Sailors

European overseas expansion and the processes of early modern globalization depended on the labor of sailors. It is therefore not surprising that they are among the most thoroughly studied occupational groups of the early modern world, especially as their historical importance is reflected in a relative abundance of archival source material. Legal records of various kinds have proven an especially rich source that has allowed historians to recover in remarkable detail the lives of early modern sailors as they crisscrossed oceans and imperial jurisdictions, moving back and forth between ship and shore, switching from the fisheries to the merchant marine, and on to naval service and back again. As one of the first predominantly wage-dependent groups of workers in the emerging capitalist world-economy, sailors were subject to an unusually complex constellation of forces that together provided the structure of the international maritime labor market, including the interaction of the push and pull of demand and supply with the multiple and overlapping coercive recruitment systems that in wartime funneled mariners by the tens of thousands onto the gundecks of Europe’s burgeoning war-fleets. But scholarly interest has not only been stimulated by the fact that sailors sailed the ships that projected European imperial aggression overseas, and then carried people, commodities, and ideas back and forth across the oceans. Historians have also been fascinated by the peculiar culture that emerged below deck and in port cities around the world, including its characteristic cosmopolitanism, political radicalism, and sexual libertinism. The titles listed in this bibliography highlight some of the most prominent studies on these and other subjects, but interested researchers will want to consult other Oxford Bibliographies articles as well, including Oceanic History, Ships and Shipping, Piracy, Smuggling, and The Maritime Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions.

The position of the state in global capitalism: a Polanyian perspective

The aim of the article is to analyze the changing position of the state in the capitalist world economy form the perspective of Karl Polanyi’s political theory. The main thesis of the article is that the position of the state largely depends on the character of rules constituting global political economy. Three world regimes were singled out (gold standard, Bretton Woods system, and hyperglobalization), and the position of the state within each system was analyzed. If we agree with Robert Cox that each world order is a product of ideas, institutions and power relations, then we may expect the institutional structure of the world economy to evolve following the changes in the underlying constellation of ideas and social forces.

Defining financial reforms in the 19th-century capitalist world-economy: The Ottoman case (1838–1914)

Capitalist-style reforms were an important factor in the economic and social evolution of the Late Ottoman Empire. This research investigates how foreign governments and financiers, and especially Britain, influenced these various financial reforms implemented in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. The chief purpose of such reforms was to integrate the Empire into the capitalist world-economy by imposing, both directly and indirectly, the adoption of rules, institutions, attitudes and procedures amenable to exploitation on the part of foreign and also local capitalists. Drawing on primary sources, mainly from the United Kingdom’s National Archives, the article argues that foreign pressure for financial reforms was instrumental in the Empire’s economic subjection to the rules and norms that regulated the capitalist world-economy, most notably in the field of public finance, banking and the monetary sector. It takes a long-term view and largely adheres to the scholarly evolution of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and world-systems theory and methodology developed by Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, adopting a multidisciplinary and macro-scale perspective. Special attention is paid to the correlation between secondary and primary sources in support of empirical evidence. More broadly, this research contributes to the literature on the capitalist world-economy and brings a set of theoretical frameworks to bear on defining the role of financial reforms induced mainly by Britain in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries.

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

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.

Investigating the Asymmetric Core/Periphery Structure of International Labor Time Flows

This paper studies the core/periphery hierarchy of the capitalist world-economy in the current globalization era. The central and novel argument is that the network of international labor time flows reveals the core/periphery hierarchy of the world-economy with regard to the international division of labor. Based on the analysis of the labor time network of forty economies from the world input-output table, I find that the core/periphery structure of the world-economy has in large part remained unaltered for 1995-2009, though the asymmetry of international labor time flows decreased slightly between 2003-2009. Through regression analysis, I find that per capita income of a country is strongly associated with its command over global labor time. The regression analysis also lends evidence to the existence of oligarchic wealth. This wealth is not available to all countries, implying that the struggle of a country to improve its position in the capitalist world-economy tends to put downward pressure on the income of other countries.

Deglobalization, Globalization, and the Pandemic

This article is a theory piece focused on causal propositions codification and future trends identification, both supported by descriptive statistical data. It aims to analyze the middle-term dynamics of globalization and deglobalization due to the effects of the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, in general, and the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular. The broader context in which such dynamics are situated are the processes of capitalist world-economy restructuring, propitiated by the crisis the U.S. hegemony, on the one hand, and by the Chinese rise, on the other. We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic tends to deepen and accelerate ongoing processes of global fragmentation, especially in the productive and commercial dimensions. From the point of view of governments, in particular the United States, there are growing protectionist and manufacturing repatriation efforts. From the point of view of large corporations, the perception of risk derived from the suspension and rupture of global production chains emerges thanks to measures to prevent infection. Somehow, governments and companies can converge on understanding the world market as a growing source of risk and decreasing advantages. The counterpoint here may be China's interest and ability to lead the fight against the pandemic and post-pandemic recovery, restructuring the global order built in the last forty years in new institutional basis and from which it has been the main beneficiary.

Editorial Note

Editors introduction to Journal of World-Systems Research Vol. 27, No. 1 Special Issue on Capitalist World-Economy in Crisis: Policing, Pacification, and Legitimacy

István Hont, the Cosmopolitan Theory of Commercial Globalization, and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism

This critical essay explores the work of István Hont. Members of the Cambridge school eschewed the term “capitalism” as an anachronistic description of the contexts that informed early modern politico-economic thought, preferring instead the ostensibly more neutral “commercial society.” But Hont's understanding of the latter was nevertheless quite present-minded and politically charged. Hont drove nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic theory back into eighteenth-century models, and his view of the economy that gave rise to them was informed by concerns in the 1980s and 1990s over the competitiveness of advanced capitalist nations in the face of low-cost insurgents such as China. More deliberate choices of recent economic theory can produce more accurate alternatives to the supposedly neutral “commercial society” depicted by Hont. World systems and dependency theory may help us to better understand the economic thought produced in and about the specifically capitalist world economy of the early modern period.