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Announcing 3 conferences by Prof. Tanimoto

1. Peasant Society in Industrializing Economy : Labour Allocation, Migration and Occupational Structure

It is now becoming clear that the agrarian household did not simply react passively to the impact of industrialization, but strategically allocated its family labour to industrial and agricultural work executed within the household, as well as releasing members to the outer labour market. This lecture discusses the factors that determined the pattern and volume of labour mobility, in the light of the household economy and the nature of industrial occupations.

6 mars 2014 (salle 2, 105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris)

Séminaire de Histoire du Japon moderne et contemporain : permanences et ruptures.
• Patrick Beillevaire, directeur de recherche au CNRS (TH)
• Guillaume Carré, maître de conférences à l’EHESS
• Arnaud Nanta, chargé de recherche au CNRS

 [Date du séminaire modifiée – consulter les plannings sur le site de l’EHESS]

2. The Role of Labour-intensive Industrialization in the Economic Development

This lecture explores how the notion of labour-intensive industrialization, based as it originally on agrarian setting, could be extended to the non-agrarian sphere by analyzing the foundation of small scale industries in 19th and 20th century Japan, with special reference to a dispersed production system developed and operated in the metropolis.

Discipline au travail : histoire du marché du travail et protection sociale
• Mathieu Arnoux, directeur d’études à l’EHESS, professeur à l’Université Paris-Diderot (Paris-VII) (TH)
• Jérôme Bourdieu, directeur d’études à l’EHESS, directeur de recherche à l’INRA (TH)
• Alain Dewerpe, directeur d’études à l’EHESS (TH)
• Jean-Yves Grenier, directeur d’études à l’EHESS (TH)
• Gilles Postel-Vinay, directeur d’études à l’EHESS (TH)

13 mars 2014. 16,30-19 :30, ENS, Campus Paris-Jourdan, salle E 101, 48 bd Jourdan 75014 Paris

3. The Provision of Public Goods in Transitional Economy: The Role of Regional Society in 19th Century Japan

The sustainability and reproduction of economic lives of ordinary people has been based not only on goods and services obtained from market activities but also those provided as public goods in a broad sense. Though national state can be nominated as a main provider, other actors might have played significant roles specifically before 20th century. The lecture shows to what extent the regional society played a role in providing public goods, and discusses the autonomy of regional economy in transitional Japan.

Maurice Aymard, Jean-Yves Grenier, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Alessandro Stanziani, Critique de l’économie historique

24 mars 2014, salle 1, 105 Bd Raspail, 17-20 heures

http://crh.ehess.fr/index.php?3654

Starvation and the State

2014-02-06_StevenSerels_poster_webNew Book in the Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies : Starvation and the State: Famine, Slavery, and Power in Sudan, 1883-1956, by Steven Serels

For much of its recent history, Sudan has been beset by devastating famines that have killed countless people and powerfully reshaped its society. However, as this historical study of food insecurity in the region shows, there was no necessary correlation between natural disasters, decreased crop yields, and famine in Sudan. Rather, repeated food crises since the late nineteenth century were the result of inter-generational, exploitative processes that transferred the resources of victim communities to the state and to a small group of non-state elites. This dynamic fundamentally transformed the social, political, and economic structures underpinning Sudanese society and prevented many communities from securing necessary subsistence. On one hand, food crises facilitated the British-led conquest of Sudan and subsequently allowed British imperial agents, acting through the Anglo-Egyptian government, to seize control of many of Sudan’s natural resources. At the same time, however, a number of indigenous elites were also able to position themselves so as to further augment their prestige and economic wealth. At independence, these elites were handed control of the state and, in the years that followed, they continued many of the policies that had impoverished their countrymen.

Steven Serels is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University, USA. He is also a Research Associate at the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Canada.

Human Trafficking in Thailand

Recently published at Washington University Press :

SORHUMSIROK SORAJJAKOOL, Human Trafficking in Thailand. Current Issues, Trends, and the Role of the Thai Government.

“Few subjects elicit greater moral outrage than human trafficking. Media reports of dehumanizing practices such as slavery, abduction, child prostitution, and torture, along with shocking statistics, form the basis of public knowledge.

With sensitivity and candor, this book addresses the reality of human trafficking in Thailand, dissecting studies, presenting facts, and dismissing stereotypes. It focuses on the areas of fishing, agriculture, domestic work, sex work, and the trafficking of children, weaving individual narratives and official studies into the wider history of Thailand’s changing economy and labor situation.

Siroj Sorajjakool is professor of religion, psychology, and counseling at Loma Linda University, California.”

Publisher’s webpage

“Slavery in Africa: Past, Heritage, Present”

The organizing committee of the international conference, “Slavery in Africa: Past, Heritage, Present” are inviting all interested researchers to submit paper or panel proposals. The conference will be held in Nairobi, Kenya from October 27-29, 2014.

This international conference seeks to mark a significant moment in the reactivation and intensification of research on slavery in Africa. The conference will look at all types of sources, – oral, written and audio-visual, – with a particular focus on the collection and analysis of testimonies by slaves and their descendants. Moreover, the conference aims to promote a better understanding of the links between African slavery and different slave trades, which have been studied extensively in African historiography.

For more details, click here or download the flyer.

Announcing “The Indian Ocean in World History”

9780195337877Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History, Oxford University Press, 2013, 184 p.

A new volume in the New Oxford World History

The New Oxford World History is an innovative series that offers readers an informed, lively, and up-to-date history of the world and its people, representing a significant change from the “old” world history. “New” world history emphasizes connectedness and interactions of all kinds – cultural, economic, political, religious, and social – involving peoples, places, and processes. Each volume in this series is written by a leading authority and explores not only political events, but also social, cultural, and economic trends, and it highlights global interactions and the intersection of the global and the local.

Announcing “Britain’s Oceanic Empire, Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c.1550–1850”

9781107020146H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, John G. Reid (eds.), Britain’s Oceanic Empire, Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c.1550–1850, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 486 p.

“DescriptionContentsResourcesAbout the Authors
This pioneering comparative study of British imperialism in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds draws on the perspectives of British newcomers overseas and their native hosts, of metropolitan officials and corporate enterprises, migrants and settlers. Leading scholars examine the divergences and commonalities in the legal and economic regimes that allowed Britain to project imperium across the globe. They explore the nature of sovereignty and law, governance and regulation, diplomacy, military relations and commerce, shedding new light on the processes of expansion that influenced the making of empire. While acknowledging the distinctions and divergences in imperial endeavours in Asia and the Americas – not least in terms of the size of indigenous populations, technical and cultural differences, and approaches to indigenous polities – this book argues that these differences must be seen in the context of what Britons overseas shared, including constitutional principles, claims of sovereignty, disciplinary regimes and military attitudes.”

Presentation on the publisher’s webpage

Announcing “The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia Industrial Production, 1770–2010”

Ulbe Bosma just realesed his new book entitled The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia, Industrial Production, 1770–2010

Cambridge UP, 2013

Description :

“European markets almost exclusively relied on Caribbean sugar produced by slave labor until abolitionist campaigns began around 1800. Thereafter, importing Asian sugar and transferring plantation production to Asia became a serious option for the Western world. In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it over time. Although initial attempts by British planters in India failed, the Dutch colonial administration was far more successful in Java, where it introduced in 1830 a system of forced cultivation that tied local peasant production to industrial manufacturing. A century later, India adopted the Java model in combination with farmers’ cooperatives rather than employing coercive measures. Cooperatives did not prevent industrial sugar production from exploiting small farmers and cane cutters, however, and Bosma finds that much of modern sugar production in Asia resembles the abuses of labor by the old plantation systems of the Caribbean.

Uses fresh archival material to produce new insights into the histories of industrialization of sugar production of the largest sugar producers in Asia in the early twentieth century
Gives a long-term analysis of how peasant economics in Asia were mobilized to produce for the global market
Combines a broad global perspective with comparative analysis of rural change”

[Conference] Indian Women within Indentured Labour in Mauritius in the Nineteenth Century

Announcing confernce “Indian Women within Indentured Labour in Mauritius in the Nineteenth Century”

by Lorna Mungur, MA Student, Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University

Wednesday, 30 October 2013, 116 Peterson Hall, 4:45 pm

Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, Indian indentured labourers migrated to Mauritius to work within the plantation economy of the island. Approximately 453,000 indentured labourers migrated to the island between 1834 and 1920. The focus of this paper is Indian women in Mauritius at the time of indentureship. Women’s social positions were defined by their role as wives and mothers, and colonial legislation on Indian marriages legally defined women as the subordinate of their husbands. Indian women’s position within nineteenth-century colonial Mauritian society illustrates that work was not synonymous with liberation; women relied on relationships with men to access social and economic capital. Thus, migration did not create new opportunities; rather it enforced women’s inferiority and dependence on their male counterparts within the colonial landscape, reaffirming patriarchal control over Indian women. Hence, this paper argues that Indian women’s opportunities in Mauritius lay in marriage, not in work, creating a state of dependency where women had to rely socially, economically and legally on men.

The Demography of Disasters: Implications for Future Policy on Development and Resilience

The Demography of Disasters:

Implications for Future Policy on Development and Resilience

 

Australian National University

18–20 September 2013

Download full program

By exploring how mortality caused by natural disasters impacts on women, men, children, the elderly and people with disabilities, the conference aims:
1. to contribute to more cost-effective government policies on disaster mitigation, preparedness and recovery for vulnerable populations;

2. to make the latest cultural and cross-cultural research on disaster mitigation, preparedness and recovery available to representatives from disaster impacted countries with a view to this material being incorporated in public policy;

3. to enable Disaster Risk Reduction practitioners among civil society groups who have daily operational interaction with disaster-impacted communities to come together to share their knowledge and experience with a view to opening dialogue on improved approaches to development and resilience among vulnerable, often poverty-stricken, populations;

4. to explore how access to social capital in family and kinship networks, land and assets influence survival rates and adaptive behaviors after a disaster; and

5. to examine the impact of migration into and out of disaster-affected areas and what are the long-term socio-economic impacts of these migration flows on individuals and population groups.

Debt and Slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds [New !]

stanzWe are proud to announce the publication of Debt and Slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, edited by Alessandro Stanziani and Gwyn Campbell (Publisher’s page)

Campbell, Gwyn & Stanziani, Alessandro (eds). Debt and Slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds. London: Pickering & Chatto Pub., 2013, 208 p.

“Slavery casts a long shadow over human history. Though, historically, the chief mechanism of slavery was seen as violent abduction, this view is being adjusted to recognize the importance of financial indebtedness in creating and sustaining human bondage. Filling a significant gap in the historiography, the essays in this volume show that debt slavery has played a crucial role in the economic history of numerous societies which continues even today.

Full introduction available on Scribd

Table of contents :

Introduction – Alessandro Stanziani and Gwyn Campbell

1 Debt Bondage and Chattel Slavery in Early Rome – Marc Kleijwegt

2 Slavery, Debt and Bondage: The Mediterranean and the Eurasia Connection, from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century – Alessandro Stanziani

3 Clientship, Social Indebtedness and State-Controlled Emancipation of Africans in the Late Ottoman Empire – Michael Ferguson

4 Pawnship and Seizure for Debt during the Era of the Slave Trade – Paul E. Lovejoy

5 The Business of ‘Trust’ and the Enslavement of Yoruba Women and Children for Debt – Olatunji Ojo

6 The Africanization of the Workforce in English America – Russell R. Menard

7 Credit, Captives, Collateral and Currencies: Debt, Slavery, and the Financing of the Atlantic World – Joseph C. Miller

8 Unpayable Debts: Reinventing Bonded Labour through Legal Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Brazil – Henrique Espada Lima

9 Indigenous Debt and the Spirit of Colonial Capitalism: Debt, Taxes and the Cash-Crop Economy in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1956 – Steven Serels

Forthcoming events

Members of the IOW project will participate in the following events. More information will be added as soon as it comes.

India’s Unfree Workforce: Of Bondage Old and New

Jan Breman, Isabelle Guérin and Aseem Prakash (Editors), India’s Unfree Workforce: Of Bondage Old and New, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 392 p.

518AgOsVlFL._SY300_This volume makes a distinction between agrarian bondage as it existed in the past and the contemporary practices of bondage in various branches of the economy. It suggests that the analysis for bonded labour cannot be disassociated from a broader analysis related to the whole landscape of labour. The emergence of neo-bondage is strongly connected to the reinforcement of the informalization of labour relationships as well as the intensification of circulation and labour migration. Neo-bondage is strongly connected to the increased monetization of commodity exchanges and of social relationships, as well as the development of mass consumption. The authors do not accept the proposition that labour bondage is likely to disappear when economic growth is sustained at its current rate.

Readings on the Chinese “Divergence” and labour in China

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

  • “The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade. Pomeranz argues that Europe’s nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe’s failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths. Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia’s economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths–paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.”

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000

Jean-Laurent Rosenthal & Bin R. Wong : Before and Beyond Divergence. The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe

  • “China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy, reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China? Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of research, takes a sharply different tack. It argues that political differences which crystallized well before 1800 were responsible both for China’s early and more recent prosperity and for Europe’s difficulties after the fall of the Roman Empire and during early industrialization. Rosenthal and Wong show that relative prices matter to how economies evolve; institutions can have a large effect on relative prices; and the spatial scale of polities can affect the choices of institutions in the long run. Their historical perspective on institutional change has surprising implications for understanding modern transformations in China and Europe and for future expectations. It also yields insights in comparative economic history, essential to any larger social science account of modern world history.”

Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2011, 290 p.

Philip T. Hoffman : “Why was it Europeans that conquered the World?”

  • “By the 1700s Europeans dominated the gunpowder technology, which was surprising, because it had originated in China and been used with expertise throughout Eurasia. To account for their dominance, historians have invoked competition, but it cannot explain why they pushed this technology further than anyone else. The answer lies with a simple tournament model of military competition that allows for learning by doing. Political incentives and military conditions then explain why the rest of Eurasia fell behind Europeans in developing the gunpowder technology. The consequences were huge, from colonialism to the slave trade and even the Industrial Revolution.”

The Journal of Economic History / Volume 72 / Issue 03 / September 2012, pp 601-633

Draft (?) can be downloaded from here.

Complementary readings:

  • Allen, Robert, “The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War”, Explorations in Economic History, 2001, 38: 411–447
  • Allen, Robert, “Agricultural productivity and rural incomes in England and the Yangtze Delta, c.1620–c.1820”, The Economic History Review, 2009, 62 (3): p. 525–550
  • Brenner, Robert & Isett, Christopher, “England’s Divergence from China’s Yangzi Delta: Property Relations, Microeconomics, and Patterns of Development”, The Journal of Asian Studies, 2002, 61 (2): p. 609–662
  • Broadberry, Stephen & Gupta, Bishnupriya, “Cotton textiles and the great divergence: Lancashire, India and shifting competitive advantage, 1600–1850”, International Macroeconomics and Economic History Initiative, 2005
  • Deng, Kent, “A Critical Survey of Recent Research in Economic History”, Economic History Review, 2000, 53. 1, p. 1-28 [downloadable]
  • Elvin, Mark, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, Stanford University Press, 1973
  • Feuerwerker, Albert, “Chinese Economic History in Comparative Perspective”, in Paul Ropp, Heritage of China, University of California Press, 1990, p. 224–241
  • He Zhaohui, “Ming China in the Global Context: New Trends in Ming Studies in Mainland China”, Ming Studies, Number 54, Fall , pp. 8-15(8) [Link]
  • Landes, David, “Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2006, 20 (2), p. 3–22
  • Ma Debin and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Law and Long-Term Economic Change. A Eurasian Perspective, Stanford University Press, 2011, 376 p.
  • Paul S. Ropp, China in World History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 208 p.

Further readings on China Labour history:

Bibliographies on Ming-Qing China (1368-1911) history online:

  • “Ming Qing shehui jingji shi” 明清社會經濟史專題. Professor Victor (Pengsheng) Chiu 邱澎生 from the Chinese University of Hong-Kong has published a detailed bibliography of major studies on late imperial China society and economy. It constitutes an essentiel access point to studies published in Chinese language. Access here.
  • Marilyn Shea, University of Maine at Farmington, proposes a complete bibliography for Chinese studies that notably includes a section on Economics in Chinese History.
  • The Internet Guide for Chinese Studies (Sinological Institute, Leiden University, Netherlands) has been for long now one of the best access point to resources to Chinese History. It can be accessed here. Subcategories include links to resources on China’s Economy, Society and bibliographies.
  • Also have a look at Professor Leif Littrup’s (University of Copenhagen) Reference Works for Chinese Studies.
  • Chinese readers will also want to follow the reference journal presenting Trends in Chinese History Studies (Zhongguo shi yanjiu dongtai 中國史研究動態) published by the Center for Historical Research of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Humanties and Social Sciences [H-Net]

“H-Net is an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Our edited lists and web sites publish peer reviewed essays, multimedia materials, and discussion for colleagues and the interested public. The computing heart of H-Net resides at MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, Michigan State University, but H-Net officers, editors and subscribers come from all over the globe.”

Access here.

H-Net proposes a series of lists that range from discussion networks to annouces of events and conferences, book reviews, bibliographies, teaching materials and a lot more. Lists interesting more specifically our AIOW project are the following :

  • H-Human rights : “H-Human-Rights is a discussion network for scholars, policymakers, authors, historians, and other interested people devoted to the history, analysis, theory, and practice of human rights.”
  • H-Russia : “H-Russia is a member of H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine. H-RUSSIA encourages scholarly discussion of Russian and Soviet history and makes available diverse bibliographical, research and teaching aids.”
  • H-Law : “Welcome to the home page of H-LAW, a Humanities Social Sciences Online discussion network sponsored by the American Society for Legal History. H-LAW solicits discussion of issues relating to teaching and research in the history of all legal traditions: common-law, civil-law, and all other legal systems. ASLH publishes Law & History Review through the Cambridge University Press. The journal is available online via the History Cooperative and JSTOR.”
  • H-Slavery : “H-Slavery seeks to promote interaction and exchange among scholars engaged in research on slavery, the slave trade, abolition, and emancipation. It is dedicated to the dissemination of information about the history of slavery and antislavery in all time periods and parts of the world.”
  • H-UCLEA : Archives of the University& College Labor Education Association discussion network