This book brings together various contributions I have written for the
elaboration of a global history. They have been published in French
and English in different periodicals and on different dates, some of
them a while ago.1 Their collection into one volume highlights their
originality. First, because this enables the reader to identify
precisely the theses that I put forward in my early critique of «
Eurocentric » history (see my book Eurocentrism, 1989), which still
predominates the « modern » capitalist ideology that shapes
contemporary social thought. And, second, because I propose to treat
these « questions of the past » not as separate from the challenges of
the present or from the alternatives for possible futures, including,
indeed, the question of a « socialism for the 21st century ». I was an
early reader of Marx. I very carefully read Capital and the other
works by Marx and Engels that were available in French during my
university studies between 1948 and 1955. I also decided to read the
authors who were criticised by Marx (including Smith, Ricardo, Bastiat
and Say). All this certainly gave me the utmost intellectual pleasure
and convinced me of the power of Marx's thought. But at the same time,
I remained unsatisfied. For I had posed one central question, that of
the « under-development » (a new term beginning to be widely used) of
the societies of contemporary Asia and Africa, for which I had found
no answers in Marx. The texts that were published for the first time
in French in 1960, the Grundrisse, also left me unsatisfied.
