The value within multiform commodities: North African phosphates and global markets in the interwar period

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Rebecca Gruskin
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Global Markets ◽  
Modern World ◽  
North African ◽  
Chemical Fertilizers ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Intensive Farming ◽  
Capital Intensive ◽  
Stable Unit

Abstract Phosphates mined in France’s North African empire fed interwar Europe’s voracious appetite for chemical fertilizers. In critique of histories vesting commodities themselves with the agency to make the modern world, I trace not the substance but the value embedded within it. By following value, I argue that the ‘commodity’ is not a stable unit of analysis. Rather, commodities are multiform. They can acquire myriad properties when the value embedded within them changes across time and place. During the interwar period, phosphates’ character as a commodity transmuted in relation to flows of other goods, movements of labour, global financial exigencies and imperial considerations. As phosphates assumed new forms, the geographic scales over which they operated changed too. Through North African phosphates, I explore value-making processes that perpetuated capital-intensive farming, allowing for a history not of the commodity-as-substance but of the commodity-as-historical-object whose analytical boundaries and forms shifted across contexts.

Rising Inequality in the New Global Economy

2006 ◽  
pp. 84-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Birdsall
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Slow Growth ◽  
Global Markets ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Government Programs ◽  
Poor Countries

Reasons of high inequality in the modern world are considered in the article. In developing countries it interacts with underdeveloped markets and inefficient government programs to slow growth, which in turn slows progress in reducing poverty. Increasing reach of global markets makes rising inequality more likely and deepens the gap between rich and poor countries. Because global markets work better for the already rich, we should increase the representation of poor countries in global fora.

Old and New Rights

2009 ◽  
pp. 20-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Di Meglio ◽  
Enrico Gargiulo
Keyword(s):  
16Th Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Recent Phase ◽  
Effective Instrument ◽  
Different Levels

This chapter offers a long-term perspective on citizenship, questioning one of the basic assumptions of most of the literature on this topic, that is, the nation-state as unit of analysis. Through the adoption of a world-systemic perspective, two basic aspects of the history of citizenship stand out. Firstly, the fundamentally exclusive nature of this category, as it emerged and developed over the history of the modern world-system, since at least the “long 16th Century”. And, secondly, that well before the so-called “information revolution” of the last decades, “technology” has shaped the Western social imagination, acting, in various and changing historical forms, as an effective instrument of control and supremacy, producing asymmetric and inegalitarian effects, and providing a yardstick of the different “levels of development” of Western and non-Western peoples. In this view, the most recent phase of the history of citizenship, his e-form, seems to replicate, in new ways, the explanations of the gap existing both between and within countrie—now conceptualized as “digital divide”—and, at the same time, the illusory universalistic promise of an expansion of the citizenship and the rights associated to it.

ALGERIAN NATIONALISM, ZIONISM, AND FRENCH LAÏCITÉ: A HISTORY OF ETHNORELIGIOUS NATIONALISMS AND DECOLONIZATION

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Shepard
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
North African ◽  
French Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jews In France

AbstractThe Algerian war resituated the meaning of “Muslims” and “Jews” in France in relation to religion and “origins” and this process reshaped French secular nationhood, with Algerian independence in mid-1962 crystallizing a complex and shifting debate that took shape in the interwar period and blossomed between 1945 and 1962. In its failed efforts to keep all Algerians French, the French government responded to both Algerian nationalism and, as is less known, Zionism, and did so with policies that took seriously, rather than rejected, the so-called ethnoreligious arguments that they embraced—and that, according to existing scholarship, have always been anathema to French laïcité. Most scholars on France continue to presume that its history is national or wholly “European.” Yet paying attention to this transnational confrontation, driven by claims from Algeria and Israel, emphasizes the crucial roles of North African and Mediterranean developments in the making of contemporary France.

scholarly journals The Coffee Commodity Chain in the World-Economy: Arrighi's Systemic Cycles and Braudel's Layers of Analysis

2011 ◽  
pp. 58-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Talbot
Keyword(s):  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Commodity Chain ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Material Life ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This article presents a history of coffee in the modern world-economy, w;ing an analyticalframework synthesized from Arrighi's concept of systemic cycles of accumulation and Braudel'snotion of three levels of economic analysis: material life, the market economy, and capitalism. Ittakes the commodity chain as the unit of analysis, and argues that this choice helps to illuminatethe caw;al connections between Braudel 's three layers. The method of incorporated comparisonis w;ed to compare restructurings of the coffee commodity chain with the restructurings of thelarger world-economy during each of Arrighi 's systemic cycles.

Communism in the Middle East and North Africa

2020 ◽  
pp. 195-224
Author(s):  
Jens Hanssen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
North African ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Military Regimes ◽  
Revolutionary Ideology ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter provides a critical analysis of a selection of Middle Eastern and North African communist parties since the interwar period and the emergence of Marxist-Leninist movements during the Arab Cold War. It focuses on the difficulties the parties faced in the changing national and international settings. Arabs were drawn to communism in the 1930s because of Soviet leadership in global antifascism. But the parties suffered from Stalin’s support for the partition of Palestine in 1947, especially in countries neighboring Israel, and from Soviet support for Arab military regimes during the Cold War. By the mid-1960s, communists no longer had a monopoly on revolutionary ideology as Palestinian-inspired national liberation movements began to vernacularize Marxism-Leninism.

scholarly journals Effects of Agricultural Activities on the Environment

2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (11) ◽  
pp. 3183-3187
Author(s):  
Adrian Turek Rahoveanu
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Agriculture ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Natural Ecosystems ◽  
Chemical Fertilizers ◽  
Intensive Farming ◽  
Soil Functioning ◽  
Normal Soil ◽  
Agricultural Production Systems

With the development of intensive farming through the use of fertilizers, pesticides, it has become increasingly polluting. This is why they are pushing for the return of sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture has as major objectives the optimization of productivity, while preserving the basic natural resources. This means that in agricultural production systems, it is imperative to maintain a balance between inputs and outputs, between investments and benefits, while ensuring the protection of the environment and the promotion of a sustainable economy as a whole. Due to intensive farming, using pesticides, chemical fertilizers, or residues from zootechnical activities, soil is the main affected. Most soils are losing their nutrients and organic matter in a higher proportion than the process of their regeneration, which leads to their depletion, resulting in irreversible degradation. Soil pollution means any action that causes the disruption of normal soil functioning as a support and living environment within natural ecosystems.

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