W hen I first read the key works of John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett—Marx’s Ecology,Marx and Nature,Marxism and Ecological Economics, and assorted articles—during the unusually hot Swedish summer of 2006, they struck me with the force of a thunderbolt. I had read Marx for more than a decade by then. I had just realized how catastrophic a threat global warming is and how, as the saying now goes, it changes everything. But I was fumbling for links between socialism and ecology, and I had never noticed any particularly environmental messages in the writings of Marx (due partly to flaws in Swedish translations; partly to the general preconception of Marx as a thinker concerned with other matters; and partly also, to be sure, to my own previous indifference). And then here were two scholars who demonstrated how it all fits together. Never missing a good quotation, Burkett and Foster relayed one striking flash of insight after another from Marx—and, not to be forgotten, Engels; integrated them into an overarching framework of ecological Marxism; and explained, with the greatest lucidity and precision, how a tendency to environmental degradation inheres in the accumulation of capital. It was an exhilarating, even liberating experience, because it allowed someone like me to throw myself into the nascent climate movement, organize, study ecology, and sharpen—not blunt—the critique of capitalism. Many other readers of Foster and Burkett have felt the same. Little wonder, then, that two scholars and the school they represent have also come in for a fair amount of criticism. With Marx and the Earth: An Anti-critique, we now have their comprehensive rebuttal and defense of (their own interpretation of) the ecological thought of Marx and Engels. It should be noted already here, however, that the Anti-critique makes no mention of what is undoubtedly the most influential attack on the school: that of Jason W. Moore. In Capitalism and the Web of Life and article piled upon article, he accuses Foster in particular of peddling “Cartesian dualism”
{"title":"For a Fallible and Lovable Marx: Some Thoughts on the Latest Book by Foster and Burkett","authors":"Andreas Malm","doi":"10.1086/693903","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693903","url":null,"abstract":"W hen I first read the key works of John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett—Marx’s Ecology,Marx and Nature,Marxism and Ecological Economics, and assorted articles—during the unusually hot Swedish summer of 2006, they struck me with the force of a thunderbolt. I had read Marx for more than a decade by then. I had just realized how catastrophic a threat global warming is and how, as the saying now goes, it changes everything. But I was fumbling for links between socialism and ecology, and I had never noticed any particularly environmental messages in the writings of Marx (due partly to flaws in Swedish translations; partly to the general preconception of Marx as a thinker concerned with other matters; and partly also, to be sure, to my own previous indifference). And then here were two scholars who demonstrated how it all fits together. Never missing a good quotation, Burkett and Foster relayed one striking flash of insight after another from Marx—and, not to be forgotten, Engels; integrated them into an overarching framework of ecological Marxism; and explained, with the greatest lucidity and precision, how a tendency to environmental degradation inheres in the accumulation of capital. It was an exhilarating, even liberating experience, because it allowed someone like me to throw myself into the nascent climate movement, organize, study ecology, and sharpen—not blunt—the critique of capitalism. Many other readers of Foster and Burkett have felt the same. Little wonder, then, that two scholars and the school they represent have also come in for a fair amount of criticism. With Marx and the Earth: An Anti-critique, we now have their comprehensive rebuttal and defense of (their own interpretation of) the ecological thought of Marx and Engels. It should be noted already here, however, that the Anti-critique makes no mention of what is undoubtedly the most influential attack on the school: that of Jason W. Moore. In Capitalism and the Web of Life and article piled upon article, he accuses Foster in particular of peddling “Cartesian dualism”","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"267 - 275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/693903","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47886934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the Dutch and English East India companies and the mainly British and French Caribbean slave plantations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as institutions embodying features of both “premodern” and “postmodern” economies. Because they endured and produced profits over long periods of time, neither of these institutions can be dismissed as “primitive accumulation.” The East India companies were state-licensed monopolies but also huge, vertically integrated, multinational corporations funded through share sales on the world’s first stock markets. Plantation slavery can be seen as an advanced form of constantly improving agrarian capitalism in which wage labor is replaced by the capital/chattel of purchased human beings. Arguments and evidence for a “patrimonialist” or “hypercapitalist” understanding of both institutions are considered with the conclusion that they are “hybrid,” but less in postcolonialist cultural terms than in the problematic way they fit into the genealogy of modern European capitalism.
{"title":"Monsters of Protocolonial Economic Enterprise: East India Companies and Slave Plantations","authors":"R. Austen","doi":"10.1086/693900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693900","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the Dutch and English East India companies and the mainly British and French Caribbean slave plantations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as institutions embodying features of both “premodern” and “postmodern” economies. Because they endured and produced profits over long periods of time, neither of these institutions can be dismissed as “primitive accumulation.” The East India companies were state-licensed monopolies but also huge, vertically integrated, multinational corporations funded through share sales on the world’s first stock markets. Plantation slavery can be seen as an advanced form of constantly improving agrarian capitalism in which wage labor is replaced by the capital/chattel of purchased human beings. Arguments and evidence for a “patrimonialist” or “hypercapitalist” understanding of both institutions are considered with the conclusion that they are “hybrid,” but less in postcolonialist cultural terms than in the problematic way they fit into the genealogy of modern European capitalism.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"139 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/693900","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43194323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article addresses the becoming of contentious political events through the case of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966). The conditional theory of structural causation and the rational choice conception of agency that have complemented each other in current scholarship have left missing links between elite conflict and mass mobilization. Examining the dialogic struggle among various actors involved in the process helps to overcome the teleological explanation of the rise of the Cultural Revolution and brings to light the politics of interpretation in constructing its meaning. The perspective shows ideological contradictions in the status quo ante to be important sources for change in an uncertain and destabilizing situation. The event thus did not result from the realization of actors’ fixed goals but was an emergent process of the disarticulation of structural contradictions, in which actors’ active appropriation and changing deployment of cultural repertoires were critical.
{"title":"Dialogic Struggle in the Becoming of the Cultural Revolution: Between Elite Conflict and Mass Mobilization","authors":"X. Xu","doi":"10.1086/693922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693922","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the becoming of contentious political events through the case of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966). The conditional theory of structural causation and the rational choice conception of agency that have complemented each other in current scholarship have left missing links between elite conflict and mass mobilization. Examining the dialogic struggle among various actors involved in the process helps to overcome the teleological explanation of the rise of the Cultural Revolution and brings to light the politics of interpretation in constructing its meaning. The perspective shows ideological contradictions in the status quo ante to be important sources for change in an uncertain and destabilizing situation. The event thus did not result from the realization of actors’ fixed goals but was an emergent process of the disarticulation of structural contradictions, in which actors’ active appropriation and changing deployment of cultural repertoires were critical.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"209 - 242"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/693922","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41563960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
t is no exaggeration to say that Fred Block andMargaret Somers are almost singlehandedly responsible for reviving interest in Karl Polanyi’s intellectual and political legacy in American sociology. Their contribution has consisted not only in reminding sociologists of the power of Polanyi’s analysis of the rise of market society tomake sense of our troubled times but evenmore importantly in resolvingmany of the difficult theoretical tangles that Polanyi gets himself into in the course of developing this analysis. Now their various essays, written over three decades, have been revised for publication in a single volume, supplemented with several new essays that introduce novel themes and also attempt to apply Polanyi’s conceptual apparatus to current social and political problems. As a compilation of essays, the resulting volume defies easy summary—and I won’t attempt to offer a full treatment of the many important contributions that run through these chapters. An incomplete inventory would include the masterful exegesis of the complex argument of The Great Transformation presented in chapter 2; chapter 5’s valuable reexamination of the Speenhamland period in English social history; and a highly original, Polanyian-inspired consideration of free market ideology as a genre of utopian social theory, which is elaborated in chapter 4 but runs as a theme throughout the book. Alongside these contributions, I want to give special emphasis to two conceptual innovations that underpin Block and Somers’s entire analysis and I think represent their most enduring legacy to Polanyian scholarship: namely, their notion of the “always embedded economy” and the closely related concept of “ideational embeddedness.” But since my role as reviewer is not merely to praise but also to offer a critique, after introducing these concepts, I will take is-
{"title":"Polanyi for the Age of Trump","authors":"Greta R. Krippner","doi":"10.1086/693902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/693902","url":null,"abstract":"t is no exaggeration to say that Fred Block andMargaret Somers are almost singlehandedly responsible for reviving interest in Karl Polanyi’s intellectual and political legacy in American sociology. Their contribution has consisted not only in reminding sociologists of the power of Polanyi’s analysis of the rise of market society tomake sense of our troubled times but evenmore importantly in resolvingmany of the difficult theoretical tangles that Polanyi gets himself into in the course of developing this analysis. Now their various essays, written over three decades, have been revised for publication in a single volume, supplemented with several new essays that introduce novel themes and also attempt to apply Polanyi’s conceptual apparatus to current social and political problems. As a compilation of essays, the resulting volume defies easy summary—and I won’t attempt to offer a full treatment of the many important contributions that run through these chapters. An incomplete inventory would include the masterful exegesis of the complex argument of The Great Transformation presented in chapter 2; chapter 5’s valuable reexamination of the Speenhamland period in English social history; and a highly original, Polanyian-inspired consideration of free market ideology as a genre of utopian social theory, which is elaborated in chapter 4 but runs as a theme throughout the book. Alongside these contributions, I want to give special emphasis to two conceptual innovations that underpin Block and Somers’s entire analysis and I think represent their most enduring legacy to Polanyian scholarship: namely, their notion of the “always embedded economy” and the closely related concept of “ideational embeddedness.” But since my role as reviewer is not merely to praise but also to offer a critique, after introducing these concepts, I will take is-","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"243 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/693902","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47332660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article integrates Günther Anders, a critic of technology and antinuclear militant still not widely known in the Anglophone world, into current critical discussions about Heidegger’s Nazism and his legacy for modern thought. It does so by sketching Anders’s many biographical connections but mainly focuses on his critiques of the political implications of Being and Time and of the later Heidegger. These two critiques I treat as parts of one larger “confrontation” with the reactionary character of Heideggerian philosophy. This article should help clarify Anders’s place in the history of Heideggerianism and also set the stage for a detailed evaluation of Anders’s approach to modern technology.
{"title":"Ontology and Ideology: Günther Anders’s Philosophical and Political Confrontation with Heidegger","authors":"Jason Dawsey","doi":"10.1086/690967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/690967","url":null,"abstract":"This article integrates Günther Anders, a critic of technology and antinuclear militant still not widely known in the Anglophone world, into current critical discussions about Heidegger’s Nazism and his legacy for modern thought. It does so by sketching Anders’s many biographical connections but mainly focuses on his critiques of the political implications of Being and Time and of the later Heidegger. These two critiques I treat as parts of one larger “confrontation” with the reactionary character of Heideggerian philosophy. This article should help clarify Anders’s place in the history of Heideggerianism and also set the stage for a detailed evaluation of Anders’s approach to modern technology.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"1 - 37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/690967","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49624564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
coercion through “the purportedly impersonal but far from impartial social mechanisms of the market, the law, and the state.” Beckert is certainly not wrong to identify the necessary role of the state in organizing and sustaining successive regimes of accumulation around the world. Nor, of course, is he incorrect to treat the hard-fought abolition of chattel slavery as a transformative achievement in the history of global capitalism. But the characterization of a progressive transition in which the mediating institutions of the market, the law, and the state “replaced” the social and ecological violence of the slave plantation requires its own startling acts of narrative omission. Excepting a couple of brief remarks about “boll weevils” and “soil exhaustion” in the American South, the conversion of ever more farmland to cotton cultivation appears as a rather straightforward matter of applying new scientific techniques to soil. Missing are the swarms of ravenous insects, rising water tables, and terrifying dust storms that farmers everywhere soon recognized as the modern plagues of monocrop agriculture. At intervals throughout his final chapters, Beckert casts the peasant smallholding as a last redoubt of subsistence techniques and localized production lying beyond the grasp of the world market. This may have been so in some cases. But in many others, from the New South to the Nile Delta, the smallholding endured within the empire of cotton in no small degree because the family norm upon which it rested, with its gendered and generational division of labor, proved so amenable to the cultivation of cheap raw cotton. Perhaps most strange of all, the word “race” (used in the relevant sense) does not appear in the second half of the book; “racism” appears exactly once. 25. Ibid., 280. 26. Ibid., 344, 352. 27. Hannah Holleman, “De-naturalizing Ecological Disaster: Colonialism, Racism, and the Global Dust Bowl of the 1930s,” Journal of Peasant Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1195375. 28. In listing the “factors which have made Egypt the most perfect cotton-country of the world—a cotton-laboratory would be a better term,” Egypt’s foremost botanist of the colonial era laid special emphasis on the importance of the family smallhold. “In the first place,” he explained, “there is an ample supply of hand-labour at a reasonable price; cotton can be grown with the use of horse-hoes and similar appliances, but it cannot be grown to its highest productivity, because the plants cannot then be set closely together, and the best results can only be got by hand-hoeing between closely planted, closely-set rows; further, the harvest of cotton has to be picked from the open fruits by hand, and where labour is scarce and dear this item may cost half as much as the cotton is worth; the small-holding fellah, incredibly industrious in his patient way, and with a numerous progeny, solves both these labour difficulties automatically.” See William Lawre
强制是通过“市场、法律和国家等所谓非个人的、但远非公正的社会机制”来实现的。贝克特肯定没有错，他认为国家在组织和维持世界各地的连续积累制度方面发挥了必要的作用。当然，他将艰苦卓绝的废除奴隶制度视为全球资本主义历史上的一项变革性成就，也并非不正确。但是，对市场、法律和国家等中介机构“取代”奴隶种植园的社会和生态暴力的渐进式转变的描述，需要它自己令人吃惊的叙事遗漏行为。除了对美国南部的“棉铃象鼻虫”和“土壤枯竭”的几句简短评论外，将越来越多的农田转变为棉花种植似乎是将新的科学技术应用于土壤的相当直接的问题。成群的贪婪的昆虫、不断上升的地下水位和可怕的沙尘暴都不见了，各地的农民很快就认识到这些是现代单一作物农业的瘟疫。在他的最后几章中，贝克特把农民的小农作为生存技术和世界市场无法掌握的本地化生产的最后堡垒。在某些情况下可能是这样。但在其他许多地方，从新南方到尼罗河三角洲，小农场在棉花帝国中得以幸存，在很大程度上是因为它所依赖的家庭规范，以及它的性别和代际分工，被证明是如此适合于廉价原棉的种植。也许最奇怪的是，“种族”这个词(在相关意义上使用)没有出现在书的后半部分;“种族主义”只出现了一次。25. 出处同上,280年。26. 同上，344,352。27. 汉娜·霍尔曼，“去自然化的生态灾难:殖民主义、种族主义和20世纪30年代的全球沙尘暴”，《农民研究杂志》(2016)，http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1195375。28. 埃及殖民时期最重要的植物学家在列举“使埃及成为世界上最完美的棉花国家的因素——一个棉花实验室可能更合适”时，特别强调了家庭小农场的重要性。“首先，”他解释说，“这里有充足的、价格合理的手工劳动;棉花可以用马蹄铁和类似的工具来种植，但它的产量却不能达到最高，因为棉花不能紧密地种植在一起，只有在种植紧密、排列紧密的行之间用手锄地才能获得最好的收成。此外，棉花的收获必须用手从开放的果实中采摘，在劳动力稀缺和昂贵的地方，这一项目的成本可能只有棉花价值的一半;这个小佃农，他非常勤劳，耐心，有许多后代，自动解决了这两个劳动难题。”参见威廉·劳伦斯·鲍尔斯，《埃及人的埃及》(纽约:查尔斯·斯克里伯之子出版社，1916)，第193页。有关埃及棉花种植中童工的详细历史，请参见埃利斯·戈德堡，《20世纪埃及的贸易、声誉和童工》(纽约:帕尔格雷夫·麦克米伦出版社，2004年)。29. 在描述反殖民民族主义所面临的挑战时，他提到了“种族主义的坚固堡垒，将人类的大部分人束缚在从属角色上”(Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 423)。发现价值bbb119此内容下载自130.058.065.013在2017年7月28日上午10:55:09所有的使用服从芝加哥大学出版社的条款和条件(http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c)。无法解释漫长的19世纪最严重、最持久、最广泛的经济危机的到来，对生态退化问题的明显不可知论，以及对种族化和性别化等级制度的根本和构成作用的叙事拒绝，不仅是对高帝国主义的，而且是对资本积累的，这些都是同一分析问题的相关症状，即:关注棉花本身，而不是同时分析棉花蕴含的价值。如果我们从一个前提出发，即“棉花资本家”最关心的不是像贝克特的叙述所暗示的那样，生产更多的棉花，而是像马克思所说的那样，积累更多的资本，那么贝克特的叙述所忽略的历史细节就会指向一种不同的描述，它把资本主义的不平衡发展理解为一种社会形式，这种社会形式只能通过特定的物质历史来产生和再生产，同时又无法与特定的物质历史相联系。为了澄清这一区别，我们转向贝克特本人提到的一组工作，但没有追求其对自己论点的全部含义。 在重构由“战争资本主义”实现的横跨全球的商业和生产的重新配置时，贝克特观察到，18世纪的加勒比种植园主“开辟了一个新的‘商品前沿’——一个新的棉花生产领域——并由此开始了全球棉花史的新篇章。”在他的“新棉花帝国主义”的叙述中，他再次回到了这个概念，他将其解释为“全球棉花‘商品前沿’被推向世界上更多的地区，加剧了一位历史学家如此恰当地称之为‘土地大热潮’的过程”。在这两个例子中，贝克特主要关注的是从这些“前沿”出口的大量纤维，无论是西印度的奴隶种植园还是多哥的小农场。但他所引用的概念不仅仅是为原材料生产的外围地点命名的巧妙措辞。相反，在詹森·w·摩尔(Jason W. Moore)的著作中，“商品边界”作为“组织自然的一种方式”，为价值的重新理论化提供了基础。在摩尔的著作中，“商品边界”不仅仅是依赖理论范畴“边缘”的绿色重塑，也不仅仅是资本为森林、田野和地下矿物而掠夺的地理区域。30.出处同上,89年。31. 出处同上,345年。32. 贝克特直接将这一概念归功于摩尔(同上，第472-73页)。该内容于2017年7月28日上午10:55:09从130.058.065.013下载，所有使用均受芝加哥大学出版社条款和条件(http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c)的约束。“边界”描述的不是一个地方或地点，而是一种移动的关系配置，允许资本定位和占用各种形式的无偿或低薪工作，这些工作都是由人类和非人类的本性所完成的。因此，它指的是资本不断流动的商品和非商品生活形式之间的界限。这一观点与罗莎·卢森堡著名的表述相呼应，即只有考虑到存在于她所谓的“纯粹商品交换”领域和“资本的咆哮暴力”之间的有机联系，才能欣赏资本主义的历史生涯。“廉价自然”的持续生产及其被资本作为“免费礼物”占有，对于压低其他地方商品生产的价值构成是必要的。摩尔总结道:“资本主义的历史流经商品生产的岛屿，在无偿工作/能源的海洋中发展。”“换句话说:除非大多数工作不被重视，否则价值不会起作用。”为什么廉价自然资源的生产——以食物、能源、劳动力和原材料的形式——对资本主义的运作如此重要?为了找到答案，摩尔转向马克思的《资本论》第三卷，重新思考资本主义内在危机倾向的动力。危机理论，特别是那些关注欧美工业核心的危机理论，倾向于“过度积累和生产过剩的奇怪结合”。摩尔认为，在马克思主义传统中，许多人从《资本论》第一卷及其对追求相对剩余价值产生资本、商品和机器过剩的方式的分析中得到了启示。马克思所说的“资本有机构成的上升”——“不变资本”(体现在机器、设备和原材料中的价值)与“可变资本”(劳动力价值)的比率——预示着利润率下降的危机诱发趋势。摩尔继续说，问题在于，不断下降的利润率论点往往过于强调恒定资本的一个时刻——即以节省劳动力的机器形式存在的“固定”不变资本——而忽略了体现在能源投入、工资食品和原材料中的“循环”不变资本。但正如马克思在第三卷中所观察到的那样，随着劳动生产率的提高，原材料的成本——例如棉花纤维和煤炭——在特定商品的价值构成中所占的比例越来越高。因此，“利润率在与价格相反的方向上下降或上升”。大卫·哈维，《新帝国主义》(牛津:牛津大学出版社，2003);罗莎·卢森堡:《资本的积累》(1913)，译。Agnes Schwarzschild(纽约:Routledge出版社，2003)，432-33。34. 《生命之网中的
{"title":"Finding Value in Empire of Cotton","authors":"Aaron G. Jakes, A. Shokr","doi":"10.1086/691060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/691060","url":null,"abstract":"coercion through “the purportedly impersonal but far from impartial social mechanisms of the market, the law, and the state.” Beckert is certainly not wrong to identify the necessary role of the state in organizing and sustaining successive regimes of accumulation around the world. Nor, of course, is he incorrect to treat the hard-fought abolition of chattel slavery as a transformative achievement in the history of global capitalism. But the characterization of a progressive transition in which the mediating institutions of the market, the law, and the state “replaced” the social and ecological violence of the slave plantation requires its own startling acts of narrative omission. Excepting a couple of brief remarks about “boll weevils” and “soil exhaustion” in the American South, the conversion of ever more farmland to cotton cultivation appears as a rather straightforward matter of applying new scientific techniques to soil. Missing are the swarms of ravenous insects, rising water tables, and terrifying dust storms that farmers everywhere soon recognized as the modern plagues of monocrop agriculture. At intervals throughout his final chapters, Beckert casts the peasant smallholding as a last redoubt of subsistence techniques and localized production lying beyond the grasp of the world market. This may have been so in some cases. But in many others, from the New South to the Nile Delta, the smallholding endured within the empire of cotton in no small degree because the family norm upon which it rested, with its gendered and generational division of labor, proved so amenable to the cultivation of cheap raw cotton. Perhaps most strange of all, the word “race” (used in the relevant sense) does not appear in the second half of the book; “racism” appears exactly once. 25. Ibid., 280. 26. Ibid., 344, 352. 27. Hannah Holleman, “De-naturalizing Ecological Disaster: Colonialism, Racism, and the Global Dust Bowl of the 1930s,” Journal of Peasant Studies (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1195375. 28. In listing the “factors which have made Egypt the most perfect cotton-country of the world—a cotton-laboratory would be a better term,” Egypt’s foremost botanist of the colonial era laid special emphasis on the importance of the family smallhold. “In the first place,” he explained, “there is an ample supply of hand-labour at a reasonable price; cotton can be grown with the use of horse-hoes and similar appliances, but it cannot be grown to its highest productivity, because the plants cannot then be set closely together, and the best results can only be got by hand-hoeing between closely planted, closely-set rows; further, the harvest of cotton has to be picked from the open fruits by hand, and where labour is scarce and dear this item may cost half as much as the cotton is worth; the small-holding fellah, incredibly industrious in his patient way, and with a numerous progeny, solves both these labour difficulties automatically.” See William Lawre","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"107 - 136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/691060","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41494175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article places the 1959 steel strike—the largest work stoppage in US history—within the trajectory of the New Deal order. We provide a multiscalar account of the strike that stretches from the mills and corporate boardrooms, to Congress and the Oval Office, and back to the homes of steelworkers themselves. The strike crystallized the limits of postwar collective bargaining and Keynesian policy making to manage postwar economic growth. Those limitations allowed steelworkers to lay claim to the New Deal’s promise of industrial citizenship and defend the moral economy of their home life—but only for a brief time. Therefore, unpacking the steel strike along these lines recasts the entire New Deal order as a complex formation composed of multiple layers of social activity, each powered by its own internal dynamics, and each in contradictory relation to the others.
{"title":"Conflict and Consensus: The Steel Strike of 1959 and the Anatomy of the New Deal Order","authors":"Kristoffer Smemo, S. Sonti, Gabriel Winant","doi":"10.1086/690968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/690968","url":null,"abstract":"This article places the 1959 steel strike—the largest work stoppage in US history—within the trajectory of the New Deal order. We provide a multiscalar account of the strike that stretches from the mills and corporate boardrooms, to Congress and the Oval Office, and back to the homes of steelworkers themselves. The strike crystallized the limits of postwar collective bargaining and Keynesian policy making to manage postwar economic growth. Those limitations allowed steelworkers to lay claim to the New Deal’s promise of industrial citizenship and defend the moral economy of their home life—but only for a brief time. Therefore, unpacking the steel strike along these lines recasts the entire New Deal order as a complex formation composed of multiple layers of social activity, each powered by its own internal dynamics, and each in contradictory relation to the others.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"39 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/690968","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46679400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines street protests in early nineteenth-century Lower Canada as a lens through which to study the movement of economic and political liberal ideas around the British Empire. These were not backward-looking evocations of an anticapitalist moral economy but embraced the tenets of the new political economy emerging in Britain. Protestors drew on the work of British political economists, as well as currents of Irish agrarian radicalism, to mobilize a constituency of small merchants and artisans. Using a variety of legal records, the mainstream colonial press, and the satirical Scribbler permits a multilayered analysis of the cultural and political meanings expressed in out-of-door political activity. If, as recent historians have argued, the British empire was imbricated with the development of liberalism, this microstudy illustrates that British colonies were critical sites for the articulation of modern notions of economic and civil rights, including the rights of consumers.
{"title":"“Freedom of the Fassions”: The Politics of the Street in Montreal and the Struggle against the British Fiscal-Military State","authors":"Michael Gauvreau, N. Christie","doi":"10.1086/690969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/690969","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines street protests in early nineteenth-century Lower Canada as a lens through which to study the movement of economic and political liberal ideas around the British Empire. These were not backward-looking evocations of an anticapitalist moral economy but embraced the tenets of the new political economy emerging in Britain. Protestors drew on the work of British political economists, as well as currents of Irish agrarian radicalism, to mobilize a constituency of small merchants and artisans. Using a variety of legal records, the mainstream colonial press, and the satirical Scribbler permits a multilayered analysis of the cultural and political meanings expressed in out-of-door political activity. If, as recent historians have argued, the British empire was imbricated with the development of liberalism, this microstudy illustrates that British colonies were critical sites for the articulation of modern notions of economic and civil rights, including the rights of consumers.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"75 - 106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/690969","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46069158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Global warming projects new meaning onto the past two centuries: since the early nineteenth century CO2 emissions have soared, driving humanity into an unprecedented crisis. This article outlines a historical research agenda for the study of the fossil economy as the main driver of this process. It argues for studying history in climate, as distinct from the preoccupation with how climate fluctuations have affected societies in the past. While narratives of “the Anthropocene” point to the human species as the agent of fossil fuel consumption, this article scents a narrower set of suspects. Study of colonial India and other parts of the British Empire demonstrate that imperial agents introduced large-scale extraction and combustion of coal in those areas but found the “natives” ill-disposed to the project. Turning to present-day India, I argue that inequality and capital accumulation should be in focus when studying the historical dynamics of our warming world.
{"title":"Who Lit This Fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy","authors":"Andreas Malm","doi":"10.1086/688347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/688347","url":null,"abstract":"Global warming projects new meaning onto the past two centuries: since the early nineteenth century CO2 emissions have soared, driving humanity into an unprecedented crisis. This article outlines a historical research agenda for the study of the fossil economy as the main driver of this process. It argues for studying history in climate, as distinct from the preoccupation with how climate fluctuations have affected societies in the past. While narratives of “the Anthropocene” point to the human species as the agent of fossil fuel consumption, this article scents a narrower set of suspects. Study of colonial India and other parts of the British Empire demonstrate that imperial agents introduced large-scale extraction and combustion of coal in those areas but found the “natives” ill-disposed to the project. Turning to present-day India, I argue that inequality and capital accumulation should be in focus when studying the historical dynamics of our warming world.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"3 1","pages":"215 - 248"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/688347","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60598948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
With the elaboration of the concept “commercial society,” political economy identified the social as an object of analysis proper to its inquiry. But the development of a discourse of political economy in the seventeenth century centered on the role of extraterritorial, maritime, and interstate commerce in underwriting the funding of state power and in augmenting the collective wealth of the polity. While political economy emerged in response to accelerating processes of early modern commercialization, it was slower than contemporary discourses of natural law and moral skepticism to formulate a conception of “commercial society.” When in the later seventeenth century an inchoate conception of commercial society did emerge in political economy, this was achieved through the internalization of models of maritime commerce as the basis for reimagining domestic society as radically commercial and for understanding this fact as a new, endogenous basis for the expansion of the aggregate wealth of the polity.
{"title":"From Statecraft to Social Science in Early Modern English Political Economy","authors":"A. Sartori","doi":"10.1086/688348","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/688348","url":null,"abstract":"With the elaboration of the concept “commercial society,” political economy identified the social as an object of analysis proper to its inquiry. But the development of a discourse of political economy in the seventeenth century centered on the role of extraterritorial, maritime, and interstate commerce in underwriting the funding of state power and in augmenting the collective wealth of the polity. While political economy emerged in response to accelerating processes of early modern commercialization, it was slower than contemporary discourses of natural law and moral skepticism to formulate a conception of “commercial society.” When in the later seventeenth century an inchoate conception of commercial society did emerge in political economy, this was achieved through the internalization of models of maritime commerce as the basis for reimagining domestic society as radically commercial and for understanding this fact as a new, endogenous basis for the expansion of the aggregate wealth of the polity.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"3 1","pages":"181 - 214"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/688348","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60598986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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