Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation

xx, 408 pp.
ISBN: 978-90-04-18368-1
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 25, 408 Seiten, Format (B × H): 168 mm x 244 mm, Gewicht: 816 g

Reihe: Historical Materialism Book

Winner of the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.

The essays collected here straddle four decades of work in both historiography and Marxist theory, combining source-based historical work in a wide range of languages with sophisticated discussion of Marx's categories. Key themes include the distinctions that are crucial to restoring complexity to the Marxist notion of a 'mode of production'; the emergence of medieval relations of production; the origins of capitalism; the dichotomy between free and unfree labour; and essays in agrarian history that range widely from Byzantine Egypt to 19th-century colonialism. The essays demonstrate the importance of reintegrating theory with history and of bringing history back into historical materialism. An introductory chapter ties the collection together and shows how historical materialists can develop an alternative to Marx's 'Asiatic mode of production'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Banaji, Jairus

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Marxismus, Kommunismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Foreword, Marcel van der Linden
Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Themes in Historical Materialism
2. Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History
3. Historical Arguments for a ‘Logic of Deployment’ in ‘Precapitalist’ Agriculture
4. Workers Before Capitalism
5. The Fictions of Free Labour: Contract, Coercion and so-called Unfree Labour
6. Agrarian History and the Labour-Organisation of Byzantine Large Estates
7. Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: What Kind of Transition? (A Discussion of Chris Wickham’s magnum opus)
8. Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages
9. Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism
10. Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century
11. Trajectories of Accumulation or ‘Transitions’ to Capitalism?
12. Modes of Production: A Synthesis

Publications of Jairus Banaji

References
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jairus Banaji spent most of his academic life at Oxford. He has been a Research Associate in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, for the past several years. He is the author of Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2007).