The Italian scholar of political economy and sociology Giovanni Arrighi, who has died of cancer aged 71, was an outstanding teacher and mentor. He will be best remembered for his trilogy of works analysing global capitalism, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (1994); Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (with his wife, Beverly Silver, 1999); and Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (2007).
In these works, he identified four systemic cycles of accumulation in the history of global capitalism. The systemic crises that produced such reorganisations, he argued, were preceded by phases of financial expansion. Appealing to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, he provided a compelling account of power shifts within the inter-state system from the 16th-century Italian city states to 17th-century Netherlands, to 19th-century Britain and then to the US after 1945. He opened up a fertile debate on a possible future hegemonic shift towards China and east Asia and on understanding Chinese governance and its long history of internal dissent.
Giovanni was born in Milan into what he described as a "bourgeois" family. Both his father and grandfather ran businesses and when the former died in 1956, Giovanni tried unsuccessfully to keep the business afloat before going to work on the shopfloor in one of his grandfather's firms. Meanwhile, he studied economics at Bocconi University, Milan. His thesis on shopfloor efficiency convinced him that the economic theory he had been taught was irrelevant to production and distribution. This conclusion was reinforced when he took up a position teaching economics in the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1963. His studies on development and labour in southern Africa led him into the fields of political economy and comparative historical sociology. The anti-racist commitments formed there lasted for the rest of his life.
Expelled from Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in 1966, he spent three exciting years in Dar es Salaam, in what is now Tanzania, where he met an extraordinary group of scholars and activists such as Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, Andre-Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein and John Saul, all of whom, along with Giovanni, were to make major contributions to understanding global capitalism.
Returning to a position in Italy in 1969, Giovanni became enmeshed in politics. A founding member of the "Gruppo-Gramsci" that sought to link shopfloor workers with intellectuals, he also furthered his studies of labour and economic development, particularly in Calabria, southern Italy. The Geometry of Imperialism, a seminal article on crisis theory, written for workers, and another on labour supplies in historical perspective were products of this period.
His move to the State University of New York at Binghamton in the late 1970s proved decisive. He joined the world systems theory group at the Braudel Centre founded by Wallerstein, and wrote The Long Twentieth Century.
In 1998 he moved to Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, where he chaired the department of sociology. While researching Adam Smith in Beijing, he brought together prominent east Asian scholars and graduate students with the aim of challenging stereotypical images of China and placing its long history into a more coherent global perspective.
Giovanni had the uncanny ability to extract clear patterns from the swirling complexities of the historical record. He also possessed the scholarly integrity and patience to marshal compelling evidence for his arguments, thereby establishing his reputation as one of the greatest comparative historical sociologists. His unbounded courtesy and generosity towards his colleagues (particularly those with whom he disagreed) and, above all, to his many students, will be missed.
History, he was fond of remarking, is never a done deal, any more than the frameworks we devise to understand it. He had, he once told me, only two regrets: that he had not learned to play the piano or to converse in Mandarin. Yet he taught us to think about China in a radically different way and his ability to play exquisitely on the infinite variations in the history of capitalist accumulation will long echo in our ears.
Giovanni is survived by Beverly and Andrea, a son by a former marriage.
• Giovanni Arrighi, political economist and sociologist, born 7 July 1937; died 18 June 2009