Search results
Over twenty-five contributors from around the world have prepared short, accessible chapters that take a striking image as a starting point to explore how today’s global financial structures are haunted by the ghosts of empire. Anyone interested in knowing more about the legacies of racism, colonialism and imperialism, whether newcomer or specialists, will enjoy this unique collection of essays. The volume provides many rich examples to draw on, from the City of London to the Australian outback, from Angola’s railways to China’s ghost cities, from the depths of the ocean to the ethereal world of data. It also tells stories of resistance and contestation, from Maori banks to radical muralists, from subtle gestures to mass uprisings. With chapters on global commodities ranging from oil to clothing to the popular drink Milo, the authors in this collection take an interdisciplinary approach, melding political economy with cultural analysis, critical geography with historical acumen. This book is both a fascinating journey for readers and an invaluable tool for teachers in many fields seeking to awaken students’ curiosity about how the global capitalist economy emerged from and reproduces racialized inequalities.
This chapter outlines key arguments around the nature of capitalism and its relationship with patriarchy and other forms of structural inequality. It begins by outlining the changing nature of capitalism and the liberal and economic theories that support it, before showing how they are challenged by women-centred feminist perspectives: these expose the idea of human independence as a myth and reveal the economic importance of the unpaid work that has traditionally been done by women. The chapter develops this discussion to highlight the limitations of some initiatives that claim to ‘empower’ girls and women in the global south while also benefiting the global capitalist economy; these initiatives include micro-credit projects and Nike’s Girl Effect. The chapter concludes that the needs of the majority of women will not be met in a global economy that is primarily based on the pursuit of profit, and that is therefore unable to solve the climate emergency it has created.
power has led to cities playing a central role in the global capitalist economy. Urban spaces are not only a location in which wealth, especially intellectual property, is produced; they are also outlets for capitalist accumulation. The process of gentrification and urban redevelopment is part of a broader capitalist project to recirculate wealth via rebuilding and constructing space. As economic power in cities grows, they become central nodes in global capital. The ability to occupy, control, and disrupt these spaces therefore has a ripple effect that impacts the
had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? ( 1848/1967 :126) Since then, economic growth and technological change have continued, spreading throughout the world, so that today we effectively have one main global capitalist economy, albeit one often torn by national and ideological rivalries. China (now the world’s second largest economy, after the US) remains an outlier, in that many big enterprises remain state-owned or state-controlled and there is a high degree of economic planning. However, it is also a key
considered response by social reformers to long-term and tumultuous social adjustments instigated by the Great Famine. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the rural economy was characterised by emigration, which complemented a move from subsistence farming to more commercialised agricultural practices. 3 As Irish farmers were integrated into a global capitalist economy, the rise of international competition left them vulnerable. Informed by economic developments in Britain and Denmark, figures like Horace Plunkett concluded that co-operative societies
.e. 2008–9] in a global capitalist economy that the American state had been so central in constructing, it was hardly surprising to see a resurgence of pronouncements that US hegemony was coming to an end … [because] pundits of every persuasion once again blur the lines between a capitalist crisis and a decline of US empire. 8
're not teaching the children well. You have graduates who at the end of school have to do transportation business. Driving tricycles. They've studied and they're doing that kind of job … You want to find a way out of the system. You want to give your children a better life so they don't think it's all poverty, poverty around them. Everyone wants a better life. Who doesn't want a better life ?’ As part of the ‘breadbasket’ of the British empire, Nigeria's incorporation into the global capitalist economy was simultaneously
manifestations of contemporary forces and effects, postmodern more than premodern or primitive. They seem to share a common element: supernatural sightings often appear when ‘new dreams of wealth in the global capitalist economy have for the first time been plunged into the icy realities of imperial hierarchies’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001 : 126). Such reports offer, for Hardt and Negri, a way of understanding how ‘each of these contexts
into East Asia was underwritten by the sort of superior military technology that orthodox security studies tend to emphasize, the breakdown of older social orders and the downfall of the political elites that dominated them was ultimately a function of economic imperatives and the transformative impact of integration into an expanding global capitalist economy. 7
and can be politically counterproductive. First, ‘patriarchy’ should not be treated as a stand-alone concept. It is not the only form of oppression, and it needs to be treated as part of a wider analysis that explores how the structures of male domination intersect with other dimensions of inequality and exploitation and the ways in which they are bound up with the logic of the global capitalist economy. The implications of such a multidimensional approach are developed in later chapters, in which I argue for broadly socialist solutions. Second, this means that