‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’Part I: The Alchemy of Capital,Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545–1648

In the first of two essays in this Journal, I seek to unify the historical geography of early modern ‘European expansion’ (Iberia and Latin America) with the environmental history of the ‘transition to capitalism’ (northwestern Europe). The expansion of Europe's overseas empires and the transitions to capitalism within Europe were differentiated moments within the geographical expansion of commodity production and exchange – what I call the commodity frontier. This essay is developed in two movements. Beginning with a conceptual and methodological recasting of the historical geography of the rise of capitalism, I offer an analytical narrative that follows the early modern diaspora of silver. This account follows the political ecology of silver production and trade from the Andes to Spain in Braudel's ‘second’ sixteenth century (c. 1545–1648). In highlighting the Ibero‐American moment of this process in the present essay, I contend that the spectacular reorganization of Andean space and the progressive dilapidation of Spain's real economy not only signified the rise and demise of a trans‐Atlantic, Iberian ecological regime, but also generated the historically necessary conditions for the unprecedented concentration of accumulation and commodity production in the capitalist North Atlantic in the centuries that followed.     

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.     

The expansion of intensive marine aquaculture in Turkey: The next‐to‐last commodity frontier?

Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food‐producing sectors, and its share in global seafood production is rising significantly compared with capture fisheries. This transforms seafood production practices while allowing capital to expand to new marine commodity frontiers. Building on the conceptualization of aquaculture as a new frontier for capture fisheries, the article aims to uncover how commodity frontiers expand within the intensive marine aquaculture sector and shape the transformation of seafood production by focusing on its recent growth in Turkey. It analyses this transformation based on 22 in‐depth interviews with key social actors in Turkey, as well as a review of sector and state reports and the relevant legislations of Turkey and the European Union, and argues that the three‐pronged horizontal, vertical, and taxonomic expansion already observed in industrial capture fisheries has similarly taken place in intensive marine aquaculture through the commodity widening, deepening, and marketing strategies employed by aquaculture firms.     

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.     

Blue Revolution in a Commodity Frontier: Ecologies of Aquaculture and Agrarian Change in Laguna Lake,Philippines

Aquaculture presents a radically different way of producing fish that aims to transcend the limitations of capture fisheries but that in turn creates new forms of agrarian and ecological transformations. Using the case of Laguna Lake, the paper probes how aquaculture production and corresponding agrarian transformations are inextricably tied to dynamics in capture fisheries in multiple ways. It emphasizes the fundamentally ecological nature of the relations between aquaculture and capture fisheries through a discussion of three interrelated features of agrarian change: commodity widening through the production of a commodity frontier, aquaculture producer strategies of working with materiality of biophysical nature, and the attendant consequences of these processes for agrarian configurations. By examining the appropriation of nature in commodity frontiers and situating relations between aquaculture and capture fisheries as historical‐geographical moments in commodity widening and deepening, the paper highlights the centrality of nature in agrarian change.     

Accumulation by Dispossession and Socio‐Environmental Conflicts Caused by the Expansion of Agribusiness in Argentina

Drawing upon the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, this paper analyses the expansion of agrarian capital in Argentina. A case study illustrates the social and environmental impacts of the expansion of agribusiness in central Argentina and the social struggle – both rural and urban – that has arisen to resist this process. Although government policies after the 2001 crisis differ in many ways from those of the 1990s, current agrarian policies are not significantly distinct from those followed during the pre‐crisis neoliberal period. Rather than ‘post‐neoliberal’, the new model could thus be better described as ‘neo‐extractivist’. With the connivance of the state, agribusiness is producing the largest‐ever transformation of natural capital into economic capital in the history of the region. Moreover, the latest policy developments suggest that Argentina is on the threshold of a new and deeper stage of agrarian capital expansion and wealth concentration, this time operating at a much larger scale.     

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.     

A Marketing Approach to Commodity Futures Exchanges: A Case Study of the Dutch Hog Industry

This paper proposes a marketing strategic approach to commodity futures exchanges to optimise the (hedging) services offered. First, the environment of commodity futures exchanges is examined. Second, the threats and opportunities of commodity futures exchanges are analysed. Our analysis demonstrates that market orientation is an important element in the market strategies of commodity futures exchanges. Our market strategic framework is applied to the Dutch hog futures market. It is concluded that market penetration is an appropriate strategy. Consequently, to identify the variables that distinguish between farmers who initiate futures positions and farmers who do not, we conducted a discriminant analysis on data gathered from 418 Dutch hog farmers. The discriminant analysis shows that latent variables, such as farmers' perceived performance, farmers' reference price and farmers' market orientation, are important discriminating variables. Furthermore, farmers' cash market behaviour (in terms of the frequency of selling in the spot market) is an important discriminating variable as well. The usefulness of these results as input for a penetration policy is demonstrated.     

Rethinking Organic Farming in the Post‐Socialist Context: Lessons from Bulgaria

On the basis of an in‐depth qualitative study, this article discusses the case of Bulgaria as an example of a new EU Member State that implemented EU organic farming policies in a top‐down process during EU accession. We explore the difficulties in transposing a concept originating in Western Europe to post‐Socialist countries, and particularly ask what this transposing of an alien concept means for long‐term development of the organic sector. We found that the top‐down agenda‐setting for organic farming in Bulgaria resulted in inefficient policies that inhibited an orientation of producers towards the market's needs. Tacit assumptions underlying the concept of organic farming in Western Europe, such as the relevance of social capital could not be sustained in Bulgaria, which added to the challenges of policy implementation. To increase policy efficiency, we recommend a policy process that involves the expertise of all organic sector actors, including organic operators, but also policymakers, organic organisations, consumers and academic experts. Expertise and knowledge requirements are diverse, touching policy, market, collective action and practice‐oriented skills. Integrating these skills could maximise success in finding the best solution for implementing – and adjusting – a foreign concept meaningfully in a particular local context.     

Short‐run and long‐run dynamics of farm land allocation: panel data evidence from Denmark1

This study develops and estimates a dynamic multi‐output model of farmers’ land allocation decisions that allows for the gradual adjustment of allocations that can result from crop rotation practices and quasi‐fixed capital constraints. Estimation is based on micro‐panel data from Danish farmers that include acreage, output, and variable input utilization at the crop level. Results indicate that there are substantial differences between the short‐run and long‐run land allocation behaviour of Danish farmers and that there are substantial differences in the time lags associated with different crops. To our knowledge, this is the first dynamic micro‐model of land allocation estimated on data from the temperate climate zone. Since similar farming conditions are found in northern Europe and parts of the United States and Canada, this result may be of wider interest.     

Socio‐economic differentiation from a class‐analytic perspective: The case of smallholder tree‐crop farmers in Limpopo,South Africa

South African agrarian policy aims to integrate smallholder tree‐crop farmers into high‐end value chains with growth and employment potential, generally neglecting socio‐economic differentiation amongst them. This paper aims to analyse socio‐economic differentiation amongst tree‐crop farmers in Vhembe District, Limpopo, using a class‐based analysis based on livelihood diversification and accumulation. Cluster analysis of survey data and semi‐structured interviews reveals that most tree‐crop farmers engage in petty commodity production, internally differentiated by their combination of income sources and livelihood strategies. Farmers' ability to engage in accumulation and upward class mobility is generally severely constrained by limited access to capital. Agricultural diversification offers livelihood potential but limited possibility for accumulation, whereas salaried nonfarm work offers more promising prospects for accumulation but limited livelihood opportunities. A minority demonstrated characteristics of small‐scale capitalist farmers, internally differentiated by their reliance on salaried employment or agricultural production. The findings challenge the notion of an undifferentiated class of market‐oriented smallholders.     

Farm Capital Investment and Deviations from the Optimal Path

We identify farms’ optimal investment path in capital assets and compare it with their actual investment to assess the direction and extent of deviation from the optimal investment. A probit model is further used to investigate the determinants of the probability that a farmer over‐ or under‐invests in capital assets. We use a panel dataset of Dutch dairy farms over the period 2003–2013, and find that most farms under‐invest in capital assets during the study period. Although the number of farms that had over‐invested in capital assets is relatively small, these farms account for the biggest share of total investment in capital assets. The probit results show that liquidity, agricultural support payments, age, land tenure and standard output size are important variables explaining the likelihood of over‐and under‐investment.     

A copula‐based approach to the simultaneous estimation of group and meta‐frontiers by constrained maximum likelihood

Existing approaches to the meta‐frontier estimation consist of two stages where the estimates of the local frontier parameters obtained in the first step are used to estimate meta‐frontier parameters by means of a linear or quadratic minimisation procedure in the second. Since it was shown by Schmidt (Review of Economics and Statistics 58: 238) that the second step is equivalent to constrained maximisation of a likelihood function, we extend this idea and offer a copula‐based approach to the estimation of the parameters of both meta‐ and group frontiers in a one‐step setting. In this way, we ensure a single data‐generating mechanism for the estimated parameters, expand the set of potential meta‐frontiers and account for the fact that shocks to the individual production units may be correlated with shocks to the local technological environment as a whole. We apply our estimation methodology to a data set on the world agriculture and find that the deviations from the group frontiers are positively correlated with deviations from the meta‐frontier, which is a conclusion that is impossible to reach without accounting for stochastic dependence between the two deviation types represented by a copula.     

Energy‐saving Technology Choices by Dutch Glasshouse Firms

This paper estimates a sequence of energy‐saving technology choices by Dutch glasshouse firms. The model allows for time‐constant, firm‐specific effects and serial correlation of errors and it is estimated on panel data over the period 1991–1995. The unobserved error sequences are simulated in the model in such a way that they are consistent with the observed choices. The results suggest that positive revenue shocks encourage adoption of new technologies. The choices also exhibit firm‐specific persistency over time. An increase of the price of energy encourages the adoption of a highly efficient energy‐saving technology. The probability of investing in energy‐saving technologies also decreases with capital invested in structures (e.g. double glazing of glasshouses) and increases with capital in energy installations.     

New Paths to Capitalist Agricultural Production in Africa: Experiences of Ghanaian Pineapple Producer–Exporters

With the global restructuring of agri‐food markets since the 1980s, an impressive amount of scholarship has examined its impacts in African countries. However, little has been written on the emergence of local medium and large‐scale commercial farmers selling to export companies or controlling their own export marketing arrangements. This article examines Ghanaian commercial farmers producing and exporting fresh pineapples to European markets. This group of pineapple producer–exporters represents a path to capitalist agricultural production that can be conceptualized as capitalism from outside: where capital flows into the countryside, rather than accumulation occurring from above or below within the agrarian economy. The emergence of this form of agrarian capitalism is stimulated by opportunities in new high‐value agricultural export markets, but its stabilization depends on country‐specific characteristics such as rural social structures, property rights and state support. The article documents the conditions of emergence of this new group of Ghanaian capitalist farmers, the period of destabilization caused by increasing international competition that resulted in a small number of large‐scale agribusiness firms surviving, and the challenges that these agribusiness firms faced in stabilizing their capitalist agricultural production.     

The food regime in late colonial Philippines: Pathways of appropriation and unpaid work

I argue that food regimes need to take into account the production relations of paid and unpaid work. As an angle of vision, I use the historical geography of late colonial Philippines (1901–1941) to show how paid and unpaid work in food production was not discrete and separated processes but rather conjoined moments of capital accumulation. The colonial regime—in this context, American colonial government, U.S. agribusinesses, and Filipino landed elites—utilized state power, customary land relations, and commodity‐specific characteristics to appropriate vast amounts of unpaid work from agrarian classes of Philippine labour and draft animals towards the exploitation of commodified labour power. These processes not only produced considerable quantities of coconut and sugar products that were exported to the American consumer market, sold at cheaper prices, and contributed to the profitability of U.S. agribusiness elites but also allowed the colonial regime to efficiently expand commodity production across the islands. The more the American capitalists and Philippine elites invested in Philippine agriculture, the more they appropriated unpaid work from the agrarian classes of labour.     

Manufactured regional crises: The Middle East and North Africa under global food regimes

The current agrarian and food crisis in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been interpreted through a number of tropes. Within the dominant mainstream discourse, the MENA region is often depicted as a homogenous geographical area characterized by dryness, infertile lands and poor water resources. How did imperialism, colonialism and the Cold War influence the MENA food systems? What were the effects of trade liberalization and neoliberalism on the agricultural systems in the region? These are some questions that this paper will try to answer using a geographical and historical-comparative analysis, through a food regimes lens. Understanding contemporary social relations dynamics cannot be limited to the recent period. Agriculture and food in the MENA region are anchored in the history of power relations ruled by flows of capital and the shaping of ecological transformations during the longue durée of capitalism and its corresponding modes of control and regulation.     

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.     

Value versus Volume in the Catch of the Spanish South‐Atlantic Trawl Fishery

An understanding of the link between the level of inputs and resultant level of outputs is of considerable importance when trying to manage fisheries through input controls. To this end, studies of several fisheries have been undertaken to examine this relationship through the estimation of production functions and frontiers, using either catch weight or revenue as the dependent variable. The choice of the appropriate output variable to use in the analysis will depend on the objectives of the fishermen. Maximisation of catch weight is often proposed as an objective of fishermen rather than maximisation of profits. In this paper, the technical efficiency scores of vessels operating in the Spanish south‐Atlantic trawl fishery are estimated using the stochastic production frontier approach. The production frontiers are estimated with both the weight and the value of the catch as the dependent variable. The results of the analysis suggest that fishermen adopt a range of strategies but relatively few aim to maximise catch weight only. The differences in strategies may reflect heterogeneous attitudes towards risk, with more risk averse fishermen aiming to trade‐off some potential catch value for a more certain quantity of catch.     

Analysing Farm‐specific Payments for Norway using the Agrispace Model

Norway maintains a complex system of activity or type specific coupled payments which account for a large share of farm income. Most of the payment rates are negatively related to farm size and are higher in remote areas compared to central regions. We present and use a newly developed recursive‐dynamic multi‐commodity model (Agrispace) with CES production functions depicting regional farm clusters derived from the full farm population. Using this model, we simulate impacts of current and alternative subsidy policies on production, prices, input use, income and farm structural change. Mapping cluster results to each farm along with behavioural rules allows estimation of individual profits and farm exits. Our results indicate that, in the short run, the current policy regime seems to support the policy objective of maintaining a variety of farms in all parts of Norway. In the long run, farm structural change is less affected by a policy reform that leaves total support levels unchanged.