scholarly journals Commodity frontiers and the transformation of the global countryside: a research agenda

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Sven Beckert ◽  
Ulbe Bosma ◽  
Mindi Schneider ◽  
Eric Vanhaute
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Global History ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

Abstract Over the past 600 years, commodity frontiers – processes and sites of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy – have absorbed ever more land, ever more labour and ever more natural assets. In this paper, we claim that studying the global history of capitalism through the lens of commodity frontiers and using commodity regimes as an analytical framework is crucial to understanding the origins and nature of capitalism, and thus the modern world. We argue that commodity frontiers identify capitalism as a process rooted in a profound restructuring of the countryside and nature. They connect processes of extraction and exchange with degradation, adaptation and resistance in rural peripheries. To account for the enormous variety of actors and places involved in this history is a critical challenge in the social sciences, and one to which global history can contribute crucial insights.

New World Slavery in the Capitalist World Economy

Capitalisms ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 71-94
Author(s):  
Leonardo Marques
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
New World ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Historical Capitalism ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Over Time

This chapter explores, first, how New World slavery and other forms of coerced labour appear in the volume organized by Larry Neal, The Cambridge History of Capitalism, published in 2014. The second half of the chapter offers a brief alternative interpretation of the history of slavery in the Americas as a constitutive part of historical capitalism. In this way, it tackles a central problem in The Cambridge History of Capitalism: its static representation of slavery, which, abstracted from the broader world structures of which it was part, appears as a single immutable institution throughout the modern era. The main goal of the article is to emphasize, first, how slavery changed over time and, second, how it was part of the total ensemble of global relations that formed the capitalist world economy between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It is a history of slavery in capitalism.

State maneuver in the capitalist world-economy: A political geography of contextualized agency

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (8) ◽  
pp. 1580-1601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Flint ◽  
Raymond Dezzani
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Transition Probabilities ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Emergent Structure ◽  
Spatial Formations

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate a theoretical perspective and outline an analytical framework for state maneuver in the hierarchical world-economy that incorporates the idea of context with structural imperatives. Maneuver is the agency of states within conjunctures of structural imperatives and spatial settings of inter-state alliances and established cultural understandings and historic relations. The hierarchy of the capitalist world-economy is conceptualized as an emergent structure, one that emerges from competition for scarce resources. The resources are economic attributes defined by the process of capital accumulation, political attributes emanating from the imperative of state territorialization, and the agglomeration of these attributes in spatial formations. The structure is emergent from the actions of states that create these spatial formations, but transformation is limited given structural constraints. States maneuver can be modeled as Markov transition probabilities decomposable as logits for covariate analysis.

The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840s

1991 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 642
Author(s):  
Richard Lachmann ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
Jean Baechler ◽  
John A. Hall ◽  
Michael Mann
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
World System ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

Ten Years That Shook the World? The United Provinces as First Hegemonic State

1994 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
Social Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Protective Capacity ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
City States ◽  
United Provinces

In world-systems analysis, the United Provinces are interpreted as one of only three hegemonic states in the history of the capitalist world-economy. Unlike the subsequent hegemons Britain and the United States, the United Provinces only became an independent country just before its rise to hegemony in the early seventeenth century. This essay explores how this new small state became the first hegemon of the modern world-system. Two questions are asked: why did the area of northern Netherlands became a state, and why did this state became a hegemon? Using Mann's sources of social power, it is shown how a promiscuous combination of ideological, military, political, and economic power produced a unique state combining the economic policies of city-states with the protective capacity of territorial states. It is concluded that the Dutch promotion of an economic raison d'etat was a necessary component for the consolidation of a competitive interstate system, itself a necessary requirement for the expansion of the capitalist world-economy.

World History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Osterhammel
Keyword(s):  
World History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Global History ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration ◽  
Second World

This chapter examines different approaches to global history. Modern world history differs from older universal-historical constructions in that it presupposes an empirical idea of geography and of both the unity and plurality of humanity’s historical experience. After the Second World War, historians paid more attention to the interaction of the nation-state (the local) and the world (the global). The newer global history, while it does not negate the nation-state, strives to understand the reasons for the success of the West, without however reverting to a Eurocentric and essentializing perspective. Aware of the constructedness of history, it nonetheless pays attention to agency in the past, and to the plurality of perspectives and divergent historical paths. It does so by focusing on topics such as the history of migration, the environment, and economic globalization.

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