My recommendations list on the Amazon knows me better than I know myself:
Perverse Egalitarianism
an otherwise excellent blog
My recommendations list on the Amazon knows me better than I know myself:
Perverse Egalitarianism 
I’ve read the Arrighi book. It’s excellent. Written from the Braudel/Annales school tradition. This is an excellent supplement to Immanuel Wallerstein’s similar analyses of capitalist expansion over the past several hundred years in his multi-volume The Modern World-System.
Thanks, Jeff. David Harvey is fond of it too, it’s on my list (w/ his Adam Smith in Beijing).