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.     

Roads from Calabria: The Arrighian approach to agrarian political economy

Scholars of agrarian change have long debated the nature of capitalist transition in the countryside, including whether the deepened interlinking of local, national, and transnational economic activities make past trajectories of agrarian transformation unlikely to reoccur in the present. This essay makes the case that Giovanni Arrighi's work has much to add to our understanding of the agrarian question in global historical perspective. We focus in particular on Arrighi's research on trajectories of change in the Calabrian region of southern Italy, and his essay “Capitalist Development in Hostile Environments.” In this piece, Arrighi and co‐author Fortunata Piselli develop two key insights. The first is that the pathways to capitalism are diverse, non‐linear, and historically contingent such that within one country—or, in the case of Italy, a single subnational region—multiple trajectories can be found. The second is that the outcomes of capitalist transition vary based on a country's position in the international hierarchy of wealth, meaning that agrarian transformation is compatible with both economic development and underdevelopment. We describe the three methodological principles that enabled Arrighi to develop his analysis of capitalist transition and explain how the papers collected in this special issue reflect and extend the Arrighian approach to agrarian political economy.     

Beyond market dependence: The origins of capitalism in Catalonia

Buried in the footnotes of his famous 1976 essay, Robert Brenner left the remark that Catalonia had experienced an agrarian transition to capitalism in parallel to England. This important claim has been completely forgotten by his followers of the political Marxist tradition, who since then have developed his views on the origins of capitalism. Building on the specialist literature, this article revisits the question of the Catalan transition through the prism of political Marxism and teases out its implications. In particular, it argues that the Catalan case illustrates the centrality of agency and subjectivity in the process of capitalist change. Contrary to Brenner's claim, this paper will argue that pre‐capitalist social property relations persisted in agriculture throughout the period of transition. Instead, the region's capitalist breakthrough was prompted by sociocultural struggles in its 18th‐century proto‐industry.     

From organized to disorganized capitalism? Market versus nonmarket coordination in Spain's dairy chain

Conventional wisdom has it that the food economy has transitioned from organized to disorganized capitalism. An era of extensive state intervention between around 1930 and 1980 would have been followed by an era of deregulation and increasing coordination through markets after around 1980. This article uses the case of Spain's dairy chain to propose an alternative view. In the case under study, there certainly were elements of state‐coordinated capitalism between 1952 and 1986, as well as elements of deregulation and liberalization from 1986 onwards. However, the structure of economic coordination involved some combination of market and nonmarket mechanisms all the way through. The organized capitalism of the first period was not really so tightly organized, whereas much of its later “disorganization” was in fact a transition towards a different mode of “organization”: one in which the control of nonmarket coordination shifted from political to corporate hierarchies.     

Rethinking the agrarian question: Agriculture and underdevelopment in the Global South

In recent years, agriculture has come to be seen as increasingly irrelevant to processes of industrialization and economic development in the Global South. The integration of developing economies into global capitalism and the continued advance of structural transformation would seem to indicate that there is no longer a classic “agrarian question” in the developing world. In other words, agriculture is no longer a major barrier to capitalist development in these countries. However, there is reason to doubt this growing consensus. This article argues for a rethinking of the agrarian question in the Global South and presents evidence that capitalist property relations have not penetrated agriculture throughout much of the developing world. Contrary to recent trends in the literature, I argue that not only is there still an agrarian question in the Global South but also that it remains central to explaining lower levels of industrialization in these countries and, thereby, their relative underdevelopment.     

Capitalist development in hostile conjunctures: War,dispossession, and class formation in Turkey

This article analyses how periods of geopolitical conflict and violence have affected the development of capitalism and class formation in Turkey. We argue that all major episodes of conflict, violence and war—from forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of the non‐Muslims in the late 19th and the early 20th century, to Kurdish secessionist warfare in the 1990s and the Syrian Civil War—have become major historical turning points in the development of historical capitalism in Turkey. These “hostile conjunctures” transformed capitalism through their direct and indirect effects on dispossession, class formation, and capital accumulation. Although each of these conflicts produced a violent dispossession process, none of them resembled the rural dispossession process in England. To make sense of Turkey's experience, we turn our attention to what we call the “Castilian/Spanish road,” and what Lenin called the “Junker/Prussian road” and the “farmers/American road.” Our analysis shows that these differential paths of dispossession, class formation, and capital accumulation have produced highly variegated rather than uniform outcomes. We conclude that we are living in a new “hostile conjuncture,” which is pregnant to a major structural crisis and is generating the preconditions of another historical transformation in the way capitalism operates.     

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.     

Essential agriculture,sacrificial labor,and the COVID-19 pandemic in the US South

As farmworkers were reframed as “essential” workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, US growers demanded unfettered access to foreign farm labor. After initially announcing a freeze on all immigration processing, the Trump administration bowed to farmers' demands, granting a single exception for agricultural guestworkers under the H-2A visa program. Through a focus on H-2A farmworkers in Georgia, this paper highlights how the pandemic exacerbated farm labor conditions in the US South. The author interrogates these conditions through the lens of racial capitalism, exposing the legacies of plantation political economies and a longstanding agricultural labor system premised on devaluing racialized labor. These histories are obscured by the myth of agricultural exceptionalism—the idea that agriculture is too different and important to be subject to the same rules and regulations as other industries. Agricultural exceptionalism naturalizes the racial capitalist system and informs state responses that privilege agricultural production through the exploitation of farmworkers, remaking “essential” farmworkers as sacrificial labor.     

Special Economic Zones and Accumulation by Dispossession in India

This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over‐accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra‐economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation – in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India's privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession – which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry – occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non‐productive economic activity and pre‐capitalist forms of exploitation.     

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?      

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.     

The social construction of “shared growth”: Zambia Sugar and the uneven terrain of social benefit

Recent years have witnessed a growing trend in agricultural investment and large‐scale farmland acquisition in the Global South and a rapid expansion of scholarship and public debate over the nature, consequences, and desirability of these trends. The polarization of this debate into “win/lose” narratives raises the question of whether, and under what conditions, the logic of capital accumulation driving farmland acquisition and investment can engender broad‐based social benefits akin to “shared growth.” This paper sheds light on this question through a detailed look at the recent expansion of Zambia Sugar's Nakambala Estate in Mazabuka, Zambia. We explore outcomes linked to two of the most prominent pathways through which social benefits are said to accrue: smallholder incorporation and employment. Findings demonstrate the unevenness of outcomes linked to both pathways, with the concrete benefits both claimed and observed through some measures quickly eroding under the weight of alternative performance metrics. The unevenness produced by the intensification of capitalist relations is manifested not just between those differentially positioned with respect to the incoming investment (“outgrower,” “employee,” and “land loser”) but within each of those conditions. This ambiguity opens spaces for competing representations of the promises and pitfalls of these processes, while highlighting the shaky ground on which shared growth and inclusive business agendas stand.     

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.     

Land outsourcing and labour contracting: Labour management in China's capitalist farms

Difficulty in labour supervision has been considered to be one of the obstacles to the development of capitalist agriculture. This paper presents two distinctive labour management strategies in China's large‐scale agriculture, which contribute to the development of agrarian capitalism in China. As shown in these cases, agribusiness companies engaged in grain crop production retreat from direct labour management by outsourcing crop cultivation, while acquiring profits from upstream and downstream activities. On the other hand, capitalist producers, who are involved in the labour‐intensive and capital‐intensive crop production, tend to mobilize local elites to manage the farmworkers. Although independent labour contracting services have not emerged, a specialized group of labour contractors is being cultivated. Rural social resources are utilized in labour recruitment and supervision to minimize the labour management costs in both strategies. However, the conflicts between capital and labour are covered or replaced instead of being settled.     

Small‐scale commodity frontiers: The bioeconomy value chain of castor oil in Madagascar

The European Commission defines the bioeconomy as a “transition economy which seeks to increase efficiency, optimize use and decrease environmental impact through the reduction of waste and greenhouse gas emissions.” However, attempts to substitute or control nature through efficient bio‐based technology have not lived up to expectations and much of the industry still relies on globally sourced biomass to drive the bioeconomy. This article examines the social and political economic relations surrounding small‐scale production of the feedstock castor oil plant (castor, Ricinus communis) in the deep south of Madagascar. Theorizing the bioeconomy through the lens of a “small‐scale commodity frontier,” it builds from recent injunctions by Jason Moore to show how the appropriation of cheap nature (including paid and unpaid labour) is both historically and geographically co‐produced. The castor value chain is held up as a way to transform regional economies and a “silver bullet” to alleviate poverty and address food security in some of the most economically marginal areas of Madagascar. We adopt a regional and feminist political ecology approach to illustrate what is behind this discursive cloak of “development imaginaries,” making visible the social relations surrounding castor production and demonstrating the historical marginalization involved in producing the frontier.     

‘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.     

Dispossession through land titling: Legal loopholes and shadow procedures to urbanized forestlands in the Yucatán Peninsula

Under certain circumstances, land titling, property regime changes, and land-use conversions yield substantial profits. Yet few people possess the wealth, knowledge, and networks to benefit from these procedures. In the Yucatán Peninsula, a region recently targeted as a prominent investment location by the Mexican national government (mainly with the “Tren Maya” megaproject) and the private capital, forestlands collectively owned as ejidos by Mayan peasants are on the trend to complete privatization. Against the arguments of neo-institutional economists that in the 1990s promoted legal reforms and justified land-titling programmes worldwide to make available credit for uncapitalized peasants, individual land titling of commonly held lands in Mexico increased the overall economic value of the land, but not the investment in economic activities related to farmland and indigenous communities. Instead, those policies enabled land grabbing, dispossession, and urbanization. In this article, I describe recent private-led initiatives of ejido land titling that have redefined agricultural land's uses, meanings, and values for capitalist accumulation. In doing so, I explain how and why Mayan ejidatarios have been excluded from the monetary benefits of land titling, a top-bottom dispossession process only accomplished through shadow procedures and former privatization of ejidos' common lands.     

Food security,obesity, and inequality: Measuring the risk of exposure to the neoliberal diet

In reviewing the so‐called obesity “epidemic”, we critique the individual‐focused explanations that also lead to interventions at this level. Instead, we suggest a different possibility: that food choices are structurally conditioned by income inequality, first; and, second, that we eat what huge oligopolistic food producers and distributors have on offer, which is in turn shaped or facilitated by neoliberal state intervention. To highlight the relevance of structural factors, we develop an index that measures the risk of exposure to what we call the “neoliberal diet” for low‐to‐middle‐income working classes. Using this index, we compare the United States and Canada, advanced capitalist countries that are also agro‐export powerhouses, with a group of countries including the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) plus Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, and Turkey. We conclude that state interventions need to refocus on reducing social inequality and the social determinants of food production and distribution. Transcending individualistic and consumption approaches will help us appreciate that the state, not the individual consumer, is best positioned to implement change when it comes to food “choices” and food production.     

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.     

Green Consumerism and Ecolabelling: A Strategic Behavioural Model

The ethos of “green” marketing is to affect tastes and perceptions so that those individuals for whom the attribute of environmental‐friendliness is significant can signal this preference by choosing the “green” alternative. This paper presents a strategic behavioural model of interactions between two agents, a firm and consumer, under conditions of incomplete information. The outcome of the model is that, unless some restrictive and (arguably) unrealistic conditions apply, some proportion of “green” marketing campaigns will be misleading; “green” marketing is not restricted to “green” products, and “green” consumers only adapt their purchasing habits some of the time. Ecolabelling schemes can be used as a means of ameliorating this inefficiency in information‐transfer. Whether state intervention to make ecolabelling mandatory for “green” products is welfare‐improving depends on the balance between the deadweight losses from the process and the gains in terms of facilitating the expression of “green” preferences.