‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’ Part II: The Global North Atlantic in the Ecological Revolution of the Long Seventeenth Century

‘Amsterdam is standing on Norway’– this was a popular saying in the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century. There was more than one inflection to the phrase. Amsterdam was, in the first instance, built atop a subterranean forest of Norwegian origin. But southern Norway was also a vital resource zone, subordinated to Amsterdam‐based capital. This paper follows the movement of strategic commodity frontiers within early modern Europe from the standpoint of capitalism as world‐ecology, joining in dialectical unity the production of capital and the production of nature. Our geographical focus is trained upon the emergence of the Global North Atlantic, that zone providing the strategic raw materials and food supplies indispensable to the consolidation of capitalism – timber, naval stores, metals, cereals, fish and whales. I argue for a broader geographical perspective on these movements, one capable of revealing the dialectical interplay of frontiers on all sides of the Atlantic. From its command posts in Amsterdam, Dutch capital deployed American silver in the creation of successive frontiers within Europe, transforming Scandinavian and Baltic regions. The frontier character of these transformations was decisive, premised on drawing readily exploitable supplies of land and labour power into the orbit of capital. We see in northern Europe precisely what we see in the Americas – a pattern of commodity‐centred environmental transformation, and thence relative ecological exhaustion, from which the only escape was renewed global conquest and ever‐wider cycles of combined and uneven development.     

The Coal Crisis in Appalachia: Agrarian Transformation,Commodity Frontiers and the Geographies of Capital

Capital's commodity frontiers strategy has at once woven together regional differences within an expanding world‐system and remade the productive and reproductive activities of humans and the rest of nature. The development of successive commodity frontiers gave way to long waves of economic expansion that have been pivotal to accelerating accumulation and transcending capital's recurrent crises. In short, commodity frontiers are constitutive of world‐ecological moments premised on booms and crises of accumulation. In this paper, I examine the coal commodity frontier in Appalachia, to illustrate the region's history as one of succeeding frontiers in and out of the region over the long twentieth century of American capitalism. I argue that the origin of Appalachia's coal frontier was decisively made through the nineteenth‐century agricultural revolution expressed outside of the region. Appalachia's full‐fledged development was an outcome of capital's under‐reproduction strategies. The crisis of the region's frontier turned on a lack of surplus from under‐reproduction strategies, competing coal basins, economic diversification and competing energy sources. I find that the commodity frontier concept not only illuminates regional political economies and ecologies of difference, but also explains the production of nature of historical capitalism.     

Cacao capitalism in coastal Ecuador: Production processes and accumulation in non‐transitionary agrarian capitalism during the long 19th century

Histories of agrarian capitalism have often been constrained by the implications of Robert Brenner's work on the subject. This essay, employing archival and secondary research on Ecuador's long 19th century experiences with cacao capitalism, argues that production processes and localized forms of accumulation, rather than class structure and legal relations, should be included in our definition of the concept. By focusing on how fixed capital in cacao trees and the production of the yearly cacao commodity responded to global demand and local material conditions, I propose amplifying the concept of agrarian capitalism, as well as a rethinking of coastal Ecuador's history of capitalist development. I highlight how both absolute and relative forms of surplus value generation coexisted in coastal Ecuador's cacao haciendas, while demonstrating how financial instruments used for extending the cacao frontier undermined the prospects for long‐term growth.     

Discipline,Governmentality and ‘Developmental Patrimonialism’: Insights from Rwanda's Pyrethrum Sector

An ongoing academic debate examines the implications of ‘developmental patrimonialism’ for African citizens. Rwanda is a key case study in this debate, with proponents of developmental patrimonialism and ‘party capitalism’ arguing that companies owned by the ruling party or the military play positive roles in economic development. This debate often focuses on macro‐level, elite politics. This paper instead uses a Foucauldian lens to examine the micro‐level politics of pyrethrum production in Rwanda, which is managed by a military‐owned company. The company utilizes incentive‐based governmental strategies, in line with state discourses, in addition to punitive, disciplinary regimes. The paper demonstrates that state agricultural strategies depend on multiple factors, including multi‐scale political tensions between the ruling party's desire for control and its discourse of ‘entrepreneurship’.     

Rural Economies and Transitions to Capitalism: Germany and England Compared (c.1200–c.1800)

Based on a synthesis of the empirical scholarship on England and Germany, this paper demonstrates that in both regions, rural socio‐economic developments from c.1200 to c.1800 are similar: this period witnesses the rise to numerical predominance and growing economic significance of the ‘sub‐peasant classes’, which had a growing impact on the market as a result of their increasing market dependence, and from which – towards the end of the period – a rural proletariat emerged. Against the influential theory of Robert Brenner, it is argued that the period c.1200–c.1400 cannot really be categorized as ‘feudal’ according to Brenner's definition; and ‘agrarian capitalism’ does not adequately describe the socio‐economic system that obtained by the end of the sixteenth century. A genuine transition to capitalism is only evident from after c.1750, and can be found in Germany as well as in England; it is predicated both on ideological shifts and on the evolution of the rural proletariat, which is only found in large numbers by or after c.1800.     

Afterword: Reflections on “Capitalist development in hostile environments”

This afterword places the long essay “Capitalist Development in Hostile Environments” in the context of Giovanni Arrighi's overall intellectual trajectory. It highlights several crucial theoretical and methodological contributions to debates, including on the relationship between proletarianization and capitalist development, and between labour migration, class formation, and class conflict; on the interrelationship between “internal” and “external” processes in the explanation of social change; and on the distinction between economic progress, “catching‐up” development, and popular welfare. It concludes with a brief discussion of ways in which Arrighi's later theorization of the longue durée evolution of historical capitalism provides a robust conceptual framework for ongoing studies of proletarianization and capitalist development.     

Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A Survey of Evidence from across Western Europe, 1300–1800

The view of the commons as archaic, ‘backward’ and ‘irrational’ institutions for the management of resources has now been revised in favour of a more positive one, for both past and present societies. Indeed, it is clear that the commons had multifarious ecological and economic benefits for both medieval and early modern rural societies in Western Europe. That being the case, many scholars have seen the increasing expropriation of the commons in the transition to the early modern period as a sign of increasing inequality characterizing pre‐industrial Europe, and many have lamented the loss of communal grazing privileges connected to processes such as land enclosure – pushing poor peasants into the ‘abyss’ with the removal of their final form of welfare. However, in this paper it is argued that the social distribution of the benefits to the commons were rarely, if ever, entirely equitable. In fact, in many historical contexts the benefits of the commons could also be highly restricted – crystallizing and entrenching stratifications themselves, and even serving as the ‘vehicle’ of further inequality. The expropriation of the commons did not necessarily make Western European rural societies any more unequal.     

‘Deal’ or ‘No Deal’? Impacts of Alternative Post‐Brexit Trade Agreements on UK Agriculture

Brexit will have important implications for UK agricultural commodity markets due to potentially significant changes to trade flows. We quantify the sectoral impacts on UK agriculture of three illustrative scenarios, which capture a broad range of potential trade arrangements: Bespoke Free Trade Deal , WTO Default and Unilateral Trade Liberalisation . It is estimated that the projected market impacts are relatively small if the UK negotiates a Bespoke Free Trade Agreement with the EU. The projected impacts are much greater under the two other scenarios, which capture potential trade arrangements if ‘no deal’ is reached. The high tariffs imposed under the WTO default scenario lead to significant adjustments in trade between the UK and EU‐27, with the impact on the domestic UK market depending on whether the UK is a net importer or a net exporter of the relevant commodity. All sectors experience price and production declines under the trade liberalisation scenario in which the UK unilaterally sets tariffs on imports from both the EU‐27 and the rest of the world to zero; the impacts are particularly severe in the beef and sheep sectors where international competition is very strong.     

Historical Materialism and Agrarian History

Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation , by Jairus Banaji. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010 . Historical Materialism Book Series Volume 25 . Pp. xix+406. €101 (hb). ISBN 978‐90‐04‐18368‐1 The collection provides an opportunity to assess Jairus Banaji's original and provocative contributions over more than three decades. This review tries to chart a path across the range of the essays as a whole, marked by three themes and their connections and possible disconnections: what constitutes modes of production; modes of production before capitalism and their histories; and characterizing and periodizing capitalism. Banaji's emphatic arguments for long histories/trajectories of commodity production, exchange and accumulation across different times and places, especially in estate agriculture and the circuits of merchant capital, traverse these three themes.     

Perspectives on Natural Resources in the Global Economy: Polity Series Review

Polity's ‘Resources’ series is a set of scholarly books, each of them dealing with a single resource or resource‐based commodity from a generally global or international perspective. As of this writing, nine books have been published in the series, six of which I review here. The series is a welcome contribution to interdisciplinary and overall critical perspectives on the social and environmental dimensions and implications of the international appropriation, production and exchange of natural resources. While there is no clear disciplinary bent or theoretical foundation running across the volumes, together the books develop a transnational perspective, stressing the linkages between specific sites of appropriation and production, on the one hand, and broader political economic networks of processing, finance, coordination, commercial distribution and social regulation, on the other. The books should serve as valuable references to researchers in academic, government and non‐government institutional settings, but should also prove valuable for undergraduate teaching on contemporary natural resource industries and their social regulation.     

The Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Post‐Soviet Russia

A core set of criteria have been met, so that it is accurate to speak of an agrarian capitalist system in Russia. The development of agrarian capitalism carries with it increased stratification, which is analysed along five dimensions: earned income, land expansion, use of credit, income from food sales and income from household enterprise. The paper demonstrates increasing differentiation between households, between professional cohorts and within professional cohorts. The data showing stratification within professions suggest that intra‐cohort stratification is driving most of the inter‐cohort stratification. The Russian model of agrarian capitalism and its processes of stratification have yielded a bifurcated countryside in which a thin stratum of ‘super winners’ has emerged. Economic processes have developed beyond simple stratification and have created the basis from which a rudimentary class structure appears to be forming.     

Historical grounding,political contexts,material hurdles: Towards more in-depth understandings of ‘finance going farming’

Two recently published books—Fairbairn's Fields of Gold and Ouma's Farming as a Financial Asset—now provide the first extensive investigations into finance's engagement with farmland. Both books set out to understand finance's growing interest in farmland from the perspective of the financial actors involved, and inquire how, why, and with what kind of challenges ‘finance has been going farming.’ This review essay discusses the two books in the context of the ‘land rush’ literature. It outlines how they contribute to an advanced understanding of the financialization of farmland in three ways, by (i) embedding finance-farmland intersections historically; (ii) scrutinizing the role of the state within financial farmland investments; and (iii) exploring the hurdles involved in ‘marrying’ finance with farmland. I then critically reflect on the areas that have not been covered by the authors. Critical agrarian studies need to investigate how financialization intersects with the digitization of agriculture, examine life expectancies and afterlives of financialized farms, further ground financial investment in concrete rural spaces, and explore individual motivations and belief systems of its proponents more seriously.     

Moral Economy and the Upper Peasant: The Dynamics of Land Privatization in the Mekong Delta

This paper examines how people mobilize around notions of distributive justice, or ‘moral economies’, to make claims to resources, using the process of post‐socialist land privatization in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam as a case study. First, I argue that the region's history of settlement, production and political struggle helped to entrench certain normative beliefs around landownership, most notably in its population of semi‐commercial upper peasants. I then detail the ways in which these upper peasants mobilized around notions of distributive justice to successfully press demands for land restitution in the late 1980s, drawing on Vietnamese newspapers and other sources to construct case studies of local land conflicts. Finally, I argue that the successful mobilization of the upper peasants around such a moral economy has helped, over the past two decades, to facilitate the re‐emergence of agrarian capitalism in the Mekong Delta, in contrast to other regions in Vietnam.     

Livelihoods after Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Understanding Processes of Rural Differentiation

This paper explores the consequences of Zimbabwe's land reform for the dynamics of differentiation in Zimbabwe's countryside, reporting on the results from a 10‐year study from Masvingo province. Based on a detailed analysis of livelihoods across 400 households at 16 sites, the paper offers a detailed typology of livelihood strategies, linked to a class‐based analysis of emerging agrarian dynamics. The paper identifies a significant and successful ‘middle farmer’ group, reliant on ‘accumulation from below’ through petty commodity production, existing alongside other worker‐peasants and the semi‐peasantry, whose livelihoods remain vulnerable, with prospects for accumulation currently limited. In addition, there are others who are ‘accumulating from above’, through patronage and corruption. While small in number, this group has significant political and economic influence, and is embedded in powerful alliances that have fundamental impacts on the wider political–economic dynamics. To conclude, the economic, social and political implications of the emerging patterns of differentiation in Zimbabwe's countryside are discussed.     

Agrarian Winners of Neoliberal Reform: The ‘Maize Boom’ of Sinaloa,Mexico

While the detrimental impact of neoliberal policy on Mexico's maize smallholders is well researched, little attention has been paid to the rise of maize in the northern state of Sinaloa. Sinaloa's entry into maize has restructured the geography of national supply, and generated a new national confidence in white maize self‐sufficiency. Using semi‐structured interviews and secondary data, we document the primary social and political drivers of Sinaloa's maize boom. Local actors trumpet Sinaloa's response as a success story of entrepreneurship and technological innovation, while simultaneously appropriating the language of food sovereignty to justify preferential entitlements in public investment. Our analysis confirms interpretations of neoliberalism as a political project, illustrating how existing natural, social and political capital held by specific interest groups can be leveraged and reinforced through private–public partnerships to mould national policy and investment, and the potential vulnerabilities that may emerge from this process.     

Commodity Studies and Commodity Fetishism II: ‘Profits with Principles’?

The two edited collections and the monograph reviewed here provide the means to consider an extended range of commodities, locations, commodity/value chains, and issues of theory and method in political economy, beyond those presented by Gibbon and Ponte (2005) that we considered in the first part of this essay. Our discussion here touches on issues concerning how 'global' global commodity/value chains are; the symbolic attributes of commodities and commodity fetishism; the politics of consumption (or simply politics of selling and buying); the strengths and weaknesses of the economic sociology of commodity/value chains; and how the 'slices' extracted from larger organisms in studies of particular commodities may be reinserted, as it were, as part of the understanding of contemporary capitalism and of issues of development in the economies of the 'South'.     

Value‐Chains in the Andes: Upgrading for Ecuador's Blackberry Producers

We apply a value chain approach to examine how blackberry producers in Ecuador can improve production and marketing practices to obtain more favorable prices. Results show that general upgrading actions are associated with improved producer prices, and specific activities, such as seeking information from reputable sources can lead to substantial welfare improvements. The paper goes beyond most value chain studies which treat participation in a ‘modern’ value chain as a discrete state. Ecuador's blackberry industry is evolving incrementally with no clearly discernible ‘modern’ market chains. Instead, producers incrementally make improvements in multiple dimensions. Relatively low‐cost practices, many of which do not imply substantial risk or investment, are associated with price improvements. Obstacles to participation in incremental value chain upgrading activities are not insurmountable. In particular, scale of production is not a limiting factor: small‐scale producers are not precluded from adopting improved practices and they do not suffer in terms of price received.     

The Rise and Decline of Small‐Scale Sugarcane Production in South Africa: A Historical Perspective

South Africa's sugar industry has long been distinguished by its large number of small‐scale sugarcane growers (SSGs) farming on ‘communal’ land and its peculiar privately administered regulatory structure. In recent years, however, the numbers of small‐scale growers have declined precipitously. This paper argues that the relationship between the rise and fall of SSG production and the industry's governing regulatory structure is closer than usually appreciated. The emergence of SSG production in the late 1970s and the 1980s can be traced to industry‐subsidized initiatives, disguised as small‐scale credit, to bring commercially inalienable Bantustan land into cane production with strong miller oversight. From the late 1980s to 1990s, however, the elimination of these subsidies encouraged millers to subcontract support to farmers, while simultaneously instigating an increase in SSG numbers by removing restrictions on grower registration. Although low rainfall is a central proximal factor in the rapid decline of the SSGs in the 2000s, their rapid increase was structurally fragile.     

Labour Migration and Gendered Agricultural Relations: The Feminization of Agriculture in the Ejidal Sector of Calakmul,Mexico

We examine the nature of the ‘feminization of agriculture’ in the semi‐subsistence, peasant production sector of southeastern Mexico, as associated with male labour out‐migration. Presenting findings from empirical work with smallholder producers, we discuss the impact of men's migration to the United States on women's participation in agriculture and gendered relations of agricultural production. In 2007, we conducted a survey of 155 semi‐subsistence, smallholder households in six ejidos. This survey was supplemented by ethnographic research in a single ejido. Our findings demonstrate the need to distinguish between farm labour and management in this sector, and the potentially significant (but focused) changes in the local relations of agricultural production wrought by gendered patterns of labour migration – specifically in tenure, land‐use decision‐making and the management of hired labour.     

Sweetness and Power – Public Policies and the ‘Biofuels Frenzy’

Sweetness and Power – Public Policies and the ‘Biofuels Frenzy’ In the last decade, there has been a huge policy‐led expansion in biofuels production and consumption. This paper presents some of the findings of a funded research project which has sought to identify the drivers of biofuels policies over this period. It focuses on the EU, US and Brazil which, together, represent about 90 per cent of global biofuels markets. Biofuels policies have three key drivers: as a partial substitute for fossil fuels, to lower greenhouse gas emissions; as a way of improving energy security, by diversifying away from fossil fuels and from the limited number of countries with fossil‐fuel reserves; and as a means of promoting rural development, given the opportunities offered by the production of biofuel feedstocks and their processing into biofuels. One particular challenge for both the EU and US has been to create and sustain a broad coalition of stakeholder interests in support of biofuels and biofuel policies. Both have sought to promote ‘conventional’ biofuels now, whilst trying to aid the development of ‘advanced’ biofuels industries that will address problems with existing technologies. The continued failure to deliver significant quantities of advanced biofuels raises questions for biofuels policymakers going forward, not least dealing with the downsides of conventional biofuels that, so far, have not been mitigated by a successful transition to advanced biofuels.