scholarly journals Afterword: Reflections on the Motley Crew as Port City Proletariat

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (S27) ◽  
pp. 255-262
Author(s):  
Marcus Rediker
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
World Market ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Port City ◽  
Occupational Structure ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The World ◽  
Indentured Servants

AbstractThis essay reflects on the workers in Atlantic and Indian Ocean port cities who made possible the rapidly expanding system of global capitalism between 1650 and 1850. In all of the ports treated in this volume, a mixture of multi-ethnic, male and female, unskilled, often unwaged laborers collectively served as the linchpins that connected local hinterlands (and seas) to bustling waterfronts, tall ships, and finally the world market. Although the precise combination of workers varied from one port to the next, all had an occupational structure in which half or more of the population worked in trade or the defense of trade, for example in shipbuilding/repair, the hauling of commodities to and from ships, and the building of colonial infrastructure, the docks and roads instrumental to commerce. This “motley crew” – a working combination of enslaved Africans, European/Indian/Chinese indentured servants, sailors, soldiers, convicts, domestic workers, and artisans – were essential to the production and worldwide circulation of commodities and profits.

scholarly journals Free and Unfree Labor in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries)

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (S27) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pepijn Brandon ◽  
Niklas Frykman ◽  
Pernille Røge
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
Labor History ◽  
World Market ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Unfree Labor ◽  
The Impact

AbstractColonial and postcolonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions functioned as crucial hubs in the commodity flows that accompanied the emergence and expansion of global capitalism. They did so by bringing together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses – legally free or semi-free wage laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. Focusing on the period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, a crucial moment in the establishment of the world market, the transformation of colonial states, and the reorganization of labor and labor migration on a transoceanic scale, the contributions in this special issue address the consequences of the presence of these “motley crews” on and around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. The introduction places the articles within the context of the development of the field of Global Labor History more generally. It argues that the dense daily interaction that took place in port cities makes them an ideal vantage point from which to investigate the consequences of the “simultaneity” of different labor relations for questions such as the organization of the work process under developing capitalism, the emergence of new forms of social control, the impact of forced and free migration on class formation, and the role of social diversity in shaping different forms of group and class solidarity. The introduction also discusses the significance of the articles presented in this special issue for three prevailing but problematic dichotomies in labor historiography: the sharp borders drawn between so-called free and unfree labor, between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, and the pre-modern and modern eras.

Labor and Global Commodities: Introduction

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
Mae Ngai ◽  
Mary Nolan
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
World Market ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Industrial Countries ◽  
The World ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Productive Method

Conventionally defined, “global commodities” refer to raw materials and basic foodstuffs—sugar, bananas, cotton, coal, bauxite—that are extracted or grown in one area of the world and sold on the world market for industrial or consumer use elsewhere. Labor historians focusing on the point of extraction/production or tracking the production and circulation of specific global commodities have gained insight into the development of global capitalism, in particular relations between colonized and colonizer, developing countries and advanced industrial countries. From Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986) to Mark Kurlansky's Cod: The Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1998) scholars and general readers alike have found in studies of a single commodity a productive method for understanding social relations in the making of the modern world.

scholarly journals ASIA: Economic Success but Uncertain Future

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan-Erik Lane
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Stress ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
21St Century ◽  
World Market ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
The World ◽  
Uncertain Future

The rise of East Asia, South East Asia and South economically to become the leaders of global capitalism with some 50% of output in the world market economy has one negative drawback, namely the enormous increase in CO2 emissions in this part of the world. Together with general environmental stress, Asia may come pay a heavy price for its stunning economic success, if present trends continue over the 21st century. Asia, here with Australia added, cannot just wait for the eventual implementation of the COP21 Treaty. It needs to go ahead and become the leader in environmental protection.

Surat

2019 ◽  
pp. 218-238
Author(s):  
Martha Chaiklin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Port City ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
The City

In the eighteenth century, Surat was perhaps the single most important port city of the Moghul empire, if not the world. Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese ships were called from Africa and Brazil to obtain Gujarati textiles, side by side with dhows from the throughout the Indian Ocean. This textile trade was underpinned by ivory, large amounts of which poured in the city both by caravan and by sea. Even though Surat, or even Gujarat, was not elephant habitat in the early modern period, Surat became a significant port for the import of ivory into India. The need for tusks of an appropriate size for bangles created symbiosis of trade between Gujarati textiles and ivory that directly affected the prosperity of Surat. The chapter thus links Surat to the Indian Ocean World through ivory and demonstrate the interconnected nature of ivory and textiles in the Gujarat region.

scholarly journals Competitiveness and Critique: The Value of a New-Materialist Research Project

2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greig Charnock
Keyword(s):  
World Market ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Relative Autonomy ◽  
Original Proposal ◽  
The World ◽  
Contemporary Management ◽  
And Control

AbstractFollowing Marcus Taylor's critique of Paul Cammack's 'new materialism', this paper proposes a New-Materialist Research Project (NMRP) borne out of a synthesis of the insights of both open Marxism and Cammack's project. The rationale for this lies in the conviction that a more 'applied' focus upon specific forms of contemporary class practice can aid open Marxism to move beyond general and abstract critique, thereby making an original and critical contribution to our understanding of the contemporary management of global capitalism. While the proposed NMRP refutes the problematic theorisation of relative autonomy in Cammack's original proposal, it is argued that a more rigorously theorised NMRP can extend negative critique to the current activities of international regulative agencies. By focusing on the activities of such agencies – beginning with their discursive operations – it is possible to discern how contemporary forms of ideology operate in a retroactive manner, obfuscating and distorting the contradictions being played out across the world market; and also how such agencies are seeking to exercise unprecedented levels of intervention and control in the management of individual national 'capitalisms', and under the rubric of promoting 'competitiveness'.

scholarly journals Capital, Labor, and State

2015 ◽  
pp. 321-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Hanieh
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World Market ◽  
State Theory ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rentier State ◽  
The World ◽  
Oil Rents ◽  
Gulf States ◽  
The Impact

The Middle East’s pivotal position in a hydrocarbon-based global capitalism carries enormous ramifications for the region and the Gulf Arab states in particular. This chapter aims to present key debates associated with this transformation. It begins with an overview of the Rentier State Theory (RST). RST theorists foreground the impact of oil rents on Gulf states, drawing causal relationships between these rents and the characteristics of the Gulf’s political economy. The chapter turns to a critique of some of its core assumptions, notably its theorization of state and class. It argues that a more satisfactory understanding of the political economy of oil in the Gulf can be found through a return to the categories of class and capitalism, and a deeper appreciation of the ways in which the Gulf is located in the wider dynamics of accumulation in the world market.

Plantation Production and White “Proto-Slavery”: White Indentured Servants and the Colonisation of the English West Indies, 1624-1645

1985 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary McD. Beckles
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Sugar Industry ◽  
World Market ◽  
Scale Production ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
Indentured Servants

Two dominant features of agricultural history in the English West Indies are the formation of the plantation system and the importation of large numbers of servile labourers from diverse parts of the world—Africa, Europe and Asia. In Barbados and the Leeward Islands, the backbone of early English colonisation of the New World, large plantations developed within the first decade of settlement. The effective colonisation of these islands, St. Christopher (St. Kitts) in 1624, Barbados 1627, Nevis 1628, Montserrat and Antigua 1632, was possible because of the early emergence of large plantations which were clearly designed for large scale production, and the distribution of commodities upon the world market; they were instrumental in forging an effective and profitable agrarian culture out of the unstable frontier environment of the seventeenth century Caribbean. These plantations, therefore, preceded the emergence of the sugar industry and the general use of African slave labour; they developed during the formative years when the production of tobacco, cotton and indigo dominated land use, and utilised predominatly European indentured labour. The structure of land distribution and the nature of land tenure Systems in the pre-sugar era illustrate this. Most planters who accelerated the pace of economic growth in the late 1640's and early 1650's by the production of sugar and black slave labour, already owned substantial plantations stocked with large numbers of indentured servants.

China und Lateinamerika

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (142) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Enrique Dussel Peters
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
World Market ◽  
Global Integration ◽  
Integration Process ◽  
Medium Term ◽  
The World ◽  
New Challenges

China's socioeconomic accumulation in the last 30 years has been probably one of the most outstanding global developments and has resulted in massive new challenges for core and periphery countries. The article examines how China's rapid and massive integration to the world market has posed new challenges for countries such as Mexico - and most of Latin America - as a result of China's successful exportoriented industrialization. China's accumulation and global integration process does, however, not only question and challenges the export-possibilities in the periphery, but also the global inability to provide energy in the medium term.

TRENDS OF THE WORLD MARKET FOODNET

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-119
Author(s):  
O.N. Mikhaylyuk ◽  
Ya.N. Dolina ◽  
E.A. Strelka
Keyword(s):  
World Market ◽  
The World
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