Expanding the Intellectual Envelope Comparative Approaches to Political Economy

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric D Johnson. Douglas J Bolender.

Categories such as capitalism, feudalism, peasantry and proletariat obscure more than they elucidate in Early Modern Iceland. The millennium-long occupation of farms in Skagafjörður, Northern Iceland reveals that during the initial settlement of Iceland in the late ninth century, land was freely available, but by the late seventeenth century over 95% of all farming properties were owned by landlords who frequently renegotiated tenant leases. In many ways these insecure tenants resemble...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Noa Corcoran-Tadd. Guido Pezzarossi.

Although the historical archaeology of the Spanish colonial world is currently witnessing an explosion of research in the Americas, the accompanying political economic framework has tended to remain little interrogated.  This paper argues that Spanish colonial contexts bring into particular relief the entanglements between ‘core’ capitalist processes like ‘antimarkets’, dispossession, and the disciplining of labor and dynamic biopolitical ecologies of assemblage, coercion, and accumulation. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Johnson.

Where did ‘colonialism’ come from?  Clearly, and at once, colonialism is a set of practices that can be traced back to the ancient and medieval worlds.  However, also and at the same time, it is an analytical term which, if used loosely, holds the danger of uncritically back-projecting a 19th century model of colonial worlds into earlier centuries.  How to map patterns of colonial practice before they were colonial?  This paper tries to engage with this difficult issue through a comparative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Mrozowski.

This paper explores some of the theoretical and evidentiary challenges facing the comparative study of colonialism and its imperial dimensions through the lens of political economy. It focuses on the advantages and limitations of political economy as a framework for understanding the transformation of colonies into post-colonial societies. Drawing on case material from North America, the Caribbean and India –three areas with vastly different colonial histories - this paper asks whether political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Magdalena Naum.

In the 17th century, the Swedish kingdom launched exploitation and colonization programs in the northern region of Sápmi. These programs involved political, economic and cultural rhetoric of reform, progress and utility as well as practical and material actions of rearranging the landscape. Traditionally this process has been viewed as largely designed and controlled by the state with rather passive participation/resistance of the Sami. In this paper I will challenge this picture and discuss the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Young.

The high, mud brick walls enclosing whole villages owned entirely by wealthy landlords are common sites across Iran. Now largely abandoned but with occupation still within living memory, these villages offer the opportunity to explore use of space and analyses of material remains in relation to status, economic function, and individual and group identity. Analyses the walled landlord villages of the Tehran Plain have been carried out in order to explore hierarchy and control, and how these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Horning.

Examinations of the imposition of colonial ideologies actualised through the mechanism of plantation, or enforced settlement, in Ireland often highlight plantation as a stark process that was founded upon, and thus fully accommodated to, a fully-fledged version of mercantile capitalism. Yet on the ground, engagements between peoples reveal that ideologies were incompletely applied, plantation plans seldom realised, and new economic formulations incompletely rendered. On close examination,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan J. M. Weaver.

At the time of its expulsion from the Spanish Empire in 1767, the Society of Jesus was among the largest slaveholders in the Americas. The two Jesuit Nasca estates (San Joseph and San Xavier) were their largest and most profitable Peruvian vineyards, worked by nearly 600 slaves of sub-Saharan origin. Their haciendas and annex properties throughout the Nasca valleys established agroindustrial hegemony in the region. This paper explores the political and economic dynamics among enslaved subjects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark F. Gardiner.

During the sixteenth century Iceland, the Faroes, Shetland and the Gaelic areas of Ireland were drawn into the networks of trade emanating from England and Germany. In each case preserved fish caught in the North Atlantic were exchanged for consumer goods. The response in each of these islands to this emerging trade was different, though we can also identify many common factors. The comparative study of these provide us with a variety of ways in which the economics, politics and government...