[1] The book begins in 1400 with a description of the trade routes a world traveller might have encountered, the people and societies they connected, and the civilizational processes trying to incorporate them.
Wolf differs from world-systems theory in that he sees the growth of Europe until the late eighteenth century operating in a tributary framework, and not capitalism.
He examines the way that colonial state structures were created to protect tributary populations involved in the silver, fur and slave trades.
The final section of the book deals with the transformation in these global networks as a result of the growth of capitalism with the industrial revolution.
[2] Where World Systems theory had little to say about the periphery, Wolf's emphasis is on the people "without history" (i.e. not given a voice in western histories) and on how they were active participants in the creation of new cultural and social forms emerging in the context of commercial empire.