Ellen Meiksins Wood, for many years Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Canada, was an editor of the New Left Review from 1984 to 1992, and, co-editor of Monthly Review from 1997 to 2000. She is the author of numerous books, including The Retreat from Class (1986; reissued in 1998, with a new introduction by the author), which won the Deutscher Prize; The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (1992); Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (1995), andThe Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (2002), as well as several others on the history of Western political though and ancient Greek democracy. Her work has been translated into many languages, European and non-European.
