Blog
The JAC Blog hosts posts on agrarian and rural issues, both contemporary and historical.
It covers book reviews, photo essays, research essays and field notes. We welcome blog submissions.
Agrarian Change Webinars | Spring 2021
The Journal of Agrarian Change and SOAS Department of Development Studies have been organizing an annual Agrarian Change Seminar Series since 2008. This year this series has been organized as a series of webinars and is open to the public across the world. Please note: registration links for each webinar will be made available here…
Read MoreAQs Shorts: R Ramakumar
Agrarian Questions is pleased to announce a new series of short video interviews with eminent and emerging scholars in the field of agrarian political economy, AQs Shorts. In our first interview, R Ramakumar speaks about the multi-dimensional impact of COVID-19 on the Indian countryside, on the nature of India’s agrarian crisis (differentiated by crop, class,…
Read MoreLand questions in the 21st Century Postcolony
M VIJAYABASKAR Labour may have become less relevant to capital accumulation in the 21st century as scholars like Sanyal, Li and Ferguson suggest. The recent spate of literature on ‘land grabs’ has, however, made the role of land in capital accumulation much more visible now than it was in the latter half of the last…
Read MoreAgrarian Change Webinars | Autumn 2020
The Journal of Agrarian Change and SOAS Department of Development Studies have been organizing an annual Agrarian Change Seminar Series since 2008. This year this series has been organized as a series of webinars and is open to the public across the world. Please note: registration links for each webinar will be made available two…
Read MoreLaunch of a new journal on the Agrarian History of Latin America
Historia Agraria de América Latina (HAAL) is an academic journal of the Centro de Estudios de Historia Agraria de América Latina (CEHAL), an autonomous institution established in Santiago de Chile in 2017. HAAL aims to promote and disseminate research and interdisciplinary debate on the history of the rural societies of Latin America and the Caribbean. The…
Read MoreRule by Bosses? Criminal Political Economies in South Asia
MICHAEL LEVIEN In the past few decades, the term “mafia” has gained widespread usage across South Asia, and particularly India and Pakistan where there are said to be a variety of sector-specific ones: “land mafia,” “sand mafia,” “coal mafia,” “timber mafia,” “water mafia,” “contractor mafia,” and so on. The sum total of these mafia…
Read MoreLockdown Chronicle: The Story of a Migrant Workers’ Platform Across India’s Lockdown
ORLANDA RUTHVEN Editors’ Note: In one of the most brutal lockdowns prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, India witnessed the haunting spectre of scores of migrant workers walking back to their villages hundreds of kilometres away along highways and railway lines. A critical agrarian political economy lens must recognize the multitude of ways in which…
Read More‘Problems in the Empirical Analysis of Agrarian Differentiation Processes’: A Reflection
BEN WHITE The ideas in this book chapter published in 1989 began to form themselves in the 1970s. Under the guidance of cultural materialist Marvin Harris, I had written a mainly quantitative dissertation based on detailed time-budget analysis of small-peasant and landless households in a Javanese village. From 1975 to 1980, I was back…
Read More[CfP for Symposium] Capitalism, Crisis and Covid: Agrarian Political Economy in Disrupted Circuits of Capital and Labour
The Journal of Agrarian Change seeks contributions to a symposium on Capitalism, Crisis and Covid: Agrarian Political Economy in Disrupted Circuits of Capital and Labour. Covid-19 is re-configuring the global capitalist system. It has disrupted the functioning of capitalism in unprecedented ways. The flow of commodities has slowed dramatically, and labour has experienced a mass…
Read MoreBook Review of Xavier Lafrance & Charles Post’s Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism
ERIC MIELANTS This is an interesting book which focuses on an old but very important topic: the origins of capitalism.
Read MoreGendering Peasant Household Surveys: Who to interview?
CARMEN DIANA DEERE The use of household surveys to analyse the economic activities of peasants has become much more commonplace since Alain de Janvry and I published ‘A Conceptual Framework for the Empirical Analysis of Peasants’ in 1979. However, an issue that has received insufficient attention until recently is that of who should be…
Read MoreCfPs on Agrarian Change, IIPPE Conference 2020
The IIPPE 11th Annual Conference 2020 will be held in Ferrara, Italy between September 9 and 11. The Agrarian Change Working Group, sponsored by the Journal of Agrarian Change, calls for papers and panels under three different rubrics. 1. Agrarian Change Working Group As the crisis of neoliberal capitalism deepens and rightwing populisms engage…
Read MoreVegans should target the corporate food system, not just dairy and meat!
BENJAMIN SELWYN The rise of veganism represents a step change for campaigners who have long sought to highlight links between the food we eat and the fate of the world’s environment. Headlines such as ‘Avoiding meat and dairy is the ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth’ point to the immensely damaging impacts…
Read MoreBook Review of Yi Wu’s Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China
XU SIYUAN Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China: State, village, family, by Yi Wu. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. 2018. Pp. xiii+282. $ 80 (hb); $28 (pb). ISBN-13: 9780824846770 and 9780824876807 This is an excerpt of the review of the book. Read the complete review here. In Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China,…
Read MoreAn Interview with Bridget O’Laughlin
Bridget O’Laughlin is among the leading Marxist intellectuals and anthropologists of our times and a major contributor to the field of agrarian political economy. With a life and scholarship spanning three continents (North America, Africa and Europe), Bridget’s oeuvre is not just varied in terms of the subjects and regions covered but also analytically and…
Read MoreAn Interview with Henry Bernstein
The editors of the Journal of Agrarian Change are pleased to present an interview with Henry Bernstein by Subir Sinha. Henry Bernstein is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University of London and one of the founding editors of the Journal of Agrarian Change. Subir Sinha is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Development…
Read MoreThe Bernstein & Byres Prize in Agrarian Change for 2018
LIAM CAMPLING, CRISTÓBAL KAY, JENS LERCHE, BRIDGET O’LAUGHLIN, CARLOS OYA We are pleased to announce that Enric Tello, Gabriel Jover, Ivan Murray, Onofre Fullana and Ricard Soto have been awarded the 2018 Bernstein & Byres Prize for their article ‘From feudal colonization to agrarian capitalism in Mallorca: Peasant endurance under the rise and fall…
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