The Problem of Property: Local Histories and Political-Economic Categories in British India

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1005-1035 ◽  
Author(s):  
Upal Chakrabarti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
British India ◽  
Coherent Property ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Property Regime ◽  
Indian Form

AbstractThis essay considers—as an integrated space of discursive practices—disputes over proprietary titles in an obscure locality, debates over the authentic “Indian” proprietary form in British India, and a conceptual recasting of political-economic categories in Britain, over the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that “property” was produced by this space as a marker of political power/sovereignty, its “indigenous/Indian” form being construed as a field of dispersed, contested, and plural rights. Positing this conceptualization of property as immanent in governance and political economy, this essay questions the dominant historiographic consensus that indigenous social forces aborted all attempts of the Company’s government to introduce a coherent property regime.

Agrarian Localities: Political economy as local power in early nineteenth-century British India

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 898-933 ◽  
Author(s):  
UPAL CHAKRABARTI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Local Power ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis article writes the agrarian history of an obscure locality, Cuttack, in early-nineteenth-century British India. In doing so, instead of exalting the explanatory power of the local, or the particular, it interrogates the category of the ‘local’ itself by demonstrating how it was assembled as the object of agrarian governance in British India through a densely interwoven network of discursive practices. I present this network as various inter-regional practices and debates over agrarian governance in British India and some methodological debates of political economy in contemporary Britain. This article argues that the governmental engagement with locally specific, indigenous forms of interrelationship between landed property and political power in British India can be more productively understood as internal to the transformed vocabulary of contemporary political economy, rather than lying outside it, amid the pragmatism and contingency of governance. Accordingly, it shows how the particularity of agrarian relations in a locality was produced out of a host of reconfigurations, over different moments and sites, of a universal classificatory grid. In the process, I question those histories of British India which, being rooted in a series of hierarchized binary oppositions, like inside–outside, abstract–concrete, or universal–particular, reproduce the rationality of colonial governance.

Book Reviews

2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-201
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Bargaining Problem ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Resource ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Harsanyi Solution

Harry de Gorter of Cornell University reviews, “Political Power and Economic Policy: Theory, Analysis, and Empirical Applications” by Gordon C. Rausser, Johan Swinnen, and Pinhas Zusman. The EconLit abstract of this book begins: “Analyzes the links between political economics, governance structures, and the distribution of political power in economic policy making. Discusses public policy—the lens of political economy; the Nash solution to the bargaining problem; the Harsanyi solution to the bargaining problem; political-economic analysis; normative political-economic analysis; dynamic political-economic analysis; political power, ideology, and political organizational structures; political power, influence, and lobbying; constitutional prescription and political power coefficients; the political economy of commodity market intervention; the political economy of public research and development; a political-economic analysis of redistributive policies and public good investments; interest groups, coalition breaking, and productive policies; policy reform and compensation; political-economic analysis of land reform; political-economic analysis of water resource systems; the political economy lens on quality and public standard regulations; political-economic analysis in transition economies; the power of bureaucracies—the European Commission and EU policy reforms; political econometrics; the political econometrics of the Israeli dairy industry; flexible policy instruments given a political-power distribution; estimating statistical properties of power weight; and the role of institutions in the joint determination of political economic resource transactions and political economic seeking transfers. Rausser is Robert Gordon Sproul Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Swinnen is Professor of Economics and Director of the LICOS Institute for Institutions and Economic Performance at the Catholic University of Leuven and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies. The late Zusman was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Index.”

Prerequisites for the reforms of the Russian Empire in the 1860s: a historical analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 176-184
Author(s):  
Dmitry Nechevin ◽  
Leonard Kolodkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Political Economic

The article is devoted to the prerequisites of the reforms of the Russian Empire of the sixties of the nineteenth century, their features, contradictions: the imperial status of foreign policy and the lagging behind the countries of Western Europe in special political, economic relations. The authors studied the activities of reformers and the nobility on the peasant question, as well as legitimate conservatism.

The Idea of a Meaningful Synthesis of Marxist and Non-Marxist Systems of Political Economy as a Mirror of Intellectual Turmoil (About V.T. Ryazanov’s Book «Modern Political Economy: Prospects of Neo-Marxist Synthesis»)

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-98
Author(s):  
A.B. Lyubinin
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
Subjective Assessments ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Political Economic

Review of the monograph indicated in the subtitle V.T. Ryazanov. The reviewer is critical of the position of the author of the book, believing that it is possible and even necessary (to increase the effectiveness of General economic theory and bring it closer to practice) substantial (and not just formal-conventional) synthesis of the Marxist system of political economy with its non-Marxist systems. The article emphasizes the difference between the subject and the method of the classical, including Marxist, school of political economy with its characteristic objective perception of the subject from the neoclassical school with its reduction of objective reality to subjective assessments; this excludes their meaningful synthesis as part of a single «modern political economy». V.T. Ryazanov’s interpretation of commodity production in the economic system of «Capital» of K. Marx as a purely mental abstraction, in fact — a fiction, myth is also counter-argued. On the issue of identification of the discipline «national economy», the reviewer, unlike the author of the book, takes the position that it is a concrete economic science that does not have a political economic status.

THE NATURE AND ENVIRONMENT OF COST MANAGEMENT AMONG EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY U.S. TEXITLE MANUFACTURERS

1992 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Tyson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Cost Management ◽  
Cost Accounting ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Cost Information ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Textile Mills

Several authors have suggested that a particular managerial component was needed before cost accounting could be fully used for accountability and disciplinary purposes. They argue that the marriage of managerialism and accounting first occurred in the United States at the Springfield Armory after 1840. They generally downplay the quality and usefulness of cost accounting at the New England textile mills before that time and call for a re-examination of original mill records from a disciplinary perspective. This paper reports the results of such a re-examination. It initially describes the social and economic environment of U.S. textile manufacturing in New England in the early nineteenth century. Selected cost memos and reports are described and analyzed to indicate the nature and scope of costing undertaken at the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The paper discusses how particular cost information was used and speculates why certain more modern procedures were not adopted. Its major finding is that cost management practices fully measured up to the business complexities, economic pressures, and social forces of the day.

The possibility of democratic socialism in Habermas

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102098689
Author(s):  
Pedro A. Teixeira
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Economic Organization ◽  
Democratic Socialism ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Theory Of Democracy ◽  
Economic Regime ◽  
The Ideal

In keeping with the radical openness of his theory of democracy, Habermas avoided pre-determining the ideal mode of economic organization for his favoured model of deliberative democracy. Instead of attempting a full-blown derivation, in this article, I propose adapting the Rawlsian method of comparing different political–economic regimes as candidate applications of his theory of justice to Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy. Although both theorists are seen as endorsing liberal democratic world views, from the perspective of political economy, the corollary of their conceptions of democracy would arguably veer elsewhere: in Rawls’s case, into the territory of property-owning democracy or democratic socialism, and in Habermas’s, into any political–economic regime which guarantees the real exercise of full political and discursive liberties against the background of legitimate lawmaking. The ultimate aim of this article is to discuss whether a concrete conception of democratic socialism, if any, is compatible with Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy.

Questioning territories and identities in the precolonial (nineteenth-century) Lake Kivu region

Africa ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-515
Author(s):  
Gillian Mathys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Lake Kivu ◽  
Territorial Claims ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

AbstractThroughout Africa, contemporary boundaries are deemed ‘artificial’ because they were external impositions breaking apart supposedly homogeneous ethnic units. This article argues that the problem with the colonial borders was not only that they arbitrarily dissected African societies with European interests in mind, but also that they profoundly changed the way in which territoriality and authority functioned in this region, and therefore they affected identity. The presumption that territories could be constructed in which ‘culture’ and ‘political power’ neatly coincided was influenced by European ideas about space and identity, and privileged the perceptions and territorial claims of those ruling the most powerful centres in the nineteenth century. Thus, this article questions assumptions that continue to influence contemporary views of the Lake Kivu region. It shows that local understandings of the relationship between space and identity differed fundamentally from state-centred perspectives, whether in precolonial centralized states or colonial states.

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