General
Land 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 More
Book review of Pablo Lapegna’s Soybeans and Power
CARLA GRAS In Soybeans and Power, Pablo Lapegna offers a thorough and challenging analysis of the contested terrain of Genetically Modified (GM) crops in Argentina. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the province of Formosa, in the North East of that country, he addresses key issues regarding the new landscapes produced by the expansion…
Read More
Agrarian 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 More
Rule 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 More
Lockdown 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 More
Book 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 More
CfPs 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 More