Reply to So, Perelman, and Post

Abstract

I am grateful to the three reviewers for making the effort to respond critically yet constructively to my paper (Webber 2008). In this brief response, I want to place the comments of Perelman (2008, this issue), Post (2008, this issue) and So (2008, this issue) within the theoretical framework that I use in the paper. I start by developing an observation that Michael Perelman makes in his comparison of British and Chinese experiences. Perelman points to differences between Britain and China in the timing of primitive accumulation in relation to industrialisation, in the forms taken by primitive accumulation and in the complexity of the process. I would extend this argument, claiming that the timing, forms and complexity of the processes of primitive accumulation differ in different parts of China. As I stressed in the conclusion to the original paper, China really should not be thought of as one place. The central government sets the general rules, true?but even then often in reaction to local experiments. In some places, primitive accumulation is preceding industrialisation, in others following; in some places dispossession from the land (and so loss of self-provisioning) is important, in other places not; in some places ethnicity, environmentalism and insensitivity interact with greed, but in other places processes of dispossession or the market seem quite simple. This claim has an important bearing on the observations made by the two other commentators.