Giovanni Arrighi (7 July 1937 – 18 June 2009) was an Italian economist, sociologist and world-systems analyst, from 1998 a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

Arrighi began his career teaching at the University College of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and later at the University College of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania,[1] where he developed arguments about how the labor supply and labor resistance affected the development of colonialism and national liberation movements, and where he met Immanuel Wallerstein with whom he late collaborated on a number of research projects.

In 1979 Arrighi joined Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins as a professor of sociology at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at Binghamton University.

[citation needed] Although in many ways intellectually close to Immanuel Wallerstein, Arrighi tends to ascribe greater significance to the recent shift in economic power to East Asia.

[citation needed] A retrospective interview by David Harvey on his intellectual trajectory, The Winding Paths of Capital, was published in the March/April 2009 issue of New Left Review.