‘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.     

Rural employment in industrialised countries⋆

This paper assesses the recent changes in rural employment in the OECD countries, highlighting the growing role of employment in services and, in some cases, manufacturing activity. In many, but not all, rural areas the secular decline in agricultural employment has been more than counterbalanced by growing employment in these other sectors. However, the diversity of employment growth within and between rural areas is stressed, as are the implications of this diversity for policy. A range of explanations for the relative economic success of some rural areas is explored. These include the impacts of globalisation; restructuring of the labour market; new‘consumption’ demands on the rural areas; and human mobility. The paper concludes that traditional theories do not explain the diversity of outcomes in rural areas. New approaches are needed. Recent analyses under the banner of‘the new economic geography’ has advanced our understanding of the pre‐conditions for rural development to occur, but understanding the diverse pattern of rural employment outcomes within the same kind of geography remains a challenge which needs to be addressed by inter‐disciplinary approaches and methods.     

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.     

The Costs of Coexistence Measures for Genetically Modified Maize in Germany

We estimate the perceived costs of legal requirements (‘coexistence measures’) for growing genetically modified (GM) Bt maize in Germany using a choice experiment. The costs of the evaluated ex‐ante and ex‐post coexistence measures range from zero to more than €300 per measure and most are greater than the extra revenue the farmers in our survey expect from growing Bt maize or than estimates in the literature. The cost estimates for temporal separation, the highest in our evaluation, imply that the exclusion of this measure in Germany is justified. The costliest measures of the ones that are currently applied in Germany are joint and strict liability for all damages. Our results further show that neighbours do not cause a problem and opportunities for reducing costs through agreements with them exist. Finally, we find that farmers’ attitudes towards GM crops affect the probability of adoption of Bt maize. Our results imply that strict liability will deter the cultivation of Bt maize in Germany unless liability issues can be addressed through other means, for example, through neighbours agreements.     

Illegal Evictions? Overwriting Possession and Orality with Law's Violence in Cambodia

The unfolding of a juridico‐cadastral system in present‐day Cambodia is at odds with local understandings of landholding, which are entrenched in notions of community consensus and existing occupation. The discrepancy between such orally recognized antecedents and the written word of law have been at the heart of the recent wave of dispossessions that has swept across the country. Contra the standard critique that corruption has set the tone, this paper argues that evictions in Cambodia are often literally underwritten by the articles of law. Whereas ‘possession’ is a well‐understood and accepted concept in Cambodia, a cultural basis rooted in what James C. Scott refers to as ‘orality’, coupled with a long history of subsistence agriculture, semi‐nomadic lifestyles, barter economies and – until recently – widespread land availability have all ensured that notions of ‘property’ are vague among the country's majority rural poor. In drawing a firm distinction between possessions and property, where the former is premised upon actual use and the latter is embedded in exploitation, this paper examines how proprietorship is inextricably bound to the violence of law.     

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.     

‘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.     

Contemporary agrarian,rural and rural–urban movements and alliances

Henry Bernstein has criticized the research agenda of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), and the publications linked to it, for, among other things, not having specified which classes are supposed to comprise the proposed emancipatory rural politics. The Journal of Agrarian Change organized a special issue (published in January 2023) that takes Bernstein's critique as its point of departure. It emphasized the importance of movements of the working class that straddle the rural–urban corridor. I agree, but this should not be done by de-valuing the agrarian and the rural. The key challenge is in building agrarian, rural and rural–urban anti-capitalist movements and alliances within and between these spheres. This calls for more—not less—attention to agrarian movements seen from the inseparable domains of the agrarian, rural and rural–urban continuum in terms of academic research and political action. A starting point, and implication, of this broader unit of analysis and political intervention is an argument against a ‘too agrarian-centric’, or ‘merely agrarian’, mass movement-building and political mobilization to counter regressive populism and struggle against capitalism.     

Land use dynamics in the central highlands of Vietnam: a spatial model combining village survey data with satellite imagery interpretation

The paper investigates geo‐physical, agro‐ecological, and socio‐economic determinants of past land use change in two districts of Dak Lak province in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and assesses the influence of rural development policies on land cover change. Landsat satellite images from the years 1975, 1992 and 2000 are interpreted to detect land cover in two time periods. A survey in randomly selected villages provides primary recall data on socio‐economic and policy variables hypothesised to influence land use change. Secondary data on rainfall, soil suitability, and topography was obtained from meteorological stations and from a digital soil map and digital elevation model. All data were spatially referenced using geographic information systems (GIS) software. A reduced‐form, multinomial logit model is used to estimate the influence of hypothesised determinants on land use and the probabilities that a certain pixel has one of five land classes during either of the two periods. Results suggest that the first period from 1975 to 1992 was characterised by land‐intensive agricultural expansion and the conversion of forest into grass and agricultural land. During the second period, since 1992, the rapid, more labour‐ and capital‐intensive growth in the agricultural sector was enabled by the introduction of fertiliser, improved access to rural roads and markets, and expansion of the irrigated area. These policies, combined with the introduction of protected forest areas and policies discouraging shifting cultivation during the second period reduced the pressure on forests while at the same time increasing agricultural productivity and incomes for a growing population. Forest cover during the second period mainly increased due to the regeneration of areas formerly used for shifting cultivation.     

United States–Cuba Agricultural Relations and Agrarian Questions

In the wake of Cuba's far‐reaching, halting economic reforms, geopolitical rapprochement and trade openings with the United States (US) offer opportunities and risks for Cuban small‐scale farmers and agrarian cooperatives: pressures, paradoxes and potential abound. Meanwhile, on the margins, agro‐ecologically oriented tours bring admiring US students, farmers and agrarian advocates. Cubans concur that the country must solve key problems in its agricultural sector to overcome the contradictions of its agri‐food model, and that this entails more exchange with the US – but in what capacity and on what terms? The current crossroads begs the classic agrarian question, even as it updates it. Having experienced and survived the promises and disasters of both capitalist and communist agricultural economies, Cuban farmers expand the original ‘peasant’ protagonist. As they navigate new non‐state markets and recent re‐entrenchment of state control of prices, Cuban farmers and cooperatives struggle to avoid monopolizing tendencies of unfettered capitalist as well as communist agricultural economies – both of which have historically been ecologically damaging. US agribusiness courts Cuba, but not as mere unidirectional capture: Cubans are inviting and leveraging trade to end the embargo, which is increasingly being modified altogether. Key Cuban agrarian principles of resilience and cooperativismo have persisted through capitalist and communist crises: could they influence prospects for agro‐industrial hegemony from the North?      

Farmer Gone Fish'n? Swidden Decline and the Rise of Grouper Fishing on Palawan Island,the Philippines

Considerable research has focused on understanding how upland farmers adjust land‐based livelihoods to the influences of agrarian change in Southeast Asia. In the process, an ‘upland bias’ has emerged where researchers focus narrowly on the uplands as localities with distinct, coherent features, neglecting how families engage place, social relations and ethnicity as they access opportunities in proximate spaces. This paper considers how the Tagbanua – long considered an upland swidden people – have ‘stepped back’ from swidden agriculture due to declining yields and debt to harvest the lucrative grouper (e.g. Plectropomus leopardus). We show how Tagbanua families on Palawan Island have adjusted swidden as they negotiate social relations, ethnic cleavages and economic barriers to effectively engage the grouper industry. Rather than cast such farmers and fishers as ideal types in place, we argue that how they negotiate social relations creates new livelihood opportunities in varied environments, reinforcing the dynamic, recursive context of agrarian change.     

Landscape as a Focus for Integrating Human and Environmental Processes

The landscape has long been an important object of rural policy, particularly in terms of protecting scenic areas. Increasingly, however, landscape is seen as a multifunctional and holistic entity, which provides a framework for the governance and interdisciplinary study of spatial units. A central dilemma in the maintenance of cultural landscapes is that the historical practices which produced them are often obsolete, and new social and economic forces may fail to reproduce their valued properties. Sustainable development strategies therefore seek to instil ‘virtuous’ circles in cultural landscapes, linking society and economy to environmental service functions and land uses, in order to generate mutually reinforcing feedback loops resulting in socially preferred outcomes. We explore ways of investigating these linkages as a basis for future rural research and policy. We conceptualise cultural landscapes as ‘socio‐ecological systems’ (SESs), and consider their capacity for resilience and stability. Noting that resilient systems are characterised, not by simple equilibria, but by ‘basins of attraction’, we argue the need to understand the ways in which SESs stabilise within a particular basin, or move to an alternative. In particular, we reflect on the dynamics of ‘adaptive cycles’ that may lead to changes in system state. Finally, we discuss the development of appropriate models as tools for investigating whether a landscape is trending towards stability within a ‘vicious’ or a ‘virtuous’ circle, and evaluating potential interventions to alter this trajectory.     

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’.     

Sendero Luminoso in the New Millennium: Comrades,Cocaine and Counter‐Insurgency on the Peruvian Frontier

During the 1980s and until the mid‐1990s, Peru experienced one of the bloodiest conflicts in contemporary Latin America, initiated by the armed insurrection launched by the Partido Comunista del Perú – Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). Most guerrilla activity, armed confrontations and civilian fatalities occurred in Andean rural districts. The intensity of violence declined following the detention of PCP‐SL General Secretary Abimael Guzmán and other leading cadres in 1992–3, which resulted in the dismantling of a substantial component of the organization's military apparatus and support networks. This paper examines how surviving PCP‐SL militants attempted to regroup and respond strategically and tactically to such a devastating setback, focusing on its dealings with the civilian population, particularly coca‐producing smallholders. Counter‐insurgency measures pursued by the Peruvian state are also analysed. The paper concludes with an assessment of the current disposition of guerrilla – rural population – state relations in the main areas of conflict.     

Paradoxical Utopia: The Millennium Villages Project in Theory and Practice

The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) aims to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in villages across sub‐Saharan Africa, through an integrated set of interventions designed to catalyse the transformation of ‘sub‐subsistence farmers’ into ‘small‐scale entrepreneurs’. I conceptualize the MVP as a paradoxical utopia, which is attempting to socially produce the supposedly natural order of a market society, through the staging of a fantasy of harmonious capitalist development that misrepresents the realities of rural African capitalism. Drawing on field research conducted in the Millennium Villages of Ruhiira, Uganda, and Bonsaaso, Ghana, I show how the conceptual failings of the MVP have led to the elite capture of project inputs, the absence of inclusive participation and a lack of long‐term sustainability. In Ruhiira, the MVP has contributed to the consolidation of existing relations of inequality, while in Bonsaaso it has been overwhelmed by an influx of foreign gold miners. Through its failure to stage its fantasy of capitalist development in these cases, the MVP has paradoxically succeeded in consolidating the actual social relations of capitalism.     

A High Road to Sustainability? Wildflower Harvesting,Ethical Trade and Social Upgrading in South Africa's Western Cape

This paper evaluates the outcomes from an ambitious wildflower harvesting programme in South Africa's Western Cape, which has sought to achieve positive outcomes in terms of socio‐economic development and biodiversity conservation. Indigenous wildflowers, harvested according to conservation principles, are processed into ‘Cape Flora’ bouquets and sold into international and domestic markets. The principal supply chain provides an example of ethical trade due to the explicit environmental and social standards that are required at local sites of production. The incorporation of such standards represents an attempt to engender economic and social upgrading within the value chain. In this sense, the programme is consistent with dominant policy discourses, which suggest that exploiting potentially profitable niches within international trade flows represents a ‘high road’ to economic growth and transformation. The paper focuses upon the job creation and social impacts of the programme in the context of efforts to overcome South Africa's deeply entrenched socio‐economic disparities and high poverty levels. Despite impressive growth in production and exports during the global financial crisis, there have been mixed outcomes in terms of benefits to stakeholders at the upstream end of the supply chain. The paper concludes by considering the extent to which local initiatives operating under the framework of ethical trade possess the potential to facilitate effective social and economic upgrading.     

The Dark Side of Political Society: Patronage and the Reproduction of Social Inequality

Development optimists in South Asia have argued that electoral politics and the reduced role of villages as centres of economic activity have largely put an end to exploitation by dominant castes. Although the political arrangements that have emerged out of these changes fall short of the idealized standards of civil society, various commentators have argued that they nevertheless benefit subordinate classes. Partha Chatterjee even argues that the ad hoc and extra‐legal nature of these political arrangements – which he terms ‘political society’ – actually serve popular enfranchisement better than the law‐bound activities of civil society, which he sees as captive to capital. On the basis of village ethnography from the Pakistani Punjab, I argue that political society is in fact integral to processes that dispossess people of their rights and to the reproduction of elite power. The paper illustrates how it is not the cold rationality of the state and the rule of law that disenfranchise subordinate classes, but their absence.     

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.     

BRICS varieties of capitalism and food regime reordering: A comparative institutional analysis

The emergence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has sparked debates on the possibility of a ‘great transformation’ in the course of neoliberal capitalism and the global agrifood system. This paper seeks to contribute to these debates by providing a comparative institutional analysis of the BRIC(S) ‘varieties of capitalism’ in the current ‘food regime’ international reordering. Capital accumulation, social reproduction and politics are key problems of the ‘agrifood question’ in the BRIC(S) varieties of capitalism. My argumentation is that capitalist diversity stems largely from the historically embedded legacy of the agrarian question in each country, that the dynamics of the agrifood system influence their development trajectories in decisive ways, and that the BRIC(S)‐driven polycentric shifts in the contemporary food regime are crucial to the destiny of global capitalism.