US Capitalism Research Articles

Race, Labour, Law, and Capitalism: The Case of US Naturalization and Immigration Law from 1790 to 1965

The relationship between race and labour has been analyzed from different theoretical perspectives. Some have focused on the connection between race and the extraction of surplus from people of colour, Black people in particular Others have integrated race within the context of capitalism as a world system or have focused on race as a category of exploitation that defines both feudalism and capitalism that is essential for the survival of capitalism. This paper argues that, to understand the relation between race and labour, race must be understood as legal status. Race is a set of legal rights given to or withheld from workers because of loosely defined and arbitrarily selected physical characteristics. By assigning different rights to workers based on race, their labour is racialized, and race becomes an important element to the functioning of capitalism because it defines the value of labour. As legal status, race is defined and enforced by the state. In addition, this paper analyses the development of US naturalization and immigration law from 1790 to 1964, selected as an example of the process of racialization of labour. Specifically, it discusses the process of racialization of labour by connecting it to the concept of Westphalian sovereignty and the differentiation between natural and political rights. It concludes that, between 1790 and 1965, race supported the development and stability of US capitalism through the development of three distinct highly racialized labour markets: the Northeast, mostly defined by the racialization of European workers along a scale of whiteness; the West, determined by the racialization of Asian and, later, Latino workers; and the South, characterized by the racialization of African Americans and selected southern European workers, Italians in particular, and, later, Latino workers. These three markets operated in symbiosis with each other and featured different forms of racialization of labour, as defined by different forms of enforcement of race as legal status, ranging from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 on the West Coast to the Jim Crow System that emerged in the southern states after the Compromise of 1877 and the Immigration Act of 1924 that dramatically limited immigration from southern and Eastern Europe.

Fashion on the Frontier

In 1910, on the cusp of the rubber fever that gripped South America, New York photographer Dana Bertran Merrill was hired to document the transnational construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon. His camera acted both as witness to, and abettor in, this imperial project of US capitalist expansion and exploitation of South America. Although Merrill was not employed to document the transnational clothing culture of the transient frontier society that sprang up around the construction of the railroad, his commissioned photographs overflow with visual information on dress: what people wore, and how they wore it, documented in extraordinary detail. Turning to fashion offers a revised lens into how Merrill’s predominantly male subjects, who had journeyed to the Amazon from over 52 nations, used clothing to construct their identities and position themselves in relation to one another in the remote and uninviting location. Merrill’s archive provides an unusual case study for the historian to critically evaluate the colonial and neocolonial devaluation of labour upon which early-twentieth century projects of industrial modernity such as the Madeira-Mamoré railroad were predicated. Grounded in the visual analysis of fashion, this article builds upon feminist philosopher Saidiya Hartman’s revisionist method of ‘critical fabulation’, which deviates from traditional historiography in its efforts to overcome significant acts of erasure within the historical record. In bridging the visual and sensory aspects of fashion, it presents new insights into fashion’s histories as well as those of photography at its intersection with global projects of industrial capitalism.

Automate or Assist? The Role of Computational Models in Identifying Gendered Discourse in US Capital Trial Transcripts

The language used by US courtroom actors in criminal trials has long been studied for biases. However, systematic studies for bias in high-stakes court trials have been difficult, due to the nuanced nature of bias and the legal expertise required. Large language models offer the possibility to automate annotation. But validating the computational approach requires both an understanding of how automated methods fit in existing annotation workflows and what they really offer. We present a case study of adding a computational model to a complex and high-stakes problem: identifying gender-biased language in US capital trials for women defendants. Our team of experienced death-penalty lawyers and NLP technologists pursue a three-phase study: first annotating manually, then training and evaluating computational models, and finally comparing expert annotations to model predictions. Unlike many typical NLP tasks, annotating for gender bias in months-long capital trials is complicated, with many individual judgment calls. Contrary to standard arguments for automation that are based on efficiency and scalability, legal experts find the computational models most useful in providing opportunities to reflect on their own bias in annotation and to build consensus on annotation rules. This experience suggests that seeking to replace experts with computational models for complex annotation is both unrealistic and undesirable. Rather, computational models offer valuable opportunities to assist the legal experts in annotation-based studies.

Oliver Goldsmith’s Indigent Philosopher, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Three American Editions of The Vicar Of Wakefield, 1791–1839

Abstract Oliver Goldsmith is not usually associated with the foreign policy of the United States. Nevertheless a speech attributed to the ‘Indigent Philosopher’, first published in the London Lloyd’s Evening Post in February 1762 and included in Goldsmith’s Essays (1765; 2nd corrected edn 1766), was reprinted on three separate occasions, at the conclusion of new editions of the author’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). The editions were published in the-then US capital of Philadelphia in 1791 and 1795, and in the new capital, Washington, in 1839. The speech, an exhortation not to declare war against Spain, has a direct relevance to three distinct historical moments, however unexpected the context of republication.

Dynamics Of Asean, US, and China Capital Market Relations: Before, During and Post Covid-19

Purpose: The study aims to uncover the dynamics of the relationship between ASEAN countries (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines), the US, and China to the Indonesian capital market. Methodology/approach: This study uses weekly composite stock price index data for two observation periods: January 2016 to December 2019 (pre-COVID-19) and January 2020 to December 2023 (during and post-COVID-19). The econometric model is analyzed separately for (i) Indonesia and other ASEAN markets, and (ii) Indonesia, the US, and China. Findings: The ARDL cointegration analysis reveals that before COVID-19, the Indonesian stock market was influenced by Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand within the ASEAN data group, while only China had a long-term impact within the Indonesia-US-China data group. In the short term, there was a stronger link between the Indonesian capital market and Malaysia compared to Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand. After the pandemic, there was a significant increase in the relationship between China's capital market and Indonesia, while the impact of the U.S. stock exchange on Indonesia was considered insignificant in the short term. Practical implications: This study can help investors and policymakers make informed decisions regarding portfolio diversification and risk management. More importantly, the long-term impact of China on the Indonesian stock market; so investors in Indonesia need to monitor and assess developments in the Chinese market for potential long-term implications. Originality/value: This study offers new insights into the dynamics of the relationship between the Indonesian capital market and ASEAN, the US, and China; a topic that has been relatively under-researched in the context before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The military–industrial complex as a variety of capitalism and threat to democracy: rethinking the political economy of guns versus butter

This paper examines the military–industrial complex (MIC), which is a prototype widely imitated by other business sectors. Collectively, they constitute a variety of capitalism which can be termed the poly-industrial complex (PIC). Understanding the MIC is critical to understanding contemporary US capitalism, US international policy, and the drift toward Cold War II. The MIC exerts a massive societal impact. It twists economic activity toward military spending; twists the character of technical progress; is socially corrosive via its capture of politics and government; twists societal understanding of geopolitics to increase demand for war services; promotes militarism and increases the likelihood of war; and promotes proto-fascist drift because militarism drips back into national politics. Given these features, the MIC is of first-order significance and the consequences of failure to understand it are likely to be grim. Politics is at the center of possibilities for change. This raises questions whether the demand for change can be mustered, and whether the political system will permit it.

Green building development in the US capitals: a focused comparative analysis with Baton Rouge

Purpose For over 25 years, the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) has significantly influenced the US sustainable construction through its leadership in energy and environmental design (LEED) certification program. This study aims to delve into how Baton Rouge, Louisiana, fares in green building adoption relative to other US capital cities and regions. Design/methodology/approach The study leverages statistical and geospatial analyses of data sourced from the USGBC, among other databases. It scrutinizes Baton Rouge’s LEED criteria performance using the mean percent weighted criteria to pinpoint the LEED criteria most readily achieved. Moreover, unique metrics, such as the certified green building per capita (CGBC), were formulated to facilitate a comparative analysis of green building adoption across various regions. Findings Baton Rouge’s CGBC stands at 0.31% (C+), markedly trailing behind the frontrunner, Santa Fe, New Mexico, leading at 3.89% (A+) and in LEED building per capita too. Despite the notable concentration of certified green buildings (CGBs) within Baton Rouge, the city’s green building development appears to be in its infancy. Innovation and design was identified as the most attainable LEED benchmark in Baton Rouge. Additionally, socioeconomic factors, including education and income per capita, were associated with a mild to moderate positive correlation (0.25 = r = 0.36) with the adoption of green building practices across the capitals, while sociocultural infrastructure exhibited a strong positive correlation (r = 0.99). Practical implications This study is beneficial to policymakers, urban planners and developers for sustainable urban development and a reference point for subsequent postoccupancy evaluations of CGBs in Baton Rouge and beyond. Originality/value This study pioneers the comprehensive analysis of green building adoption rates and probable influencing factors in capital cities in the contiguous US using distinct metrics.

Teacher Diversity as Interest Convergence? A Cautionary Note

The history of US capitalism is one wherein occupations with higher concentrations of workers of color coincide with increased levels of exploitation. Recent studies in education show the way strained and precarious working environments led to the now infamous “teacher shortages.” I employ the lenses of critical studies of race and capitalism to examine the interest convergence dilemma vis-à-vis recent efforts to increase diversity amid substandard labor conditions in teaching. This analysis offers a cautionary note, and absent a major structural intervention, the interests of marginalized groups (i.e., stronger representation) might converge with the interests of capitalism (i.e., cheap labor).

Sewn in Place: Gender, Materiality, and Mapmaking in the Early United States

Focused on four early nineteenth-century embroidered maps of the US capital in Washington, DC, the following analysis situates the maps’ appropriation of printed material in the context of early modern women’s work and its associated knowledge networks, exploring how embroidery’s unique set of material practices restructured conventional cartography’s claims to power and political oversight. Investigating how such practices shaped the mapmakers’ relationship to the powerful symbolism of the national capital, this account reveals embroidery to be more than just an imitative, schoolgirl art. Embroidery emerges as a way of thinking about and working with space all its own.

Stock Returns on US Capital Market During the First Quarter of November

Stock Returns on US Capital Market During the First Quarter of November

International economic institutions after neoliberalism: the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity as a blueprint?

Abstract The framework of global trade has been undergoing important transformations in the last few years. This article will defend the thesis that these events form the background of a possibly significant transformation of US capitalism that will be accompanied by new and profoundly different types of trade agreements and institutions.

Paper Trails: Exposing Racism in the History of School Finance

Abstract How can we better situate resource inequities between schools in the longer history of racial oppression and discrimination in the United States? This article provides both a historiographical panorama of the field on a range of topics related to school finance and a roadmap of archival and research paths. It seeks to sketch out the contours of a burgeoning field to show that historians of school finance have the potential to make racial dispossession a central tenet of their analyses. First, I lay out a longer timeline for the periodization of school finance history than most of the previous scholarship has adopted to recast school funding inequality within the racialized context of land and capital dispossession. Second, I situate school finance more explicitly in US political history, showing how the study of school funding policies can illuminate major historiographical debates such as the history of tax revolts, federalism, local governance, and the development of US capitalism. Finally, I chart some of the directions historians can follow to study a wider array of school finance policies beyond the surface of state school funding formulae to make the role of policymakers at all levels of education policy more visible, and to further ground school finance developments in their racial contexts.

Vanguard of the Athletic Revolution: The Black Panther Party, Micki and Jack Scott, and the Sports Liberation Movement

Abstract: During the 1970s, the Black Panther Party believed in and provided sports programming that spoke to community embodiment. The Party's approach aligned with what Jack and Micki Scott called "the sports liberation movement." Though understudied in sports history, the Scotts endeavored to create a revolution motivated by the 1968 Olympics. They controversially wrote about and taught sports in a way that prioritized the needs and well-being of professional athletes and everyday people, rather than US patriotism and capitalism consumption. Influenced by fellow leftists like the Scotts, the Black Panthers circulated ideas on freedom and free movement, drawing inspiration from international role models in non-European, socialist countries too. They imagined that socialist sports could escape the militarization of sport in the US and find space for gender inclusion. Their interpretation of socialism showed up in both philosophy and pedagogy, on and off the mat. Using sports archives from the Party as well as broader newspaper research, I contend in this essay that the Panthers, representative of the larger Black Power movement, politicized sport as a necessary site to revolutionize the everyday person's life.

Emma Goldman and the United States: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship

Emma Goldman had a love-hate relationship with the United States. While she was radicalized there after her arrival as an immigrant who had left Czarist Russia in her teens, the female anarchist spent years fighting the state and its government for more freedom and equality. The First World War witnessed the climax of this struggle, and Goldman’s support for the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution turned her into a prominent target of new laws that would be used to expel her from the US. Afterward, she experienced the “Soviet utopia” and lived in many European countries. Goldman lectured there about the American anarchist movement, US capitalism, and the failure of the workers to challenge capitalism. The present article follows the history and the development of this special love-hate relationship and thereby not only provides a detailed evaluation of Goldman’s genesis as a radical anarchist in its American context, but also highlights the overlap between biographical history, the history of anarchism in the United States, and global migration experiences in the first third of the 20th century, as they were brought together and influenced by transnational events, i.e. the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and its consequences.

From Partnership to Rivalry: China and the USA in the Early Twenty-First Century

Two unconnected crises in the 1970s, a crisis of profitability of global capitalism and a deep crisis of political legitimacy in China, led to creation of a formidable alliance between corporate/financial-led US capital and the Chinese state that sought to resolve both crises by opening China for corporate exploitation. The solution, however, masked different objectives. Transnational corporations moved to China in search of cheap labour to counter falling profits and Beijing sought to use foreign capital to develop the Chinese economy and gain access to technology. Over time China’s interests and those of the USA diverged, as US deindustrialisation became the obverse of China’s dynamic industrialisation. Factions within the US elite began to promote a different approach towards China than that of alliance and accommodation and were able to grab the upper hand during Donald Trump’s presidency, advocating an aggressive approach towards China. This posture consolidated under the Biden administration. These developments set up a struggle for hegemony to which China and the USA bring differing advantages and disadvantages. While a hegemonic transition is one possible outcome of this conflict, the possibility of a hegemonic stalemate or hegemonic vacuum cannot be discounted.

To the Expanding Community of Melville Readers

To the Expanding Community of Melville Readers Maki Sadahiro Following John Bryant’s reading of passages from his Melville biography and the lively responses and interactions of the Melvilleans in attendance, the exhibition hall had mostly emptied out. Bryant’s voice, passionately recreating and reliving Melville’s life, had seemed to fill the space, and Melville’s energy was in the air, magnified by the artworks inspired by Click for larger view View full resolution Maki Sadahiro. Photo courtesy of Maki Sadahiro. [End Page 95] and responding to his literary works. Enshrined at the center of the exhibition room was Jos Sances’s 14-foot x 51-foot scratchboard drawing mural Or, The Whale, inspired by Moby-Dick and C. L. R. James’s interpretation of the novel. Peter Martin’s Call Me Ahab series of black-and-white photographs taken with an iPhone camera portrayed Captain Ahab as a sexy, nude young man with a harpoon, casting his melancholy eye on the viewer. Ishmael was also there with his face hidden behind a whale’s skull mask. Embracing him was Queequeg (Peter Martin & David Rosenthal, Altered Visions). On the other side of the room, Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss’s ReWritten, in which Melville’s writing of Mobyo-Dick is contextualized in the author’s affectionate interactions with Hawthorne, was being broadcast. I attended the exhibition with a fellow Melvillean from Korea, Misook Lee, and could not help feeling haunted by the artistic renderings of Melville’s spirit featured at the event. I watched and recorded Lee’s dance performances, which both responded to and interacted with the artworks at the exhibition. At first I was mostly an observer, standing still to capture the performance in the frame of my iPhone screen, but as I followed Lee moving in front of the whale mural, from its head to tail, I gradually realized that my own body was beginning to move as well, as if we were dancing collaboratively. It is not an overstatement to say that it was simultaneously a transcorporeal experience and a transtemporal one because our dancing traced Sances’s historical vignettes of US capitalism, which were depicted within the space of the whale’s body. The whale motivated us to recapture history—from the massacre of the Pequot Indians to mining, the Civil Rights Movement, and ecological destruction such as water pollution and climate change—and made us ponder all the associated violence, injury, and suffering. While recording the dance, I immersed myself in “Melville’s Energies,” the aptly evoked title of the Thirteenth International Melville Society Conference in Paris. At this conference in Paris, I felt more Melville energy and saw his works generate more new thought and artworks than at any Melville conference I had participated in since the one held in Jerusalem in 2009. I arrived in Paris ready to read a paper on Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of Melville’s Billy Budd and Melville’s attitude toward “postcolonial” American literature, which inspired the opera production team. That team included Britten, E. M. Forster, and William Plomer, who together created a “British” opera from within the strong influence of continental music traditions. The transhistorical, transnational, and transcorporeal relationships between scholars and artists at the exhibition impressed me deeply and motivated me to look further into the diverse and multilayered interpretive community of Melville. [End Page 96] Click for larger view View full resolution Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss perform a scene from ReWritten during the “ReWritten: Exploring Melville Through Dance, Performance, and Experiments in Pedagogy” session, June 29, 2022. Photo credit Alan Van Brackel. For me, a decisive culmination point at the conference, in which an organic interpretive community had taken shape, occurred during the session “ReWritten: Exploring Melville through Dance, Performance, and Experiments in Pedagogy,” which explored the aesthetics manifested through bodies in motion. The panel consisted of Brian Yothers, a Melville scholar, Katherine Stubbs, a Hawthorne scholar, and dance professionals Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss, who examined Melville’s engagement with the dancing body and the process of translating literary texts into somatic performances. Yothers traced Melville’s interest in dance throughout his career, from Typee to Moby-Dick...

How Does Environmental Data from ESG Concept Affect Stock Returns: Case of the European Union and US Capital Markets

This article examines the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance of firms, with a focus on the environmental pillar of the ESG concept. It is believed that the price of equities as well as sector-specific characteristics may be affected by ESG data. It also contributes to the argument that environmental performance and governance quality are related. The purpose of this paper is to statistically validate the separated environmental data from the ESG concept and investigate its impact on the equity price in the EU and the United States. Using simple linear regressions and a fixed effect panel data model, the association between environmental score and governance score, as well as equity price and environmental score, was estimated. This study examines the 500 largest US corporations comprising the S&P 500 index (S&P) and the 600 largest EU companies comprising the STOXX Europe 600 index (STOXX) (SXXP). This article analyzes ESG statistics for the period 2015–2020. The results indicate that a higher government score has a favorable effect on environmental pledges and that changes in stock price depend in part on environmental data. The novel contribution of this paper is that the results suggest a sector-specific contribution to the model, and it would be fascinating to analyze sector disparities and their ESG-related policies in greater detail. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-02-08 Full Text: PDF

Stock Returns on US Capital Market During the First Half of February

Stock Returns on US Capital Market During the First Half of February

Race, Labor and Postbellum Capitalism in Du Bois’s ‘The Negro Worker in America’

In 1906, W.E.B. Du Bois published an article ‘L’Ouvrier Negre en Amerique’ (‘The Negro Worker in America’) which draws from original survey data and historical analysis to develop a theory of Black labors’ structural disadvantage in post Civil War US capitalism. ‘L’Ouvrier Negre en Amerique’ has essentially been forgotten. It has been accessible only to French speakers and has yet to be the subject of analysis or commentary. It deserves the full attention of not just Du Bois scholars, but all scholars who seek to understand the relationship between race, class, and capitalism in antebellum and post-Civil War America. Du Bois shows how White organized labor restricted Black workers’ access to union protections and the booming post-war labor market. His analysis highlights the interplay between racist ideology and the forces of racialized capitalism and reveals that the ‘early’ Du Bois critical, historical, materialist and attuned to socialist and labor politics.

An Empirical Investigation of Markowitz and Index model in the US Capital Market

This paper uses Markowitz's portfolio theory and index model, combined with the five most commonly used constraints in the market, to conduct portfolio analysis on ten stocks, in order to provide individual investors with a more scientific investment portfolio construction method, seeking the smallest risk and maximum return and providing relevant investment advice.