Suchergebnisse

"Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not provides a striking new answer to the classic question of why Europe industrialised from the late eighteenth century and Asia did not. Drawing significantly from the case of India, Prasannan Parthasarathi shows that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the advanced regions of Europe and Asia were more alike than different, both characterized by sophisticated and growing economies. Their subsequent divergence can be attributed to different competitive and ecological pressures that in turn produced varied state policies and economic outcomes. This account breaks with conventional views, which hold that divergence occurred because Europe possessed superior markets, rationality, science or institutions. It offers instead a groundbreaking rereading of global economic development that ranges from India, Japan and China to Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire and from the textile and coal industries to the roles of science, technology and the state"--

"Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not provides a striking new answer to the classic question of why Europe industrialised from the late eighteenth century and Asia did not. Drawing significantly from the case of India, Prasannan Parthasarathi shows that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the advanced regions of Europe and Asia were more alike than different, both characterized by sophisticated and growing economies. Their subsequent divergence can be attributed to different competitive and ecological pressures that in turn produced varied state policies and economic outcomes. This account breaks with conventional views, which hold that divergence occurred because Europe possessed superior markets, rationality, science or institutions. It offers instead a groundbreaking rereading of global economic development that ranges from India, Japan and China to Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire and from the textile and coal industries to the roles of science, technology and the state"--

AbstractWith a focus by scholars on states and classes, the environment of India and its impact on agriculture has been neglected, except to provide a context—which was largely unchanging—in which states extracted and classes struggled. One example of environment as the backdrop is the distinction between 'wet' and 'dry' areas in Tamilnad and South India more widely. This distinction is based on the availability of water and on the local categorization of agricultural activity (nanjai versus punjai). There are two problems with this approach, however. First, it is a narrow treatment of the environment as it neglects other features of the land such as forests, grasslands, scrublands, and other so-called wasteland. Second, it sees the environment as a fixed entity, but the landscape has changed dramatically in the past, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If changes in the environment are included in the mix, the development of agriculture in nineteenth-century Tamilnad may be seen in some new ways. Agricultural production existed in symbiosis with the complex and varied environment of the region. In the early nineteenth century Tamilnad contained extensive tracts of forests, widespread wastelands, and abundant surface water. This diverse environment made it possible to maintain high levels of agricultural productivity as it provided the resources to maintain the fertility of the soil and the supplies of water that were critical for agricultural enterprise, as well as the well-being of the rural population. The consequences of changing regimes of water is the focus of this article.

The 1980s and 1990s were decades of great creativity in Indian labor history. The study of labor moved from a long-standing institutional focus on trade unions to a study of workers themselves, as well as from the economism and determinism that had characterized many previous writings. A growing interest in labor led to the first conference devoted to Indian labor history at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in 1995 and the founding of the Association of Indian Labour Historians the following year. The dynamism and the new intellectual horizons of Indian labor history in that period are captured in the work of three major historians: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, and Chitra Joshi. For the purposes of this essay, there is no need to review their contributions in detail (not least because such overviews may be found elsewhere), but it is nevertheless essential to provide a quick sketch of the arguments of each.

Most of the articles in this special issue were presented at a conference held at Trinity College, Cambridge, in May 2014 in honour of David Washbrook, to mark his 65th birthday. As a Festschrift, it is unusual: its authors are drawn not only from the ranks of Washbrook's students, but also include his collaborators and colleagues. But it is, we hope, more than a commemorative volume. Inspired by David Washbrook's work, the articles not only speak to the rich range of topics he has taken up in his distinguished career, they also reflect important new directions in the economic and social history of India, and Asia more broadly.

Transnational labor migration is one of the most visible features of our globalizing world. The International Organization for Migration estimates that there are 214 million migrant workers crossing national borders in the world today. Migration both in and to the Middle East constitutes an important part of this movement of laborers and has deep roots. In the mid-fifteenth century, workers across a broad spectrum of occupations, including stevedores, boatmen, and bakers, trekked from areas in eastern and central Anatolia to the new imperial Ottoman capital, Istanbul, where they lived and worked for months and even years. Workers from outside the Middle East also have been part of the fabric of life in the region for several centuries, the slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa, which long supplied labor for a variety of purposes, being one of the most notable. Migrant workers took on new significance in the twentieth century, especially after the oil price hikes of 1973. Today the nations on the Arabian Peninsula, the destination for most workers, have the highest ratio of migrants to locals in the world.