that emboldened or unnerved them, the two men led very separate lives. We learn about the men’s differing elite educations, the ways they were galvanized by the events of 1968, Wallerstein’s search for a university base in which his resulting “world-system” approach could be developed, and Anderson’s reshaping of New Left Review to serve what he saw as an emerging transnational revolutionary historical bloc led by the industrial working class but rooted in the radical movements throughout the Third World. Then came the shocks of Thatcher and Reagan with their successful challenges to working-class organizations throughout the Global North, the hope of Poland’s Solidarity movement, the fall of the Soviet system, and the grim Eastern European neoliberalism that followed. The crushing of China’s democratic movement in Tiananmen Square was just as horrible to the two Western socialists as was the destructiveness of the United States’ hyperpower at the beginning of this century, where the book ends.

With each turn of the story, Williams provides a concise, accurate, and surprisingly sophisticated summary of the ways in which the authors’ views of the history of the global political economy changed. They did so in response not only to the unfolding of their own research programs (both planned, but never completed, multivolume works beginning with events in the distant past that were meant to be taken to the present) but also to the events used to structure the book. In addition, Williams gives us two chapter-length “intermissions” that place what he sees as each author’s greatest contributions in their immediate historical context.

This exposition of the two author’s worldviews is Williams’s own greatest contribution. This is a book that I would recommend to any student seriously interested in understanding either Anderson’s or Wallerstein’s projects or both.

That said, there are some minor problems with Williams’s account that I would caution students to consider. One has to do with the limited attention paid to the degree to which both authors were shaped by ideas originally formulated by scholars and activists from the Global South. Williams mentions Anderson’s early studies of Portuguese colonialism (p. 34) but does not consider how Anderson’s African sources contributed to his own ideas. Similarly, Williams overlooks Wallerstein’s 1971 discussion of what can be learned from Amilcar Cabral (“The Lessons of the PAIGC,” Africa Today 18 [ 3], 1971), which may be key to the development of the world-system’s perspective. Williams also asserts, I believe incorrectly, that the world-system’s theorist attributed his understanding of “unequal exchange” to Karl Polanyi (p. 96), ignoring the lively contemporary debate among scholars of development with whom Wallerstein was closely involved.

Nonetheless, Williams is correct in his conclusion that Wallerstein and Anderson’s greatest similarity was their focus on social totalities, on the entirety of the global political economy, whether it is the endpoint of the economic globalization created by industrial capitalism as forecast by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto or the more contingent unfolding of a “world-system” that emerged in the commerce and politics of early modern northern Europe. He is also correct that his subjects’ concern with the world’s most outrageous inequities make Anderson and Wallerstein representative of a much larger group of scholars and activists. This makes Contesting the Global Order part of a growing genre of intellectual history that examines the ideas of women and men from the metropole with deep experience of the colonized world who attempt to understand and represent that world to potentially sympathetic people with similar backgrounds to their own. Nancy L. Cott’s recent study of the interwar American journalists Dorothy Thompson, James Vincent Sheean, John Gunther, and Rayna Raphaelson (Fighting Words, 2020) falls into this category. Given the significance of its subject and the clarity of its presentation, Williams’s book deserves to be on any recent list of the best in the genre.