The essays collected here straddle four decades of work in both historiography and Marxist theory, combining source-based historical work in a wide range of languages with sophisticated discussion of Marx’s categories. Key themes include the distinctions that are crucial to restoring complexity to the Marxist notion of a mode of production, the emergence of medieval relations of production, the origins of capitalism, the dichotomy between free and unfree labor and essays in agrarian history that range widely from Byzantine Egypt to 19th-century colonialism. The essays demonstrate the importance of reintegrating theory with history and of bringing history back into historical materialism. An introductory chapter ties the collection together and shows how historical materialists can develop an alternative to Marx's Asiatic mode of production.
Table of Contents:
Foreword
Acknowledgement
Introduction: Themes in Historical Materialism
- Questions of Theory
- A Marxist characterization of Asiatic regimes
- From the Asiatic to the Tributary Mode: Marx, Haldon and Beyond
- Ruler and Ruling Class: Configurations of the Tributary Mode
- Some General Conclusions
Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History
- The Retreat into Historical Formalism
- Productions wise as Labor-Process and Epoch of Production
- Levels of Abstraction in Historical Materialism
- Wage-Labor as Abstract Determination and Determinate Abstraction
- Self-Owning Capital
- The Defining Role of the Laws of Motion
- The Failure of Abstraction in Vulgar Marxism
- Reading History Backwards
- Slavery and the World-Market
- Slavery
- The Nascent World-Market
- Feudal Production
- The Estate
- Peculiarities of the Second Serfdom
- Commodity-Feudalism as the pure form
- Modes of Production as objects of long duration
- Two Brief Conclusions
- Simple-Commodity Production: A determination of form
- The Peasant mode of production
- The Simple-Commodity producer as Wage-Slave
Historical Arguments for a Logic of Deployment in Precapitalist Agriculture
Workers before Capitalism
The Fictions of Free Labor: Contract, Coercion and so-called Unfree Labor
- Premises: The elusive reality of consent
- A Marxism of Liberal Mystifications
- Forms of exploitation based on Wage-Labor
- Free Contract’ in Sartre’s Critique
- Summary
Agrarian History and the Labor-Organization of Byzantine Large Estates
- Introduction
- A Historiography of Abstractions
- Rural Stratifications: Geouchountes, Ktetores and Ergatai
- The case for permanent labor
- Restructuring in the later empire
- The New Estates
- The Labor-Organization of sixth-century estates
- Conclusion
Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: What Kind of Transition?
- Introduction: Marxist Uncertainties
- Background to the Late Empire
- Unresolved Issues
- The reshaping of relations of production
- The Legacy of the Colonate
- Slavery and the Post-Roman Labor-Force
- The Legacy of Direct Management
- What happened to the aristocracy?
- Final Comments: Wickham and Modes of Production
Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages
- Introduction
- Aristocracies
- The Agrarian Watershed of the Seventh Century
- Critique of Wickham
- The East: Vulnerability
Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism
- Historiographies of Capital
- Towards a Marxist theory of Ccial Capitalism
- From Corporate Capitalism to the earliest Capitalist forms of Association
- The Arab Trade-Empire
- From Genoa to Portugal
- Company-Capitalism and the advance system
- Concluding note: Merchant-Capitalism and Labor
Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry
- The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century
- The subordination of labor to capital
- Commodity-expansion in the Deccan districts, 1850-90
- Structure of capital in the Deccan
- Interest as surplus-value: Increasing formal subsumption of labor into capital
- The big peasantry of the Deccan
- Peasant-Differentiation
- The Stage of evolution of capitalism in the nineteenth-century Deccan
Trajectories of Accumulation or Transitions’ to Capitalism?
Modes of Production: A Synthesis
- Marxists and feudalism
- The Tributary Mode
- Periodising capitalism
- Articulation?
Publications of Jairus Banaji
References
General Index
Jairus Banaji, spent most of his academic life at Oxford. He has been a Research Associate in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS at University of London, for the past several years. He is the author of Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2007).
