Arrighi was a political economist heavily influenced by Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci. While teaching in Tanzania, he observed the ways in which labor influences colonialism and revolutions. His more recent works are concerned with the recent shift in economic power from the West to China. Italian sociologist. 

"I re-conceptualized the long twentieth century as consisting of three phases: (1) the financial expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the course of which the structures of the “old” British regime were destroyed and those of the “new” US regime were created; (2) the material expansion of the 1950s and 1960s, during which the dominance of the “new” US regime translated in a world-wide expansion of trade and production; and (3) the current financial expansion, in the course of which the structures of the now “old” US regime are being destroyed and those of a “new” regime are presumably being created."

- The Long Twentieth Century