This collection of essays is most welcome. The main articles of Marian Malowist are collected together (and in many cases translated into English) for the first time. Malowist, who is one of the major economic historians of the twentieth century, is also a much neglected one. Of the eighteen articles here, only five were published in English-language journals that are widely read by historians and social scientists, and even these journals are primarily read by economic historians. So most scholars have been missing out on one of the most fertile and cultivated minds who have written on the central issue of our times - the wide and widening gulf between the core and the periphery, the North and the South, western and eastern Europe (Immanuel Wallerstein).