scholarly journals Communities of skill in the age of capitalism: Handloom weavers in twentieth-century United Provinces, India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Santosh Kumar Rai
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Informal Sector ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
The North ◽  
Community Skills ◽  
United Provinces

Abstract The role of skills has been eclipsed in the transition from an agrarian-craft economy rooted in hand-labour in small households to a modern political economy where productive work takes place outside the household, in offices and factories. Yet the ideological erasure of skilled work should not be confused with its actual disappearance. Precisely because such work was typically construed as private and unimportant, the embedded hierarchies and skills that shaped the handloom weaving industry in the North Indian province of United Provinces under colonial rule could escape systematic conversion to capitalist structures. Skill as human capital constituted the capitalist labour processes in the modern handloom industry, not as an abstract act, but as a historical experience. Handloom workers were reproduced, generationally, socially, and hierarchically, through the passing on of skilled labour within the unorganized informal sector of handloom weaving. Thus the stuff of community skills should move beyond its projection as either ‘endangered’ or ‘regressive’ to explore its access to capitalist structures and the exploitative networks that contain, transmit, and enable the production of skills.

10. Global Political Economy

2021 ◽  
pp. 223-249
Author(s):  
Stephanie Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
Global Political Economy ◽  
The North ◽  
Role Of The State

This chapter offers an overview of the field of Global Political Economy (GPE)—also known as International Political Economy (IPE). It builds on themes introduced in previous chapters, including connections with theories of global politics. These are discussed from a historical perspective to enable a better appreciation of how ideas, practices, and institutions develop and interact over time. These theories arose substantially within a European context, although the extent to which these may be applied uncritically to issues of political economy in all parts of the globe must be questioned. Significant issues for GPE include trade, labour, the interaction of states and markets, the nexus between wealth and power, and the problems of development and underdevelopment in the global economy, taking particular account of the North–South gap. The chapter then discusses the twin phenomena of globalization and regionalization and the way in which these are shaping the global economy and challenging the traditional role of the state. An underlying theme of the chapter is the link between economic and political power.

Conclusion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lily Chumley
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Creative Class ◽  
Service Economy ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
Urban Service ◽  
Maxim Gorky

This concluding chapter considers a question posed by Maxim Gorky in 1932: “On which side are you, ‘Masters of Culture’?” Examining the role of creative human capital in an urban service economy by analyzing a 2008 propaganda video titled “Reunion,” this chapter shows how the “creative class” is positioned intermediate to the socialist class categories of capital and labor. The culture workers who are supposed to transform the nation, the culture, and the economy with their innovative potential appear as labor to capital (in the person of the client or collector) and capital to labor (in the person of working-class service providers). Their professional activities can be framed as either authorial power or subaltern service, depending on context. This ambivalence demonstrates the antinomies of class in China's already postsocialist, but increasingly postindustrial, political economy.

The Antebellum Era and Civil War, 1800–1865

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-98
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
New England ◽  
State Level ◽  
The North ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Federal Constitution ◽  
Christian Nation ◽  
North And South

Several antebellum conservatives sought to dismantle the Lockean foundations of American political thinking in favor of a political vision that affirmed the divine origins of government. Evangelical conservatives such as Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen were among the first to advance the “America as a Christian nation” argument that became a favorite of conservatives in the latter part of the twentieth century. By the 1830s, New England evangelicals, such as Connecticut Congregationalist pastor Lyman Beecher, came reluctantly to accept church disestablishment at the state level as best for both Christianity and society. During the Civil War, conservatives North and South built upon the work of their antebellum forerunners and stressed the essential place and role of Christianity. Two examples of this movement in the North were the campaigns to amend the Federal Constitution with an explicit reference to Christ and the addition of “In God We Trust” to the nation’s coinage.

Conditionality in Public Policy Targeted to the Poor: Promoting Resilience?

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Bastagli
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Cash Transfers ◽  
Conditional Cash Transfers ◽  
Multiple Channels ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
The Poor

This paper explores the role of conditionality in policies targeting the poor. By requiring beneficiaries to send their children to school and to undertake regular health visits, proponents argue, conditionalities improve human capital outcomes, promoting resilience. This widespread perception has led to the adoption of conditional cash transfers in many countries. Yet policy debate on conditionality does not always reflect a full appreciation of how behavioural, administrative and political economy variables influence outcomes. This paper identifies the multiple channels through which conditionality determines human capital outcomes and reviews the evidence on linkages between conditionality and processes of resilience.

Wealth inequality, redistribution and local development: The case of land reform in Italy

2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Percoco
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Land Reforms ◽  
The North ◽  
Using Data

The role of wealth inequality for local development has long been neglected, although some literature has pointed out its relevance in explaining entrepreneurial and education investment. Among the typologies of assets composing individuals’ wealth, land is of paramount importance in underdeveloped economies specialised in agriculture. Land reforms in terms of redistribution of land ownership are hence expected to boost development through an increase in entrepreneurship rate and human capital stock. In this paper, we consider land reform in Italy, which took place in the 1950s in specific areas across the country. By adopting an Oaxaca-Blinder regression method and using data at a city level on the implementation of the reform for Puglia–Basilicata–Molise in the South of Italy and, as robustness checks, for Maremma in the Centre and Delta del Po in the North of Italy, we have found a positive impact of land redistribution on human capital accumulation and a less significant impact on employment and firm location.

Youth as a Force in the Modern World

1968 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Moller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Demographic Variable ◽  
Age Distribution ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
World Population ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
The World

The unprecedented number of young people in the world today can be isolated as one of the crucial reality factors conditioning political and cultural developments. Age distribution is only one demographic variable in the complex of social and political life, but the tremendous growth of world population in the twentieth century has magnified its dynamic potentialities. To gain perspective, it will be useful to briefly consider the role of youth in the light of historical experience.

The “Delaware Horror”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis B. Downey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The Other ◽  
The North ◽  
North And South ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter provides a case study of a lynching at the other end of the northeastern seaboard: the mass mob execution by burning of George White, an African American, in Wilmington, Delaware, in June 1903. Delaware had been a slave state that did not join the Confederacy, and while it implemented a Jim Crow system similar to those in neighboring lower Mid-Atlantic states Maryland and Virginia, the state experienced less lynching. Delaware's evolving economy and social relations were strongly tied to the rapidly urbanizing regions of southeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The chapter's analysis of the role of white and black Protestant ministers in the Wilmington mob execution and its aftermath offers significant insight into a well-publicized early-twentieth-century lynching that occurred somewhere between the North and South.

The Vietnamese Élite of French Cochinchina, 1943

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 459-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. B. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Viet Nam ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
French Culture ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Subordinate Role

It is well-known that the French colonial theory of assimilation, even though it could never be carried out completely in practice, implied the development in French colonies of an indigenous élite of people prepared to accept both French culture and a (subordinate) role in the running of the colony. In French Cochinchina, this élite was especially important owing to the circumstances of the conquest, between 1860 and 1867, when most of the Vietnamese scholar-officials who had ruled the area previously, withdrew and refused to co-operate with the Europeans. The French had no choice but to create an élite of their own, and begin to educate it in French ways. The process has been discussed in detail in a recent study by Dr Milton E. Osborne, which takes the story of colonial rule in southern Viet-Nam down to about 1905.1 During the first four decades of the twentieth century, this élite continued to grow and develop, so that by the 1940s it had become the key element in Cochinchinese society so long as colonial rule might last. The purpose of the present article is to examine the composition and role of this elite about the end of the period in which France could take its presence in Indochina for granted.

scholarly journals Technology and The North American Forest

2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-212
Author(s):  
Marian K. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
North American ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Pulp And Paper ◽  
History Of Technology ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of

ABSTRACT This paper is a critical review of recent historical literature relating to nineteenth and twentieth-century European-based technology in the North American forest. My discussion is limited to the industrial technologies of logging, sawmilling, pulp and paper milling, and forestry. These technologies will be discussed with reference to three issues in the history of technology: first, the nature of technological change; second, the environmental and social impacts of technology; and finally, the role of social values in determining choices of technology. Throughout, there will be an attempt to compare Canadian and American perspectives, when these diverge.

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