Search

Recent research and policy advice by international development organizations have, by their own account, sought to reverse a prior neglect of conditions in agriculture and rural areas. In pursuit of this, they have developed a vision of dynamic but incremental development in rural areas, anchored in a smallholder‐based and economically diversified market economy. This vision, articulated in the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report and continuing to animate research and policy advice today, presents itself as a solution to persistent poverty in the world's least developed countries. This paper adopts a historical sociological lens to use the case of Japan, in the period from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the opening decades of the twentieth, to assess how realistic this vision is. This analysis shows that the lessons of Japan's experience are chastening for this vision of rural development. The mechanisms of growth in Japan were remarkably similar to those advertised by the World Bank's vision. However, its rural economic dynamism was based on deep socioeconomic inequalities and brought improved material conditions and greater economic security to agricultural households only with excruciating slowness, if at all. Rather than demonstrating the potential of incremental, market‐oriented rural development to offer a path towards widespread poverty reduction, Japan instead serves as a warning of this development model's limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on archival research and theoretical work to articulate the specific histories, processes, and structures of primitive accumulation in British Columbia. Such processes of accumulation appear differently here than in the comparably more well‐theorized contexts of imperial colonialisms. As we highlight the agents and infrastructures of dispossession, our research also aims to foreground the importance of agents and infrastructures of resistance. Different dispossessions generate different antagonisms, and we argue that Indigenous subjects are situated antagonistically to capital not only as laborers partially or wholly subsumed into capitalist social relations, but as Indigenous peoples as such, whose Indigeneity has been 'in the way' of development from the 1850s onward. Private property requires before all else the deterritorialization of those whose relations with the land do not revolve around its commodification. Violence against Indigenous nations, and especially Indigenous women, is not incidental to capitalist development but is a prerequisite to capitalist subsumption in the settler‐colonial context. In requiring the death of either Indigeneity or the person, capital constitutes Indigenous struggle as an antagonist, interrupting both the subsumption of labor and the circulation of capital (even as such struggles may also self‐constitute themselves in a variety of ways). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dialectical relationship between secularism and capitalism, where contradictions in this relationship are resolved on the basis of class relations, results in various state‐religion relationships in different social formations. The limitations and particularities of secularism are exaggerated in countries that arrived late at capitalism, such as Turkey. These late‐developers are subject to the dynamics of uneven and combined development. This paper borrows from Marxism, particularly the theory of uneven and combined development, in order to explore the relationship between the consolidation of the modern nation‐state and its secularisation process during the bourgeois revolution of 1923 in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approaches to the study of knowledge production on a global scale have drawn analogies from the study of political economy, namely, the theories of political economic imperialism and economic dependency, the notion of economic extractivism, and capitalism. Thus, we have the conceptualization of intellectual imperialism, academic dependency, academic extractivism and academic capitalism. This essay focuses on two of these phenomenon, that is, intellectual imperialism and academic dependency, suggesting that they refer to different, yet related, problems in global knowledge production. While intellectual imperialism is a crucial starting point for the understanding of knowledge production in the Third World/Periphery/South, it interacts with academic dependency to maintain the underdevelopment of academia in many communities worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper an attempt is made to reassess how and why the laic/Islamic dual opposition has come to be a decisive factor in the politics of Turkish capitalist modernity. The question as to whether this opposition may survive into the twenty-first century is briefly discussed. It is noted that in the aftermath of the prolonged confrontation between the emergent imagined community of the Gezi Revolt and the Islamist AKP government, a religiously neutral political identity came into sight in public life, which can be considered as the harbinger of a new kind of social individuality, one which is incommensurate with the laic/Islamic dual opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, Ellen Wood argues that the English urban landscape is characterised by lack of elegance, absence of charm and neglect of public services. She traces the origins of this impoverishment to the eradication of pre-industrial capitalist urban culture in the eighteenth century. The paper investigates the claim that English urban culture underwent a significant transformation in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century. A concern with the public magnificence of London as a means of representing the wealth and power of England is characteristic of eighteenth century treatise on urban improvement. The most influential of which, John Gwynn's London and Westminster Improved, published in 1766, draws upon the spatial linkage of economy, government and power typical of mercantilist thought. The paper argues that as the principles and practices of mercantilism were displaced by the spread of industrial capitalism and the liberal state, a concern with grandeur, elegance and embellishment in urban form was subordinated to the provision of the physical and social infrastructure necessary for the reproduction of labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of the public sphere and public space have gained increasing purchase within social history. This paper contributes to this literature by theoretically developing a critical approach to both concepts. By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin circle, as well as Marxism and Poststructuralism, the paper suggests that public spheres under capitalism are structured through the basic contradiction between capital and labour. Each public sphere may then be seen as a refracted dialogic and spatial form of this basic contradiction, and is then best viewed as a contradictory spatial entity that obtains its unique identity through different “accents” and “word signs”. The capitalist state must aim to regulate, through governance and law, dialogue within a public sphere. By focusing on the Chartist demonstration at Hyde Park, London in 1855, I show how these theories can be employed to explore how a radical social movement appropriated space by developing a working class public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformations in global capitalism increased rates of international migration at the turn of the twentieth century, a period also marked by the widespread popularity of scientific racism, integral nationalism, and vaunted notions of state sovereignty. This paper considers how the intersection of these factors influenced migration and citizenship policymaking in Canada and Germany. In both cases, migration was harnessed to further economic objectives while groups deemed a threat to national integration because of their putative racial or ethno-national characteristics were excluded. The resultant policies would come to define Canada and Germany’s approaches to the migration-membership dilemma for the much of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author offers a few remarks on an introductory kind of a reading of Rees Davies's Ford Lectures: The First English Empire 1093-1343, Michael Clanchy's circulated paper, and Steve Hindle's suggestion on the authors thought about the state's relation to other forms of authority as well as about the history of governance without reference to the state. Countries are not laid up in heaven says Rees, but peoples surely are: the Jews most obviously, yet does not every other people believe they are too-- and notably the English, Chinese, and Americans. Rees opines that countries are made in the hearts and minds of men and women. England was made in this manner so early and so well he maintains that its political culture could not be and perhaps never can be inclusive. It is also opined that rich farming regions must have a good deal to do with the origins of states. It is informed that the restlessness of the farmer of fields is surely where one might look for the origins of capitalism-- that scourge of the ecological balance of the world because it needs new fields and pastures green in order to strip them: capitalism's very existence being dependent on destroying one thing after another.

This paper uses a case study, the Noble Grape co-operative (a pseudonym), to illustrate the roles of social and cultural capital in both the creation of a successful agricultural producer co-operative (collective farm) in socialist Hungary and its transformation into a successful private company after 1989. It identifies both continuities in personnel, from socialist technocrat to capitalist manager, and continuities in the financial establishment with which it deals. The social origins of the key players in the transformation are compared with the existing sociological literature on changing elites in Eastern Europe, and the fate of the ordinary members who appear to be the losers in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an explanation of how and why the British working class, from being marginal to white identity in the nineteenth century, came to adopt and adapt this identity in the twentieth century. The changing position of whiteness within the symbolic constitution of capitalism is discussed. More specifically, the transition from whiteness as bourgeois identity within Victorian, relatively laissez-faire, capitalism to whiteness as a popular, or mass, identity, within the more state interventionist capitalism of the twentieth century is used to exemplify the mutable nature, and political complexities, of the relationship between working class and white identities. The paper concludes with some observations on the implications of this argument for the theory and practice of anti-racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an alternative to the modernization, dependency and bourgeois-revolution accounts of the creation of the Turkish Republic. It presents a theoretical framework for a materialist, but non-instrumentalist, analysis of the modem nation-state and the ideology of nationalism, and places the history of transformation from the patrimonial Ottoman Empire into the modem Turkish Republic within that theoretical framework. It argues that this transformation took place incrementally, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a process of Ottoman resistance-and-accommodation to globally expanding capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to re‐interpret the development of state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) in Turkey from 1923 to 1980. The article shows that the dominant strong state tradition (SST) literature, which interpreted the development of SOEs as an independent project of the state to maintain its control over society, had been unable to fully explain the development processes of SOEs because it treated the state as an external entity distinct from (and even opposing to) the social classes. Employing an alternative Poulantzian framework, the article argues that the development of SOEs in Turkey was driven by class‐industry interest and appeared as a precondition of the development of capitalism in Turkey. As such, relations between SOEs and the social classes were internal and complementary, rather than external and antagonistic. The SOEs were providing the bulk of industrial inputs and investment capital to the bourgeoisie fractions within the constitutive context of domestic capital accumulation strategies at the time (e.g. capitalist consolidation in 1930s, capitalist expansion in 1950s, capitalist expansion with duty losses in 1960s and 1970s). The SOEs were also benefiting the laboring and popular classes in terms of employment opportunities and higher wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Master and Servant Act was a law that allowed the use of penal sanction against workers for breach of contract in nineteenth century Britain. For scholars who believe that wage laborers under capitalism are free from “extra-economic” coercion, this law was an anomaly. One explanation suggests technological backwardness during the early stages of capitalism as the cause. In this paper I will challenge this account and offer an alternative explanation. As the British Empire expanded, the same law was enacted in many British colonies. If it was the process of capitalist production that rendered the Master and Servant Act necessary, this explanation should also apply to the British colonies. By focusing on Hong Kong, I show that this was not the case. Instead, I show that the use of judiciary coercion could be explained by Bourdieu's notions of doxa, habitus and field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for papers on the concepts of the end of history and historical reasoning, along with their relationship to liberal democracy and capitalism, is presented.

The article focuses upon the concept of the State theory in reference of American capitalism. It further defines state from various parameters. The state, in a capitalist society is an executive committee of the bourgeoisie. Economist John Hoffman debates that whether the state belongs at the heart of theory of politics. As Robert Alford and Roger Friedland's finds that even after writing four hundred pages of the book "Powers of Theory," they were clueless about the suitable definition of the state and it still remains a remarkably ambiguous one. In "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution," Charles Beard proposed a thesis, whose general thrust was simple and provocative, and which quickly proved to be very popular among the progressive historians of his time: he maintained that the constitution was drafted by members of the upper class to serve the interests of a privileged minority, and was ratified through an undemocratic process. More specifically, Beard contended that it was the commercial faction of the upper class, wealthy merchants and public security holders, as against the landed faction who by writing this new constitution, produced a document that protected, served, and furthered their class interests.

From the period 2000 to 2005, Bolivia experienced a profound political convulsion as social movements rose‐up to contest the neoliberal model of development. This was most markedly inspired by contestation over the control of natural resources, namely water and gas. The period of mobilisation brought down two successive governments and propelled the MAS, led by Evo Morales, to power in 2006. This period also helped to revalorise indigenous culture and held out hope for a reimagining of power, politics and political economy. The transformation that would result from this uprising, effectively re‐founded Bolivia as a "pluri‐national state," recognising 36 separate national groups with their own languages and cultures. This was, furthermore, a process based on the convergence of national‐popular and indigenous struggles. However, following his disputed election for a fourth successive term in office, Evo Morales and other key leaders of the MAS have gone into exile, while right‐wing, revanchist social forces are increasingly prominent. How do we begin to make sense of this turn of events, which include the swirling combinations of reactionary capitalist interests but also left‐indigenous critiques of development from marginalised sectors? In this article, I argue that we need to situate Bolivia's indigenous social movements in the struggle between Pachakuti (an Andean term referring to the desire to turn the world upside down and forge a new time and space) and passive revolution (a state‐led process of modernisation that seeks to expand capitalist social relations whilst incorporating limited demands from below, ultimately diffusing their radical potential). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article restores early colonial Hong Kong to a key role in the history of capitalism and the integration of the Pacific. It argues that in the 1840s Hong Kong became the first identifiably capitalist Chinese society and a nexus between the China coast and both the expanding British and US imperial systems. It first demonstrates how Hong Kong's colonial regime swiftly re‐structured the island's social‐property relations and scaffolded its residents toward the ceaseless accumulation of capital. It then examines how this nascent node of Chinese capitalism integrated with the westward expansion of American capitalism amid the California Gold Rush and concludes by analyzing how Hong Kong's transpacific networks facilitated the expansion of capitalist systems into late nineteenth‐century China, most especially Shanghai. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The territorial growth and capitalist development of the United States that began in the late eighteenth century entailed ‐‐ among other things ‐‐ a massive expansion of agriculture that continued until the 1920s. Though based on private, freehold property in land there was no single pattern to this agrarian growth or to agriculture's integration into national and global flows of commodities, finance, and labor. Slave and non‐slave systems expanded in parallel until 1860, but even the destruction of slavery during the Civil War and the subsequent emergence of industrial and finance capitalism did not impose uniformity on American agriculture or undermine independent, household‐based farming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significance of the American Revolution has generally been downplayed in accounts of the rise of capitalism in the United States, especially those undertaken from a critical perspective. New approaches to the history of capitalism, however, have emphasised the centrality of the state. This article argues that re‐centring the state's role in the history of capitalism should return attention to the significant restructuring of the American state that occurred during and as a result of the revolution. At the same time, it argues that this restructuring cannot be understood historically outside the context of class‐formation of which it was a part. Revolution reshaped the new nation's capitalist class, in the near term, much more than it did the labouring classes. This reconfiguration encompassed and went beyond the innovation of new political institutions. In the long‐run it helped to underpin the particular development of capitalism in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the city of Łódź as an exceptional case of a settlement constitutive of different kinds and techniques of power typical of nineteenth century industrial capitalism. We consider Foucault's disciplinary power/biopower through the convergence of the paternalistic gaze of the factory owner, and the Tsarist rule in the Scheibler and Grohman industrial establishment and the nearby workers housing estate. The aim of this article is to investigate a specific locus of peripheral capitalism and the relations accompanying it through the Foucauldian analysis of power. We argue that unique and unstable patterns of correlation of power techniques emerged here. Power is no longer strictly related to the temporal matrix or the functional demands of capitalist production, and only temporarily ossified in contingent configurations. While Foucault's canonical theoretical premises and concepts are of explanatory value, the very relations between them become problematic when confronted with the particular entanglement in Łódź. Therefore we opt for the new paradigm of power analysis through S. J. Collier's 'topological analysis'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay evaluates two of the central problems for Cultural Studies as a field: how to generate methodologically rigorous scholarship that is also politically useful; and how to productively use models and theory in the practice of history. Beginning with conversations about the place of (disciplinary) history in Cultural Studies, this essay explores one of the legendary debates in the field: between E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and (at least in theory) Louis Althusser. Though the debate centered on the degree to which the English Civil War could be termed a 'bourgeois revolution,' Thompson's fundamental critique concerned Anderson's use of abstract models in history. However, the distinctions Thompson makes are not nearly as clear-cut in practice - particularly when we look at Ellen Meiksins Wood's attempt to intervene on Thompson's side in her 1991 book The Pristine Culture of Capitlism. Wood's understanding of capitalism relies on an abstract conceptualization of that mode of produciton that is ironically similar to that of Althusser and Anderson. Arguing this as an illustratration of the importance of explicit models and methods, the essay develops Richard Johnson's account of Marx's use of abstraction and theory in his own historical scholarship. Marx's framework is then deployed to reconsider the English Civil War in realation to a key contemporary concern: the origins of copyright and intellectual property. It ends by advocating for what I term anarchic abstraction: a conscious, rigorous, politically-committed, and dialectical attention to the order and determinations of history with no strict hierarchy given in advance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the stages of capitalist development in the Irish linen industry, with focus on their associated social structures of accumulation and spatialities. Model used for organizing the temporal dimension of capitalist development; Discussion on the continuous technological innovation in capitalism; Stages of initial proletarianization; Link between the creation of social infrastructure and control over social life.

The article focuses on the social conditions in England in the fifteenth century. According to the author, the gentrification of England took place in this century. It is the history of political, economic, social and cultural oppression by the English gentry of the English people that others have written about. The beginning of this gentry, which took over the English life, is discussed. October 1992 marked the end of the moral and economic bankruptcy of genteel English capitalism. In the first half of the fifteenth century, the English gentry were hammering the French, the English were kicked out of France in 1453. The internal colonization dates from 1450. The work peasant entered English usage in the sixteenth century, and violence existed in the English history from 1066 onwards. In 1450, the demonstrators behead a few notoriously corrupt politicians including the treasurer, and in 1536, the violence rose to a great degree. The reformation was undoubtedly the first modernist attack on a traditional culture.

Mapping productivist logic derived from the history of capitalism onto the rest of the world blocks the view of alternative systems, and their internal logic. Theories of the capitalist state can capture neither the nature of the non-capitalist states nor those states' social and economic relations. Our alternative formulation of the Ottoman state disassociates class, property, and distribution from the sphere of production and associates them with the state. Thereby, Ottoman history sheds its petrified cloak and the Ottoman state comes to life; motion, change and class conflict are things Ottoman once again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marx's account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is usually handled too narrowly in discussions of the later Middle Ages. When its full scope is taken into account the period 1300-1530 is shown to be more a period of arrested development than one of critical importance. The period 1000-1300 showed a much greater shift towards capitalism. By implication, the transition needs analysing as a much longer process than most traditional accounts imply. The article also queries the coherence of accounts of late medieval change that refuse to give autonomous weight to declining population as a cause of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows why and how the practices of Fabians in colonial Africa rested upon a socialist version of the doctrine of trusteeship. With its roots in nineteenth-century Comtean positivism, Fabian colonialism originated in an attempt to transcend the limits of Chamberlainite development as part of the radical-liberal reaction against the doctrine of development. The Labour Government's abortive colonial offensive of 1947 was unwittingly drawn out of Joseph Chamberlain's failed project to develop the 'imperial estates' of Africa through large-scale capitalist enterprise to meet British industrial need. In 1906, the Liberal Party's electoral programme for free trade defeated Chamberlain's imperial and industrial project. The Liberal victory was followed by the success of radicals and liberals in making land nationalisation and peasant production the comerstone of colonial policy for Africa. This policy confirmed a colonial formula of the early Fabians, such as Sydney Olivier, and marked out the contours for an imperial socialism that were later straightened out by, for instance, Leonard Woolf. As an African surplus population emerged most obviously in the 1930s, the key word of 'development' entered official language and did so in much the same way that it had earlier done in Britain at the turn of the century. Development came to mean state intervention for developing agriculture, and not industry, in an attempt to deal with the problem of urban unemployment and poverty. The agrarian bias of development, notwithstanding the failure of the large schemes of 1947 and the experience of white settlement in Kenya, marks the continuity of Fabian policy to the post-colonial present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the sociological aspects of upper Canada in the early 19th century. The concentration of general studies of state formation usually focuses on broader aspects such as nation states, thereby ignoring the sub-national levels. this study takes into account the unattended smaller local state formation in order to draw attention to geographic variation and historical change in struggles to represent or challenge power relations through political forms. It provides a detailed study of the local political formation in the state of York/Toronto as a White settlement, which was based on the suppression and replacement of earlier forms of communal property relations and on the exclusion of native people from their land. By the time Toronto was born, English political institutions and capitalist market relations were displacing earlier forms of decision-making, land use and economic interaction in its immediate vicinity. Local state formation then, was about struggles over how and where different groups of people can live and work.

This article addresses the problem of understanding the contradicton between the peasantry and the state. The substantive focus is the formation of the community of Namiquipa, Chihuahua, Mexico. The State, according to the familiar Engelsian conception, is something invented by a society, yet which seemingly stands apart from and abvove society. By highlighting the practical and processual dimensions of community-state relations, the State is not a structure. It is a complex of social forms organized so that it inflects all relations and ideas about relations in such a way that capitalist production and all it entails, becomes thought of and lived as natural. Among the features of Namiquipa's history which proved key terms for analyzing its relationship to the state are that Namiquipa was and is located on the frontier. The region in which it is located has been the site of what is conceived as a struggle between "civilization" and "barbarism," in which the non-Indian settlers and their descendants were and are still considered to be in the vanguard of civilization.

This article discusses the issue whether the development of commodity production in agriculture will necessarily lead to the displacement of peasant producers by more strictly capitalist forms of production. Here the author argues that no such transition can be assumed in general, nor can it be shown to be occurring in Nigeria. The first section identifies the various ways in which the peasantry are said to be transformed along capitalist lines. The second section examines conditions under which agrarian capitalism has been established, both in Europe and in Africa. It discusses attempts by governments and capitalists to subordinate peasant producers in Africa to their direction. The third section examines attempts to establish plantations, capitalist farms and state farms in Nigeria and considers what light evidence of inequalities among peasant households sheds on the possible emergence of capitalist producers from among the peasantry. Rural Nigeria, like the rest of rural Africa, is thoroughly commoditised. Producers provide for their subsistence needs by selling crops, as well as labor-power and other commodities, and only partly from their own produce. There is no self-sufficient peasant economy or peasant society; peasant households reproduce themselves through their interaction with a wider capitalist economy.

This article focuses on the confrontations of Asian, African, and Latin American cloth with commercial textiles manufactured or marketed by Europeans in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, and on what these confrontations can tell us about our theories of capitalist and non-capitalist society. To date the anthropological literature on this problem points toward two processes of interaction, one additive and one 'toxic', the latter at times resulting in a defensive response. Descriptions of toxic interactions based on the lure of unfamiliar cloth emphasize the dazzling or addictive quality of the goods being flogged. In the case of displacement, it is the resemblance of European goods to their handmade forerunners that draws attention. materials such as cotton. Labor displaced from spinning and weaving was directed towards the cultivation of this or other cash crops for European markets. Disturbances of this magnitude often provoked strong reactions. India, rich in its own cloth traditions but penetrated by Manchester cottons in the nineteenth century, supplied an outstanding example of sartorial revolt under the freedom fighter of India Mahatma Gandhi.

The article focuses on the theme of secularization and it's effect on state formation. Nineteenth-century social theorists, as far removed as Friedrich Engels and Ferdinand Tormies, shared a common perspective in which it was assumed that the development of capitalism would necessarily undermine the social and cultural bases of traditional religion. The whole ethos of capitalist culture was thought to be inimicable to the very roots of Christianity. Max Weber, for whom the rationalisation of the life-world remained a central question assumed that the destruction of both traditional and charismatic elements in social relations would lead eventually to the privatisation of all religious practice and belief. "The Foundations of Christianity" attempted to identify early Christianity as the radical protest movement of subordinate classes. While there are differences between the sociology of religion and Marxist analysis, there is nevertheless a convergence on the idea that the economic character of capitalism brings about eventually the erosion and collapse of traditional Christianity.