Global Capital And Peripheral Labour

This book presents a historical account of plantations in India in the context of the modern world economy. It brings history up to the present, thereby showing how history can assist in explaining contemporary conditions and trends. The author focuses on labour and economic development problems and uses the World Systems theory so as to demonstrate the practical utility of the theory and its limitations as a guide to historical research. Based on extensive archival research, the book interprets the dynamics of plantation capitalism by focusing on the work, life and struggle of the dalits on plantations in colonial and post-colonial South India as they evolved from the mid-19th century. It argues that these elements of the plantation life-world were fashioned by the specific characteristics of the workers' location within the capitalist world-economy, the then prevailing local social structure and the scheme of disciplining to which the workers were subjected to. Treating the relations among various social forces – the planting communities, the oppressed communities (dalits in India), the regional and national state, and the Imperial regime, this book fills a gap in academic literature on capitalism, economic development, and globalization.

Presents a historical account of plantations in India in the context of the modern world economy. This book shows how history can assist in explaining contemporary conditions and trends. It focuses on labour and economic development problems and interprets the dynamics of plantation capitalism.

This volume offers insights into ongoing global socioeconomic transformations by directing attention to the significance of labour, work, craft, community, social institutions, social movements and emergent subjectivities in different parts of the world. This is in contrast to theories that project globalisation as a process driven exclusively by global capital and technology, a scheme in which some parts of the world forever will be ‘peripheries’ supplying labour and natural resources, the lives and work of those people purged of originality, meaning and value by the very construct that describes them. Together the chapters in the book present a nonessentialist and non-linear reading of global transformations by examining the relations and adaptations between economy, polity and society, which remains a fundamentally unresolved question in the social sciences. Combining a wealth of conceptual and empirical investigations, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of sociology, globalisation studies, anthropology, economics, development studies and area studies.

This work concerns transformation processes in labour relations and in production systems in the 1980s. It describes new industrial and occupational patterns, as well as technological progress and the implications of the end of the Welfare State. Old practices are assessed.

An alternative view of contemporary capitalism. The authors of this text argue that modern internationalization is not a structure, but a contradictory process, and that adapting patterns in the division of labour, while successful in creating pressure over workers, is unable to supercede Fordism.

This book engages critically with mainstream accounts of ‘Anatolian Tigers’ in contemporary Turkey. Based on her fieldwork in Çorum, Deniz explores the dynamics of medium-size businesses with a dual optic of political economy and moral economy. She demonstrates that the formation of the entrepreneurial stratum is a multifaceted process and zooms into a range of workplaces to show the entanglements of market and non-market dynamics in everyday life. This innovative work sheds original light on the role of kinship, religion and social values in shaping the everyday politics of labour.

Spaces of Work is an accessible examination of the role of labour in the modern world. The authors critically assess the present condition and future prospects for workers through the geographies of place, space and scale, and in conjunction with other more commonly studied components of the globalisation such as production, trade and finance. Each chapter presents examples of labour practice from around the world, and across multiple sectors of work, not just Western manufacturing. In addition, the book features: · further reading section with key questions · glossary of key terms · short summaries of the main theoretical approaches · guide to further learning resouces Spaces of Work is a key book for all social scientists interested in the contemporary state of labour, and the scope for progressive change within the capitalist system. Students of human geography, sociology, international political economy, economics and cultural studies will all find this an invaluable text.