Investing in place: articulations and congregations of capital in the wine industry

Abstract

There has been a longstanding debate about the role of capital in agriculture. Most of this has taken place in the context of the so‐called ‘agrarian question’. This discussion has often been overgeneralised and simplified the specific geographies of agrarian transformations. We argue this has arisen due to a failure to characterise and analyse the different forms of capital engaged in agricultural production and how they are articulated and assembled. It is the existence of this diversity of capital that partly explains the differentiated unfolding of the geographies of the agrarian transition that we witness empirically. This paper argues that we need to understand the nature of what we refer to as ‘congregations of capital’ and the articulations between their different forms if we are to better appreciate the way capital engages in agriculture, the ways it shapes labour relationships, and the ways it restructures agrarian economy and society. In order to do this, we use the example of the global wine industry with particular reference to the unfolding strategies used to attach capital to land evident in theNewZealand sector.