DILEMA EKONOMI WANG DALAM MASYARAKAT MELAYU: PENUBUHAN SYARIKAT PERNIAGAAN DAN KOPERASI DI TANAH MELAYU PADA AWAL ABAD KE-20

Makalah ini membincangkan dilema ekonomi wang masyarakat Melayu dengan rujukan kepada permasalahan yang berhubung kait dengan penubuhan syarikat perniagaan dan koperasi milikan orang Melayu pada awal abad ke-20. Dalam konteks sejarah, fenomena kapitalisme telah berkembang dengan penggunaan wang dalam masyarakat Melayu untuk aktiviti ekonomi yang jelas dikesan, terutamanya dalam kalangan aristokrat, komuniti perniagaan dan golongan rakyat. Golongan pertukangan Melayu adalah golongan bawahan yang sedia terdedah kepada ekonomi wang telah berusaha untuk menubuhkan syarikat perniagaan milikan orang Melayu dengan cubaan pengumpulan dana sebagai modal. Namun, usaha ini gagal direalisasikan walaupun sambutan di peringkat permulaan amat menggalakkan. Fenomena ini juga telah berkembang dalam kalangan kaum tani kerana penggunaan wang dalam aktiviti pertanian telah mengubah orientasi ekonomi kaum tani daripada sara diri kepada komersial. Perubahan orientasi ekonomi ini sebaliknya telah menimbulkan masalah belenggu hutang berterusan dalam kalangan rakyat bawahan Melayu. Bagi membantu rakyat Melayu, mekanisme yang dilihat boleh mengurangkan masalah hutang dalam kalangan kaum tani ialah dengan penubuhan koperasi pinjaman luar bandar yang akan membolehkan mereka mendapat pinjaman bagi membiayai operasi pertanian, membebaskan diri dari penindasan pemiutang serta memupuk sikap menyimpan wang dalam kalangan mereka. Perkara ini dapat dicapai dengan melaburkan sejumlah wang yang kecil dalam sesebuah koperasi yang kemudiannya akan memberikan keuntungan. Perbincangan dua aspek ini menunjukkan dilema masyarakat Melayu untuk menyesuaikan diri dalam menghadapi perubahan orientasi ekonomi wang yang berlandaskan kapitalisme. Perbincangan ini meliputi analisis bahan-bahan sejarah sezaman yang merangkumi surat khabar Melayu dan dokumen pentadbiran British. This article discusses the dilemma of the money economy in Malay society concerning the establishment of Malay business corporations and cooperative societies in the early 20th century. In the historical context, the phenomenon of capitalism was reflected through the penetration of the money economy into the Malay economic activities evident among the Malay aristocrats, business communities and the commoners. The Malay artisans were among the first lower class community who were exposed to the money economy. However, attempts to raise funds to establish corporations owned by these Malays failed despite the encouraging initial support. This phenomenon of money economy had also expanded into the peasant community whereby the utilisation of money economy in agricultural activities had changed the self-sufficiency orientation into commercialism. Nevertheless, this change had caused many Malay peasants to be involved with indebtedness. A mechanism that could assist these peasants with the problem of indebtedness was to establish rural credit cooperative societies that would enable them to obtain loans to fund their agricultural operations, unbound themselves from indebtedness and cultivate the habit of saving. These were achievable by investing in cooperative societies that would eventually generate profits. The discussion on these two aspects shows the dilemma faced by the Malays in adapting themselves to the change in economic orientation based on capitalism. This discussion is based on content analysis of contemporaneous historical sources comprising Malay newspapers and British administrative documents.

“Dangerous modernity!”, or the shadow play of modernity and its characters: instrumental rationality - money - technology (part 1)

The article is an essay on the critical analysis of one of the fundamental issues of social theory of the 19th - 20th centuries - alienation and its manifestations in modern societies. Alienation is interpreted not in one of its special meanings (such as alienation of labor, etc.), but in the broadest way - as the transformation of products of individual and collective activities into an independent force that subjugates a person and transfers him from the position of the subject to the position of the object of social relations. Such a definition makes alienation a universal feature of social life. However, in different societies and in different historical periods, alienation can have variable specific forms. The historically specific manifestations of alienation in modern societies can be explained by referring to the classical theme of their genesis. The originality of their institutional organization is largely associated with the originality of their culture and spiritual life (in particular, with the radical demarcation between human and nature, subject and object in the modern era). The multifaceted phenomenon of scientific and technical rationality, the product of the post-Renaissance Western-European culture, becomes a source of social realities and practices fraught with alienation. The article illustrates it by a number of examples, including the logic and mechanisms of the capitalist money economy. The author refers to the heritage of world philosophy and social thought, which problematized and conceptualized the considered issues in various ways: the Frankfurt School, existentialist philosophers, pillars of theoretical sociology - Karl Marx and Georg Simmel.

PRAVNOISTORIJSKI POGLED NA ZELENAŠKE USLUGE U SRPSKOM PRAVU

The paper analyzes the state reaction to usurer services, starting from the 1830s until the Second World War. At the time of the transition from the natural to the money economy, the need for money was great. Since agricultural loans were not still regulated, the money could only be requested from usurers. Thanks to that, the usurers become richer and peasants perished. Therefore, the state begins to take certain legal measures, first in the field of civil law and after that in the field of criminal law. In the Principality and Kingdom of Serbia, the range of civil law measures was rich, while the criminal law reaction of the state against usurer services was modest. However, with the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and due to the process of unifications, the focus of the state actions on usurer services is shifted from civil to criminal law.

The “Dignity of Motherhood” Demands Something Different

This chapter considers the work of the Catholic Medical Mission Sisters as midwives in New Mexico during the middle of the twentieth century. The sisters’ experimental initiative to provide midwifery and home birthing services to local women was integral to anti-poverty work in the state, and conformed to a midcentury Catholic view in which economic justice, understood solely in the context of the money economy, failed to address the unique dignity of women tied to the vocation of motherhood. The sisters’ work sheds light on how Catholic ideas about femaleness informed non-economic initiatives aimed at the poor, even as it also reveals the layered effects of historical experiments, economic or otherwise, to honor the “dignity of the poor,” when those experiments happened across differences of race, and in the shadow of asymmetrical relations of political power.

Marxism, Economic Theory, and Asian American Literary Studies

As migrants who were drawn to North America to serve as cheap labor, questions of money, economy, and class have been central to Asian American experiences from the mid-19th century, and Marx’s critique of capitalism has circulated almost as long among Asian Americans and anticolonial, nationalist movements in Asia. However, the long history in the communist movement of the subordination of racial and gender inequality to a narrowly defined class struggle alienated many in US racialized communities. Subsequent interventions in Marxist theory leading to non-economically determinist accounts of social transformation have resulted in a post-Marxist Asian American literary and cultural studies. This is a theory, though, that is largely devoid of specifically economic inquiry, and this has led to the marginalization of questions of class, labor, and whiteness that might complicate questions about resistance to domination and capitalist hegemony. These elisions are only exacerbated in the turn to global and transnational frames of analysis, since the complexities of local racial dynamics are often lost in more abstract narratives and conceptual paradigms. The history of Japanese internment provides a case study that exemplifies some of the difficulties of evaluating the multiple forces motivating racial discrimination.

Borderlands in the Silver Mines of New Spain, 1540–1660

From the sixteenth century onward, mining towns in New Spain produced more than silver; they also led to the creation of new colonial communities and societies. The founding of mining towns outside of central Mexico served as catalysts for northern exploration, becoming and creating new borderlands in their wake. This chapter considers how mining towns constituted both geographical and social borderlands. It focuses on the roles and experience of indigenous, Spanish, African, and ethnically mixed descent individuals (castas) in Mexico’s northern silver mining district from 1540 to 1660. The colonization of the mining borderlands created new economic, social, and ethnic patterns shaped by population scarcity and instability, the labor needs of production, the incentives of the money economy, the lifeways and practices of indigenous populations, imbalanced sex ratios, and under-developed colonial institutions. Ultimately, the chapter argues that mining towns remained borderlands, sites of fluid cultural exchanges and social boundaries.

Was There a Money Economy in Late Anglo-Saxon and Norman England?*

This article asks whether there was a money economy in Anglo-Saxon and Norman England (924–1135). In simple terms, a money economy can be defined as an economic system where money has replaced barter as the principal means of exchange. Bolton has also recently stated that ‘when the use of coin becomes the norm and not the exception … we have the beginnings of a money economy’. These two complementary definitions will provide the basis against which the question will be answered. One focus of this article is therefore on a thorough examination of the documentary material in order to demonstrate the value of monetary equivalents and small-scale transactions in this period. The second focus is on assembling, collating and analysing the abundant numismatic material in the form of single coin finds and coin hoards, an approach which affords more specific evidence of how money was actually used. The combination of approaches proposed here makes possible the formation of a more precise understanding of how money was—and was not—used across the social spectrum of English society during a period of momentous political change.