Agrarian South Research Articles

Premodern Germany and the teleology of economic history

Premodern Germany and the teleology of economic history

On Political Economy and its Fallacies: Why Critiques and Rethinking Matter

This article is the 10th anniversary lecture of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, delivered in 2021. It provides a reflection on key issues and fallacies that lie at the origins of political economy. It is argued that, as regards the problem of knowledge production, the formulation of factually and logically incorrect theories begins with English classical political economy. Political economy as developed in England in the second half of the eighteenth century—a period which saw a rapid increase in its trade especially with its colonies of conquest, while also making the transition to factory production—proceeded on the basis of verbal and material fallacies and silences which have been reproduced in historiography and the discipline of economics to this day.

Third World feminist agrarian struggles and the colonial question for transnational feminist solidarity

abstract Third World agrarian feminists have, through debates and struggles over the course of at least nine decades, explored the meanings of liberation – directly through involvement in land and agrarian struggles, and indirectly through solidarity with movements against raising other related social justice questions. The link between feminist agrarian movements and the broader movements is partly based on a common historical concern with gender as a colonising substructure. In the still largely agrarian south, for instance, the gender question to class would highlight the regimes of gendered labour which fracture solidarity among working people, and ask whether feminist resistance can undermine the basic gendered structure of reproduction that stabilised the colonial/capitalist mode of accumulation. To ethnicity, the question would be the extent to which feminist movements can overcome reactionary nationalisms in order to reach for global Black solidarities on the basis of shared transnational histories. To race, the question would be the extent to which Black feminists can overcome the universalising tendencies of empire in order to retain a structural critique of the ways in which structural racism aids capitalist exploitation of gendered labour. Drawing on these concerns, this article examines various contemporary feminist agrarian questions from a global south vantage point, highlighting the limitations which these questions present to the (de)colonial present, and possibilities that exist in articulating a position in which the colonial question is core to gender and Black feminist solidarities.

The agrarian question in Yemen: the national imperative of reclaiming and revalorizing indigenous agroecological food production

ABSTRACT The pervasive and persistent impact of agricultural de-development is a common thread through the agrarian south. Until about two generations ago, Yemen had been agriculturally self-sufficient owing to its fabled systems of agriculture. However, bad policy, bad evidence, bad governance, and constant warfare have each played their respective part in forging the country's food crisis, rural impoverishment, and ecological distress. To address these root causes of Yemen's social dislocation and dismantling of its indigenous agroecological practices and self-sufficient food economy, I bring into focus the fundamental question of Yemen's national development by way of posing the agrarian question in Yemen as a question of independence and autonomy. I argue for sensible, inward-looking, and pro-production policy action that not only promotes durable growth but also progressively restores Yemenis' sovereignty as well as security.

Land and the US Agrarian South

This review essay summarizes and synthesizes three books on Black and Indigenous agrarian struggles in the modern-day territories of the USA. It discusses how they recount the centrality of land, national liberation, self-reliant development, food sovereignty and sustainable forms of agriculture and land management to Black and Indigenous radical struggle. It then suggests parallels and divergences between those struggles and those in the Third World’s agrarian south. It focusses on the anti-systemic dimensions of national liberation struggles in the core, especially those carried out historically by Black and Indigenous movements, and details how those movements historically looked out beyond the US landmass for solidarity and to build internationalist fronts. Finally, it reflects on their role in destabilizing settler-capitalism in the USA.

The Gendered Impacts of COVID-19 amid Agrarian Distress: Opportunities for Comprehensive Policy Response in Agrarian South Asia

AbstractCOVID-19 and its associated disease control measures have greatly altered everyday life. The burden of these challenges has fallen disproportionately on women. Drawing on qualitative inquiry in agrarian north India and Nepal, this research note analyzes how South Asian COVID-19 lockdowns have affected women's labor responsibilities in sometimes surprising ways. We find increased responsibilities for caregiving within the household, substantial stress in responding to food insecurity, and growing expectations to fulfill public roles in disease response measures. However, we also find that the return of male migrants and youth has, in some cases, reduced women's farming responsibilities and created opportunities for household togetherness at a time of great uncertainty. We conclude that more research is needed to examine the nuanced aspects of COVID-19's gendered labor impacts to create comprehensive policy responses to address the multiple and sometimes conflicting effects the lockdown has had on agrarian women's informal labor and well-being.

Sam Moyo and Samir Amin on the Peasant Question

This second Sam Moyo Lecture was delivered in Harare, Zimbabwe, on 22 January 2019, during the Annual Agrarian Summer School organized by The Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies and the Agrarian South Network. The lecture celebrates the life and legacy of two great Pan-Africanists and world intellectuals, Samir Amin and Sam Moyo, who were close friends with mutual respect and admiration for each other, and who passed away in quick succession in the last 3 years. The lecture addresses three areas that were close to both Amin and Moyo: first, trajectories of accumulation on a world scale; second, the contestations over the agrarian question and third, the contradictions of the national question. Sam’s and Samir’s works were mutually complementary. Sam’s empirical research was thorough and conscientious; his research site was Zimbabwe, but he trained his sight on the continent. Samir painted in broad strokes on the world canvas; his theory was global, his vision was epochal. In Sam and Samir, we had a fine ‘glocal’ pair. They have left us a wealth of writings from which we will continue to draw for many years to come.

Territorial dispossession: dynamics of capitalist expansion in rural territories in South America

The rural territories of the Agrarian South have been occupying a central role as epicentres for the recent dynamics of capitalist expansion. Over the last years this has led to an increase in the process of control and extraction of natural common goods by different mechanisms such as agribusiness, mining-energetic projects, mega-infrastructure building, cultural dispossession and so on. Taking the territory as the central analytical approach that involves different dimensions and scales, we analyse the recent transformations in several rural sceneries from South America where various forms of dispossession of natural goods have been presented. With this perspective, we hope to contribute to the analysis and understanding of the agrarian transformations in the Agrarian South.

Sam Moyo: A Life of Prodigious Scholarship, Institution Building and Strategic Activism

ABSTRACTThe car accident that took Sam Moyo's life in Delhi on 22 November 2015 and injured his comrades Paris Yeros and Marcelo Rosa, cut short a scholar at the height of his powers. Working together with a group of like‐minded colleagues, Sam had finally built the foundations of a vibrant tri‐continental network that could hold his dreams: the Agrarian South Network. He was in Delhi at a conference on ‘Labour Questions in the Global South’, hosted by Praveen Jha, professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of his two closest intellectual partners — the other, of course, being Yeros. The conference, like earlier gatherings in Sao Paulo and Brasilia, was an opportunity to coordinate meetings of the Network and its journal, Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. As it turned out, a meeting of the journal's editorial board was Sam's last activity before the accident.

An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean (review)

Reviewed by: An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean Ginette Aley (bio) An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era. By Adam Wesley Dean. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 230. $29.95 paper) It is hard to imagine that any historian would teach or write about the United States during the Civil War era as comprised of a simple dichotomy of two regions: industrial North versus agrarian South. This, despite our understanding that the 1860 census shows that most Americans overall were involved in agriculture. As both a long-time college textbook consultant and Civil War era scholar (with a specialization in agricultural history), I can say this reflects an older, widely superseded interpretation; yet, this is the corrective that Adam Wesley Dean’s An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era seeks to make. Dean’s leading argument is that the political ideology of the Republican Party of the Civil War era (beginning with the Free Soilers), aside from being antislavery, was at heart agrarian. As such, it aggressively promoted the interests of small family farmers and led ultimately to the passage of the Homestead Act, Pacific Railway Act, and the Morrill Land Grant College Act following the secession of the southern states. Dean extends this analysis of what he repeatedly categorizes as a Republican fixation on comparative land-use practices (and what they represented) to legislation creating Yosemite State Park [End Page 84] (1864) and Yellowstone National Park (1872). Dean’s problematic premise is that northerners and Republicans were more concerned over the expansion of slavery because of slave owners’ use and abuse of the land through plantation and monocrop agriculture than they were the immorality of slavery or the existence of slavery in a free republic. In contrast to northern family farms, which resulted in the wise use of the land and soil, he asserts, plantation agriculture generated land monopolies, aristocrats, and a lack of progress and civilization (although we know that the Homestead Act combined with subsequent land acts arguably led to similar scenarios in western lands, in some ranching and agricultural enterprises). An Agrarian Republic suffers from conceptual and interpretive errors, perhaps derived from a limited understanding of agricultural history, despite an indication from the subtitle that this is about farming. One would expect to see more than one farm paper and more of the relevant historiography than what is consulted here. From the outset and throughout, Dean overstates the evidence, often employing more modern environmentalist and subjective verbiage, in assertions like, “As the Republicans grew in popularity and power, they became convinced that the future of the country depended on the wise use of the soil” (p. 40). This minimizes, if not ignores, Republicans’ and northerners’ greater impetus to oppose the expansion of slavery—that is, a sense of urgency that the peculiar institution itself was a threat to the nation, not simply a threat to wise land use. Dean makes interesting use of published observations and warnings about the soil-depleting effects of slave agriculture, although he couches it in political ideology. This is actually reflective of the literature of agrarian reform impulses, North and South, some of which were clearly co-opted by sectional politicians as yet another valid reason to either oppose slavery or reform agricultural practices. Rather than being part and parcel of Republican ideology, Dean fails to appreciate that these are broader expressions of agrarian reform and the rise of agricultural science, hence the drive behind the Morrill Land Grant College Act. A stronger argument would be that reformers [End Page 85] asserted that not only was southern slavery on the wrong side of history, but increasingly on the wrong side of agricultural science. Nevertheless, halting the spread of slavery was the overriding issue of antislavery politics, not land use. Ginette Aley GINETTE ALEY teaches history at Washburn University and is a Carey Fellow in the History Department at Kansas State University. She is the co-editor of Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War (2013) and the...

Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South by James C. Giesen (review)

Reviewed by: Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South by James C. Giesen Tiffany M. Fink Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South. By James C. Giesen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 240 pp. $40.00 (cloth); $7.00–$32.00 (e-book). Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South by James C. Giesen is about a destructive little insect and its impact on one of the key agricultural regions of the United States: the American South. The boll weevil, a small beetle from Mexico, brought about much devastation throughout the U.S. agrarian South in the first half of the 1900s. And, though the actual impact of the boll weevil was real, the insect quickly emerged as the scapegoat for all problems faced by Southerners in the United States. Deteriorating quality of soil, a poor economic outlook, and failure of government leadership—all could be blamed in some form on the boll weevil. Yet, many hoped that the infestation might propel the farmers of a land often referenced by the name Cotton Kingdom to diversify and modernize. Such monumental change would come for the region, but not as a result of an agricultural pest. Giesen readily asserts that the boll weevil is more than an agricultural pest. The boll weevil and its destructive tendencies are nothing short of an environmental disaster in the agricultural history of the United States. Yet, the author contends, studies and scholarship chronicling the sheer damaging nature of the insect fail to capture the full picture of the crushing blow that the boll weevil made to the culture and mentality of the American South. Giesen makes the striking assertion that the boll weevil is “a crucial component of the larger personal, cultural, and economic history that southerners tell of their region” (p. 175). In short, in order to understand the human experience in the American South, one must understand the powerful effect of an insect that thrives on a diet of cotton plants. Giesen traces the movement of the fear of the boll weevil across the Rio Grande to East Texas, through the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, [End Page 724] to southeastern Alabama and into central Georgia from the 1890s through the late 1920s. The advance of the phenomenon mirrors the progression of the insect itself. As it infested more and more states in the American South, farmers called for action on the part of legislators at the local, state, and national level. Scholars offered wisdom, including recommendations to starve the boll weevil by limiting or abandoning cotton production for a season or two. U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist Tyler Townsend pioneered a plan of attack on the boll weevil habitat. The plan, called the cultural method, proved popular with tenant farmers. The method included vigilant watchfulness for infestations, diligent weeding out of affected plants, and a simple albeit labor-intensive post-harvest process of burning and discarding old stalks, flooding irrigated fields, encouraging livestock to consume remains, and embracing crop rotation practices. In Texas and Louisiana, African American tenant farmers employed the cultural method with notable successes. Giesen argues that tenant farmers in general were faced with only three possible solutions in regards to the threat of boll weevil infestation: “quit farming, move to another farm, or continue to live and farm alongside the insect” (p. 33). Townsend’s cultural method, therefore, presented a workable approach to living and farming alongside the insect. Regardless of the wisdom and practical experience shared by some who had success fighting boll weevil infestations, farmers resisted practical methods. Agricultural extension offices opened up throughout the American South with the purpose of educating farmers on methods of boll weevil resistance. Institutions of higher education boomed through the region as land grant colleges emerged in southern cities with various academic departments working on research methods to fight boll weevils. And groups of scholars visited communities to encourage diversification and modernization as ways to grapple not only with boll weevil problems, but also with concerns about deteriorating soil quality throughout the Cotton Kingdom. The real change that the Southern states needed could have come about as a result...

The Roots of New Criticism

The Roots of New Criticism Edward D. Pickering (bio) The rise of New Criticism is now an old story, faded to the black and white of another era. Critics and students think they know New Criticism better than any major literary movement of the past century. By virtue of its phenomenal success New Criticism drew the attention, mainly polemical, of the critical movements that followed in its wake. As a consequence, its theoretical tenets and their implications have been thoroughly analyzed. Less well known, however, is the history behind New Criticism — its political and social determinants. That several of the principal architects of New Criticism had been Southern Agrarians is common knowledge, yet merely to say that New Criticism was shaped by Southern Agrarianism is a generality that levels complexity as much as it illuminates. Precisely how great an influence Agrarianism had on New Criticism remains a vexed question. That the subject has not received conclusive treatment is no surprise. The Southern Agrarian and New Critical movements comprised several dozen men collectively responsible for hundreds of publications. These men possessed distinct aims and opinions, and professed varying degrees of commitment, to either or both of the movements. Such plurality frustrates generalization. An essay on so big a subject must be selective. Disclaimers aside, in the following pages I argue that New Criticism [End Page 93] inherited and adapted at least two of its fundamental ideas from Southern Agrarianism: belief in the superiority of a life lived in contact with the land and opposition to science. The New Critical tenets to which they correspond are the notion of the poem as an organic whole and the distinction between artistic and scientific modes of discourse. Before addressing points of contact between Southern Agrarianism and New Criticism I want to preface the discussion with opposing viewpoints, as well as historical and biographical background. The viewpoints represent the boundaries between which assessments of New Criticism’s relation to Southern Agrarianism have fallen. On the one hand is the view that New Criticism was simply the literary projection of the Southern Agrarianism of its founders. In The Critical Twilight John Fekete saw the transition from Southern Agrarianism to New Criticism as a retreat — an inevitable retreat. Having failed in their attempt to change society from the outside, the Southern Agrarians-turned-New Critics “confine[d] the broad scope of Agrarian ideology within the bounds of a literary criticism that champion[ed] art in safety from within the non-aesthetic life of the existing society” (45). In Fekete’s view, New Criticism renounced “all possibilities of reshaping the exterior world . . . to gain social sanction for the perfection of the interior world, the sensibility, through the strictly literary experience of life” (45). In contrast to Fekete’s view is that of Paul Conkin. “But even though [New Criticism] derived from former Agrarians,” wrote Conkin, “it is not clear that it was in any necessary sense agrarian criticism” (141). Both Fekete’s and Conkin’s positions resist easy refutation, for they point to divergent but equally true facets of the historical moment in which New Criticism emerged. Certainly, the New Critics did not wholly discard but retained and drew upon convictions they developed during their campaign for an Agrarian South. But equally certain, New Criticism was never subsumed beneath or brought in line with an Agrarian platform. Conkin’s point is well taken — that New Criticism resists conflation with Southern Agrarianism — but affinities between the two movements run deep enough to argue for a strong degree of socio-political determinacy. They run deep enough to make Fekete’s Marxist account, though unpalatable to many admirers of the New Critics, essentially accurate — but with one exception. I do not contest Fekete’s characterization of New Criticism as a retreat from the world of political engagement but I do question, in line with Mark Jancovich and before him Richard Gray, the contention that it represented a submission to a dominant capitalist order. Eschewing statements as sweeping [End Page 94] as Fekete’s, the following study examines the reorientation of Agrarian ideology into New Criticism albeit on a much smaller scale. While this paper founds its claims on affinities between the...

Landscape analysis of human impacts on forest fragmentation in the Great Lakes region

The Great Lakes watershed is a major geographic feature of North America, reflecting a diverse landscape ranging from the heavily forested north to the highly industrial and agrarian south. Quantitative aspects of the region's landscape have been extracted from a combination of land cover derived from satellite (Landsat multispectral scanner (MSS)) data and topographic map layers. Synoptic evaluations of a number of landscape metrics (forest contagion, U-index, riparian corridor extent, road density) indicate strong correlations between human activity (HA) and natural vegetation (NV) characterizations. Conventional or commonly used landscape metrics are scalar quantities; however, human activities are characterized by spatial regularity. For example, the small remnant forest patches in the southern portion of the watershed exhibit a spatial distribution that is associated with historic settlement patterns that led to widespread deforestation of the land and conversion to agriculture. It is shown through cellular automata simulations of deforestation that the observed values of scalar landscape metrics and their interrelationships can only be understood by taking into account the spatial pattern aspects associated with causal human drivers of the deforestation process.

Education and Social Mobility

Previous articleNext article No AccessEducation and Social MobilityJohn P. NeelsenJohn P. Neelsen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 19, Number 1Feb., 1975Politics/Education Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/445813 Views: 100Total views on this site Citations: 16Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1975 The Comparative and International Education SocietyPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jennifer J. Kish-Gephart, Kristie J. N. Moergen, Jacqueline D. Tilton, Barbara Gray Social Class and Work: A Review and Organizing Framework, Journal of Management 49, no.11 (Apr 2022): 509–565.https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063221076822Ekaterina S. Popova On the theoretical-methodological aspects of studying the influence of professional education on social stratification, VESTNIK INSTITUTA SOTZIOLOGII 11, no.33 (Jan 2020): 14–27.https://doi.org/10.19181/vis.2020.11.3.660Hui Zhou, Ling Zhu “Two Chinas”: Social Equity, Social Policies, and the Urban-Rural Divide in China, (May 2019): 109–136.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15919-1_7Jing Liu Introduction, (May 2018): 1–27.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8718-9_1Steve Leech, Catherine A. Marshall, Geoff Wren Understanding Foundation Year Provision, (Sep 2016): 19–40.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94969-4_2Oonagh Robison, Ade Kearns, Linsay Gray, Lyndal Bond, Marion Henderson , Urban Research & Practice 9, no.22 ( 2016): 131.https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2015.1095349C. R. Yadu The Land Question and the Mobility of the Marginalized: A Study of Land Inequality in Kerala, Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy: A triannual Journal of Agrarian South Network and CARES 4, no.33 (May 2016): 327–370.https://doi.org/10.1177/2277976016637990Catherine A. Marshall Good Foundations: Prediction of Degree Success in Non-traditional Students, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning 15, no.22 (Jul 2013): 22–42.https://doi.org/10.5456/WPLL.15.2.22Peggy Froerer, Anna Portisch Introduction to the Special Issue: Learning, Livelihoods, and Social Mobility, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 43, no.44 (Nov 2012): 332–343.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1492.2012.01188.xMiroslav Beblavy, Marcela Veselkova, Nicola Pensiero, Elin Peterson, AnnaaElisabeth Thum, Simon Toubeau Lessons from the Expansion of the Upper Secondary Education for the Expansion of the Tertiary Education, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2012).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2402738Graziella Bertocchi, Michael Spagat The evolution of modern educational systems, Journal of Development Economics 73, no.22 (Apr 2004): 559–582.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2003.05.003Paul Wellings Penetrating the Frontier, South African Geographical Journal 65, no.22 (Nov 2012): 87–110.https://doi.org/10.1080/03736245.1983.10559676E. Lester Levine Credentialism, meritocracy, and merit: educational requirements and the public service, International Journal of Public Administration 5, no.33 (Jun 2007): 267–290.https://doi.org/10.1080/01900698308524449Keith Simkin Comparative and sociological perspectives on Third World development and education, International Review of Education 27, no.44 (Jan 1981): 427–447.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00598140Philip Foster Education and Social Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa, The Journal of Modern African Studies 18, no.22 (Nov 2008): 201–236.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X00011319 Intelligence Testing and Chicanos: A Quality of Life Issue, Social Problems 27, no.22 (Dec 1979): 186–195.https://doi.org/10.2307/800367