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A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Histories of Economic Life)

Amazon.com Price:  $39.40 (as of 04/03/2019 00:31 PST- Details)

Description

Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the most popular packaging material of global trade, transporting the world’s grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute used to be the second one-most widely consumed fiber on this planet, after cotton. At the same time as the sack circulated globally, the plant used to be cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta’s peasantry within the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital.

Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan within the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed each and every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life used to be structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave strategy to debt and poverty within the twentieth century.

A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta’s peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped on a regular basis peasant life and made up our minds the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation.

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