A rapidly growing body of research applies panel methods to examine how temperature, precipitation, and windstorms influence economic outcomes. These studies focus on changes in weather realizations over time within a given spatial area and demonstrate impacts on agricultural output, industrial output, labor productivity, energy demand, health, conflict, and economic growth, among other outcomes. By harnessing exogenous variation over time within a given spatial unit, these studies help credibly identify (i) the breadth of channels linking weather and the economy, (ii) heterogeneous treatment effects across different types of locations, and (iii) nonlinear effects of weather variables. This paper reviews the new literature with two purposes. First, we summarize recent work, providing a guide to its methodologies, datasets, and findings. Second, we consider applications of the new literature, including insights for the "damage function" within models that seek to assess the potential economic effects of future climate change. ( JEL C51, D72, O13, Q51, Q54)

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What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature

David Harvey's adaptation and redeployment of Marx's notion of ‘primitive accumulation’–under the heading of ‘accumulation by dispossession’–has reignited interest in the concept among geographers. This adaptation of the concept of primitive accumulation to different contexts than those Marx analyzed raises a variety of theoretical and practical issues. In this paper, I review recent uses and transformations of the notion of primitive accumulation that focus on its persistence within the Global North, addressing especially the political implications that attend different readings of primitive accumulation in the era of neoliberal globalization.

Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by ‘extra-economic’ means

Scholars of democratic consolidation have come to focus on the links between political institutions and enduring regime outcomes. This article takes issue with the conceptual and analytical underpinnings of this literature by highlighting how new political institutions, rather than securing democratic politics, have in fact had a more checkered effect. It delineates why the theoretical expectations of the democratic consolidation literature have not been realized and draws, by example, on the contemporary ethnic movements that are now challenging third-wave democracies. In particular, it highlights how contemporary indigenous movements, emerging in response to unevenly institutionalized reforms, pose a postliberal challenge to Latin America's I newly founded democracies. These movements have sparked political debates and constitutional reforms over community rights, territorial autonomy, and a multiethnic citizenry. As a whole, I they have laid bare the weakness of state institutions, the contested terms of democracy, and the I indeterminacy of ethnic accommodation in the region. As such, these movements highlight the need to qualify somewhat premature and narrow discussions of democratic consolidation in favor I of a broader research agenda on democratic politics.

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Democracy, Indigenous Movements, and Postliberal Challenge in Latin America

The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925. By Herbert G. Gutman. (New York: Pantheon, 1976. xxviii + 664 pp. Illustrations, charts, tables, appendixes, notes, and indexes. $15.95.)

The Mexican Drought Atlas: Tree-Ring Reconstructions of the Soil Moisture Balance During the Late Pre-Hispanic, Colonial, and Modern Eras

The Revolutionary Capacity of Rural Communities: Ecological Autonomy and Its Demise

The description for this book, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940, will be forthcoming.

From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence 1750-1940

Studies of Mexican agrarian history long have focused on great estates and peasant communities, institutions presumed to dominate rural life. This essay suggests, however, that the agrarian poor first organized their lives in families—groups that dealt creatively with powerful people and institutions. It explores the ways the rural poor organized family economies not wholly subject to either great estates or villages. The conclusion is that family organization allowed the agrarian majority more independence from elites and powerful insti tutions than is generally accepted.

Family Economies in Agrarian Mexico, 1750-1910

Forces loyal to Emiliano Zapata rose to demand land and community autonomy in the revolution that brought destruction and transformation to Mexico after 1910. Men fought to right historic wrongs, land losses that began in the colonial era and political exclusions that mounted during the nineteenth century. Yet those historic grievances were already deeply felt and clearly expressed during the political and social conflicts of the 1860s and 1870s. Revolutionary mobilization did not surge until 1911, after three decades of political stability and commercial development under the authoritarian liberal regime of Porfirio Diaz. This article examines the social consequences of that dynamic liberal development in the highland basins south of Mexico City, the Zapatista heartland after 1910. It argues that population growth, land concentration, and mechanization fueled a commercial expansion that led to proliferating insecurities among the rural majority, insecurities lived by young men as threats to the patriarchal roles they presumed their birthright – their one advantage in communities defined by dependence and hard labor. The first result was a rising tide of violent crime within families and communities during decades of political stability. Then, after the political break of 1910, villagers refocused their rage outward in revolutionary assaults on those who presumed to rule and profit. Young men from communities south of Mexico City turned to revolution only after successful liberal development undermined their chances to live as patriarchs, even as dependent laboring patriarchs. They fought for land, community – and patriarchy.

From Involution to Revolution in Mexico: Liberal Development, Patriarchy, and Social Violence in the Central Highlands, 1870-1915

It is an ambitious book that would try to cover the Conquest of Mexico, the rise and fall of the country’s hacienda system, the emergence of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the intricacies of Emiliano Zapata’s role in the Mexican Revolution, and the exodus of women from rural regions in the mid-1960s to look for work as ‘household help’ in the nation’s fast-growing capital city. But John Tutino, professor of history and international affairs at Georgetown University, does not just stop there in his new book, a 500-page tome covering 500 years of social, political, and economic change. At the same time as giving us a fine-grained, politico-economic history of the highlands that ring Mexico City, Tutino’s book is an analysis of the economic foundations of patriarchy, a study of the violence engendered by extreme inequality, and a history of world capitalism, which in its first pages critiques Marx and Braudel (pp. 3–5), and in its epilogue namechecks NAFTA, Trump, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the work of radical economist Thomas Piketty (p. 411).

John Tutino

Papers

The Revolutionary Capacity of Rural Communities: Ecological Autonomy and Its Demise

From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence 1750-1940

Family Economies in Agrarian Mexico, 1750-1910

From Involution to Revolution in Mexico: Liberal Development, Patriarchy, and Social Violence in the Central Highlands, 1870-1915

The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500-2000