Journal of Agrarian Change最新文献

{"title":"Exploitation, Interlinked Transactions and Agrarian Class Relations in Uttar Pradesh, India","authors":"Shinu Varkey","doi":"10.1111/joac.70055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70055","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A striking feature of rural markets in underdeveloped agrarian economies is interlinked transactions, where two or more interdependent exchanges are simultaneously agreed upon across different markets. In contemporary India, even as the capitalist relations of production are dominant, there are still regions where interlinkages play a major role in defining the class relations, which in turn influence their agricultural development. This paper analyses the nature of interlinked transactions in Eastern and Bundelkhand regions of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous and agriculture-dependent state. Using a Marxist framework, I argue that such linkages are essentially exploitative, hindering the progressive development of agriculture in these regions. The dominant parties in the interlinked transactions continue to use them as important sources of labour mobilisation and surplus extraction. It further studies the possible influence of the interlinkages associated with tenancy and credit transactions in lowering crop productivity and profitability and finally their impact on the livelihood strategies adopted by the agricultural households.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70055","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147564161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pensadores Rebeldes, By Cristóbal Kay, Santiago de Chile: Ediciones UDP, 2023. 195 pp. $26.00 (paperback). ISBN: 978-956-314-578-6","authors":"Jordi Gascón","doi":"10.1111/joac.70071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70071","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Professor Emeritus, Cristóbal Kay, is a Chilean-British political economist. His long academic career has focused on two closely related areas of research: the analysis of agrarian transformations in Latin America and the history and debates surrounding development models in this region. Kay has become a leading authority in both fields, with major works including Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment, a book originally published in 1989 and which has had several subsequent reprints (Kay &lt;span&gt;1989&lt;/span&gt;), survey articles on the Agrarian Question written with A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi (Akram-Lodhi and Kay &lt;span&gt;2010a&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span&gt;2010b&lt;/span&gt;), seminal papers analysing the phenomenon of new rurality (Kay &lt;span&gt;2008&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span&gt;2009a&lt;/span&gt;) and works combining the two areas of research (Kay &lt;span&gt;2006&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;span&gt;2009b&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Pensadores rebeldes&lt;/i&gt; (Rebel Thinkers) is his latest book to date. It contains six articles that Kay published in various journals over the previous two decades. These are reviews in which he analyses the work and lives of renowned Latin American and/or Latin Americanists intellectuals within Kay's two fields of work. These thinkers challenged the academically and politically dominant theories of their time. The book consists of six chapters, each devoted to a particular thinker, organised in two main thematic parts. The first part analyses four authors who shaped what has been termed Dependency Theory(ies), a paradigm developed in Latin America that challenged developmentalist and modernisation theories. It should be remembered that the latter theories maintained that poverty in peripheral countries was due to the fact that they were at earlier stages of development than those already achieved by central countries. From this point of view, underdevelopment was not due to political and economic inequality between the global South and North, nor to unequal income distribution. Therefore, peripheral countries could overcome underdevelopment by imitating the historical process experienced by industrialised countries. In the mid-20th century, this was the hegemonic view in the bloc of liberal democracies (Rostow &lt;span&gt;2012&lt;/span&gt; [1960]; Parsons &lt;span&gt;1966&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first author reviewed is Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch (1901–1986), who turned the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) into a benchmark for economic policies under the Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) strategy. With ECLAC as his flagship, Prebisch introduced the debate on development/underdevelopment into the Latin American political and social agenda, and beyond. The book then focuses on thinkers from a later generation: Brazilian economists Celso Furtado (1920–2004) and Theotônio dos Santos (1926–1974) and André Gunder Frank (1929–2005), an economist of German and American nationality who was closely involved with Latin America as an intellectual and activist.","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70071","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Racialized Labour in the Colonial Food Regime: The Whitening of England's Farmworkers","authors":"Ben Richardson","doi":"10.1111/joac.70049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The crystallization of a colonial food regime in the 1870s centred around Britain is key to historical accounts of agrarian political economy. Yet such accounts have neglected the role of the agrarian proletariat in shaping this regime from below and its basis in racialized hierarchy. To better equip food regime analysis to apprehend the possibilities for labour agency and the persistence of racism, this article provides a race-conscious case study of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union: a chief protagonist in Britain's late-19th century ‘revolt of the field’. Its contribution is two-fold. First, it shows how the union helped consolidate the colonial food regime's tenets of free trade, settler colonialism and nationalist state-building in the English countryside. Second, it situates these within the union's racial project to whiten England's farmworkers whereby the creation of a white slave subjectivity, emigration to the settler states and adherence to English nationalism were used to secure material and symbolic gains. Its core argument is that the articulation of class formation with racial formation was authored by organized agricultural labour and mattered for regime stability; a historical argument with contemporary relevance in a world where populist appeals to workers and whiteness are reascendant.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70049","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147566321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India, By Shankar Ramaswami, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025. pp. 304. $64.95 (hb) / $64.95 (e-book). ISBN: 9781512826647; ISBN: 9781512826654","authors":"Jan Breman","doi":"10.1111/joac.70050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70050","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;The book under review discusses the work and life of migrant labourers who are confronted at home with a shortage of waged employment to make ends meet for themselves and the other members of their household. In the rural habitat, they belong to the landpoor and landless segments stuck at the bottom of the pile. Deprived of viable livelihood in agriculture, which used to be the mainstay for former generations, these proletarianized classes of peasant stock have found no substitute for their labour power in other sectors of the village economy. They are forced to leave their domicile in search of earnings enough to take care of their own cost of living and to provide for the subsistence of dependent members in their household who are left behind.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Labour migration is not a one-way trek of departure and settlement elsewhere. Wherever they manage to go, usually and preferably to towns and cities nearby or far away, the large majority of them do not succeed in staying on in the destinations reached. Not only because they are hired and fired according to the need of the moment on casualized conditions but also driven in their quest for wages in the thoroughly informalized economy. Migrant labourers are also often unable to find the dwelling space required for establishing themselves more permanently. Their migration remains cyclical in nature, moving out and coming back every now and then, if they can spare or borrow the money for travel. It is a mobility that tends to last throughout the length of working life. Such a peripatetic existence starts at young adolescence and already frequently ends in the late forties or early fifties, due to failing health and loss of vitality to keep working.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The demand for outside labour is not necessarily caused by a lack of local supply. Capital and government in combination insist on keeping huge crowds of wage hunters and gatherers without proper jobs and shelter instead of ending their nomadism. Capital, because footlooseness drives down the labour price to the lowest level possible; the government, because it aims to keep this off-and-on employed swarm firmly embedded in the countryside, fragmented and scattered over a sprawl of rural slums. Rather than allowing this proletariat at drift to settle down in aggregated habitat on the city outskirts, which could incite large-scale public disorder, it shows that both operate in tandem to privilege capital and victimize labour, a collusion that contributes to widening the distance between them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Migrants constitute a major part of the urban workforce recruited for their cheap cost and pliability. Both recruitment and dismissal are not sealed with a legally binding work contract stipulating terms of fair treatment and wage payment. The labour power extracted to a maximal extent from them when commanded is dismally rewarded. Exploitation and repression are the driving forces for their erratic engagement in all sectors of the economy, not seldom in occ","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70050","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Class Dynamics of Tenancy and Accumulation in Capitalist Agriculture in India","authors":"Paramjit Singh,&nbsp;Mukesh Kumar","doi":"10.1111/joac.70051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70051","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article underscores the crucial role of tenancy practices in shaping agricultural production dynamics and accumulation/livelihood strategies across different peasant classes in India. By examining tenancy dynamics in Haryana, a key region in India's Green Revolution and forefront of neoliberal reforms, the paper makes two contributions to the literature: First, it contributes to tenancy literature by reinstating Marxist class analysis and second, by employing a novel economic class-based classification of households rather than traditional size-based classification. The findings of the study reveal significant variations in objectives and extent of tenancy among economic classes: poor and small peasants engage in hunger (subsistence) leasing due to economic distress, while rich peasants lease for accumulation, leveraging their resources and hired labour. The escalating significance of tenancy amidst agrarian distress in rural India emphasizes that tenancy exploitation persists despite neoliberal reforms. This supports the advocacy of left-wing parties in India for comprehensive land reforms aimed at redistributing land to actual cultivators, thereby addressing inequities in land ownership and tenancy systems to promote equitable distribution of agricultural resources and alleviate rural poverty.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70051","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147569076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Theory to the Field and Back Again: Fieldwork-Based Research on Social Differentiation in Agrarian Studies","authors":"Patrick Illien,&nbsp;Helena Pérez Niño","doi":"10.1111/joac.70067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70067","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Fieldwork is the cornerstone of empirical research in agrarian studies. Discussion about methodological options has, however, not kept up with the innovative conceptual developments taking place within the discipline. This is particularly evident in the study of social differentiation, a key concern in agrarian scholarship. Through a review of the empirical literature on agrarian social differentiation in journal articles using field-based research, we identify two approaches: a stratification approach, where respondents are assigned to groups according to common socio-economic characteristics and a relational approach that studies the range of social interactions between and among groups and ensuing distributional implications. Renewed interest for the relational approach to social differentiation raises methodological questions that have not yet been examined. The paper explores implications for data collection and analysis in order to better understand the dynamics underpinning social differentiation. We argue that going beyond measuring attributes of individuals and households to investigating the relationships between them entails developing methodological tools to enquire specifically about the relations in which households participate; exploring these relationships from different ends and embedding them into the analysis of agrarian change.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70067","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147568116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evolution of Land Tenure and Farm Structure Patterns Under Agrarian Restructuring in the Chilean Countryside, 1965–1980","authors":"Antonio C. Bellisario","doi":"10.1111/joac.70053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70053","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article provides a longitudinal farm-level analysis of land tenure transformation in Chile's Central Valley before, during and after agrarian reform. Unlike aggregate studies using national statistics, this research tracks 105 large haciendas across three political regimes using archival data. The analysis reveals that landowners initiated land redistribution through pre-emptive fragmentation, with 82.6% of expropriated farms representing subdivided estate fragments. This farm-level analysis demonstrates the active role of landowning elites in shaping redistribution outcomes. Transformation succeeded not through redistributing land to peasants but by dismantling institutional arrangements enabling elite territorial control. The military's ‘partial counter-reform’ demonstrates continued elite adaptation across political regimes. Military policies concentrated prime land and infrastructure among selected proprietors while transferring marginal lands to beneficiaries. The resulting agrarian structure represented neither restoration nor revolutionary transformation, but a contingent outcome shaped by state–elite interactions. These findings suggest measuring reform success through hectares redistributed misses crucial institutional transformation dynamics.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70053","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147569744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revisiting Deere in an Extractivist Era: Agrarian Reform and Feminist Legacies in Coastal Ecuador","authors":"Natalia Landívar,&nbsp;Lynne Phillips","doi":"10.1111/joac.70058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70058","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines <i>how campesinas</i> in coastal Ecuador have navigated shifting labour roles, financial precarity and ecological degradation under <i>Plan Tierras</i>, a state-led land redistribution policy embedded in an extractivist model of agriculture. While <i>Plan Tierras</i> formally recognized women as land beneficiaries, we argue that it intensified women's burdens across blurred boundaries between productive, reproductive and ecological spaces. Building on feminist political ecology and recent debates on the labours of social reproduction, we conceptualize agrarian extractivism as a process that simultaneously depletes women's bodies, emotions and the ecological foundations of life. Drawing on ethnographic research in Hacienda Las Mercedes, we show how women's everyday practices reveal the convergence of production, reproductive and ecological labour within circuits of extraction that sustain agrarian capitalism. This framework highlights the contradictions of state-led reforms that rely on women's unpaid and affective work while undermining the material and ecological conditions that sustain it. Yet, women also resist extractivist pressure through grounded, care-centred practices that sustain livelihoods and reassert <i>campesina</i> identities. By revisiting the foundational work of Carmen Diana Deere, this article offers a critical feminist lens on agrarian reform, calling for a transition from inclusion-based policies to reproductive and ecological justice.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70058","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146016402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Legacy of Carmen Diana Deere: Gender, Households, and Market Integration—An Introduction","authors":"Günseli Berik,&nbsp;Mieke Meurs","doi":"10.1111/joac.70057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70057","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper traces the trajectory of Carmen Diana Deere's work and provides a broad overview of her contributions to understanding the political economy of agrarian change in Latin America. The overview provides context for the groundbreaking work of scholars in this special issue and discusses how they extend Deere's work in three main areas: Conceptualizing the peasant household and its links to the capitalist economy; the role of cooperatives and markets in agrarian reform in Nicaragua and Cuba; factors contributing to, and implications of, women's land and asset ownership. The special issue papers demonstrate the importance of Deere's integration of feminist theories and methodologies into the analysis of agrarian political economy. The papers range from country case studies to comparative statistical analyses; they analyse new evidence from Ghana, India and Tanzania, as well as Cuba, Ecuador and Guatemala; use statistical evidence, qualitative data obtained through fieldwork or mixed methods; and make use of newly available individual-level time-use survey and asset-ownership data.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70057","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146007448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Small-Scale Village Farmers, Farming Imaginaries and Enrichment Value Creation in Ankara, Turkey","authors":"Yıldız Atasoy","doi":"10.1111/joac.70042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.70042","url":null,"abstract":"<p>How are we to understand the continuing importance of small-scale village farming in a country like Turkey, which is undergoing an expanding process of industrialization and commodification in agriculture? There are two sides to this question: One concerns land use reconfiguration for commercial purposes, contraction of small-scale farmland and village resources and depeasantization and deagrarianization tendencies; the other relates to the absence of significant grassroots-based agroecological movements for reorganizing agriculture. Using official documents, statistics, ethnographic data and in-depth interviews, the paper examines this question through the empirical illustration of the small town of Güdül (Ankara, Turkey). It shows that farmers uphold their presence and create an enrichment value for their labour and food collaboratively with consumers within fluid, trust-based everyday social networks. Invocated by farmers' farming imaginaries, enrichment value creation comprises their assessments and evaluative judgements of capitalist expansion into local village farming within the state-led developmentalist fold.</p>","PeriodicalId":47678,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Agrarian Change","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/joac.70042","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146007890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}