Socio‐economic transitions and everyday life changes in the rural world: Pyrenean households and their contemporary economic history

This article focuses on understanding rural life and how agrarian everyday life changes as a consequence of the radical socio‐economic transformations that, across the world, have accompanied rural communities in their transition from economies of subsistence to industrial production, and, in some areas, from there to providers of service to the tourism‐oriented leisure economy. In the last century in the Alt Urgell District (Spanish Pyrenees), many communities went from a production model based on subsistence farming and livestock breeding first to a specialization in milk production and later to tourism. The industrialization of milk production, the radical transformation of the scale of their operations, and the monetization of life transformed the identity and structure of these communities. The subsequent transformation of many of these farms to accommodate the leisure industry changed the shape of these households again. This paper reflects on how science, governance, commodification, and technology played a role on the transformation of the rural mountain areas, their people, and their everyday life.     

Possibilities and Constraints of Market‐Led Land Reforms in Southern Africa: An Analysis of Transfers of Commercial Farmland in Postcolonial Zimbabwe, 1980–2000

This paper provides a systematic basis, hitherto missing in the current scholarship, to quantify land transfers in Zimbabwe after 1980. It uses title deed information to determine year of sale via a number of sources. The main finding of this research is that a great deal of land changed ownership during this period, which, if the government had been committed to land reform, it could have acted upon. Evidence suggests as much as 67 per cent of white‐owned land changed ownership after 1980. The second is that, while a large amount of land did change hands, it was not the 80 per cent that many white farmers and their supporters have claimed. The figure of 69 per cent is still very high, but it is apparent that much of this did not represent ‘true’ transfer of land. By further investigating the land that did change hands, this paper also raises questions about (a) the possibilities of market‐led land reform in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa, and (b) the relationship between white capital and the new political elite in the postcolonial state.     

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 Conflicted State and Agrarian Transformation in Pink Tide Venezuela

Can radical political‐economic transformation be achieved by electoral regimes that have not thoroughly reconstructed the state? Contemporary Venezuela offers an optimal venue for examining this question. The Chavista movement did not replace the previous state: instead, its leaders attempted to reform existing state entities and establish new ones in pursuit of its transformation agenda. It has also used its oil wealth to support cooperatively‐oriented economic activity, without necessarily fundamentally altering the property structure. Thus, the social change‐oriented political economy exists alongside the traditional one. Focusing on agrarian transformation, we examine ethnographically how these factors have impacted the state's capacity to attain its goal of national food sovereignty. We find that the state's ability to accomplish this objective has been compromised by lack of agency‐level capacity, inter‐agency conflict and the persistence of the previously‐extant agrarian property structure. These dynamics have influenced the state to shift from its initial objective of food sovereignty to a policy of nationalist food security.     

Japanese Consumption,External Disequilibrium and their Statistical Measurement

Georgescu-Roegen's work is usually divided into two categories, his earlier work on consumer and production theory and his later concern with entropy and bioeconomics beginning with his 1966 introductory essay to his collected theoretical papers published in the volume Analytical Economics. Most economists usually praise his earlier work on pure theory and ignore his later work which is highly critical of neoclassical economics. Those economists sympathetic to his later work usually take the position that he “saw the light” and gave up neoclassical theory some time in the 1960s to turn his attention to the issues of resource scarcity and social institutions. It is argued here that there is an unbroken path running from Georgescu's work in pure theory in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, through his writings on peasant economies in the 1960s, leading to his preoccupation with entropy and bioeconomics in the last 25 years of his life. That common thread is his preoccupation with “valuation.” The choices our species makes about resource use and the distribution of economic output depends upon our valuation framework. Georgescu-Roegen's work begins in the 1930s with a critical examination of the difficulties with the hedonistic valuation framework of neoclassical economics, moves in the 1960s to the conflict between social and hedonistic valuation, and culminates in the 1970s and 1980s with his examination of the conflict between individual, social, and environmental values. This paper traces the evolution of Georgescu-Roegen's thought about valuation and the environmental and social policy recommendations which arise out of his bioeconomic framework.     

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.     

The Closing Frontier: Agrarian Change, Immigrants and the 'Squatter Menace' in Gokwe, 1980-1990s

‘Squatting’ in the communal areas of Zimbabwe has been largely ignored in the literature because it is assumed that it does not exist in a ‘communal’ land tenure system. This article argues that ‘squatting’ in Gokwe villages has become a common strategy by landless immigrants to access land. Gokwe has been a frontier region for many immigrants in search of land since the 1950s with intense pressure on land by the 1990s. As the frontier closed, the question of citizenship in Gokwe villages became more signi?cant than ever before. Those who are not formally registered as residents are de?ned by local government authorities and established villagers as ‘squatters’ who should be evicted. The article traces how local authorities and established villagers have responded to what they perceive as the ‘squatter menace’. It further examines the means used by ‘squatters’ to lay claims to land and to defend those claims in Gokwe villages.     

Gibbsian and non-Gibbsian states at Eurandom

We review some of the work on non-Gibbsian states of the last 10 years, emphasizing the developments in which Eurandom played a role.     

Agrarian movements and rural populism in Indonesia

In this article, we reflect on the changing trajectories of agrarian movements in Indonesia. In the two decades after independence, a left-populist alliance of peasants, plantation workers, and other affiliate organizations achieved a mass following and were embraced by President Sukarno. In the aftermath of their violent destruction, the Suharto regime reordered agrarian movements into a single corporatist model. Suharto's downfall opened the way for the re-emergence of agrarian organizations and movements. But two decades later, they remain small and fragmented, with little influence at the national level. In the changing conditions of rural life, and the increasingly authoritarian political context, progressive rural movements face dilemmas on questions both of their focus and goals and of tactical alliances with other progressive movements and political elites. A broader, more inclusive progressive populist alliance is a possibility, but with the continuing danger of co-optation by forces of the populist right.