Recent critical analyses of global land grabs have variously invoked global capitalism and neocolonialism to account for this trend. One line of inquiry approaches land grabs as instances of “primitive accumulation of capital” whereby lands in the Global South are “enclosed” and brought within the ambit of global capitalism. Another perspective invokes the history of Anglo-American colonialism for critiquing the developmentalist discourse that depicts Africa as the “last frontier” to be tamed by the techno-industrial civilization of the North. This essay integrates these two perspectives by elaborating capitalism as an irreducibly colonial formation with global inceptions. I begin with a discussion of “primitive accumulation” and, counter to many, question the suitability of “enclosure” for interpreting land grabs. The second section delves into the theoretical origins of primitive accumulation, proposing to situate it in a global and colonial genealogy of capitalism. A final section charts the theoretical and historical contours of this global genealogy and arrives at a more capacious reconceptualization of primitive accumulation. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of contemporary land grabs for in situ displacement, the fungibility of land, and new enclosures in the contemporary reconfiguration of global value chains.

http://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3246&context=soss_research

Primitive Accumulation, New Enclosures, and Global Land Grabs: A Theoretical Intervention

This thesis addresses the production and use of cartography in Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia), under colonial rule between 1915 and 1955. The predominant narrative has previously been one of ‘absence’: that mapping in British colonial Africa was side-lined due to a lack of available resources. However, this narrative evidences a strategy that has been critiqued, the use of technical failure as an explanation to mask positive political choices. It also treats cartography teleologically, with full, modern ‘state’ mapping as an inevitable endpoint. This endpoint was not achieved in Northern Rhodesia (arguably never has been), and yet colonial rule was maintained. What then, the thesis asks, was the relationship between mapping and colonisation? Whilst colonial cartography in Northern Rhodesia failed to meet ‘universal’ cartographic ideals, hybrid, ad hoc forms of mapping emerged. These forms were determined by thoroughly local social, material and political conditions. I propose that investment in cartography was weighed against the potential value of a map; its symbolic value, utility, and financial cost. I use ethnographic archival analysis to reveal these local discussions of resources and values across multiple sites. Those discussions are then brought together within the framework of a ‘cartographic economy’. In addition to developing this theoretical approach, the thesis makes three further contributions. Firstly, it supplements the scant available description of the practices of colonial survey in the early twentieth century. Secondly, it differentiates the influence of an expanded range of actors and processes on Northern Rhodesian cartography going well beyond ‘survey experts’ to include; private enterprise, indigeneous authorities, scientists, rural adminstrators, and African labour. Thirdly, it innovates the historiography of cartography by contrasting the use of maps with alternative nondocumentary governance practices, such as peripatetic administration, and the embedding of colonial knowledge within local populations.

A Colonial Cartographic Economy: the Contested Value of Mapping in Northern Rhodesia, 1915-1955”

This dissertation examines the divergent trajectories of ethnic and national politics in the Tamil speaking regions of India and Sri Lanka. Despite comparable historical experiences and conditions, the south Indian Tamil speaking areas were peaceably accommodated within a pan-Indian framework whilst Sri Lankan politics was marked by escalating Tamil-Sinhala ethnic polarisation and violent conflict. The dissertation explains these contrasting 
outcomes by setting out a novel theoretical framework that draws on the work of Reinhart Koselleck and his analysis of the links between concepts and political conflict. It argues that in the era of popular sovereignty the nation and 
ethnicity have become central and unavoidable concepts of political order, but concepts that can be deliberately constructed through political activity in more 
or less inclusive ways. Setting out the conceptual connections between the nation, ethnicity and popular sovereignty, the dissertation shows how the 
conceptual tension between a unified national identity / interest and ethnic pluralism becomes a central and unavoidable locus of political contestation in 
the era of popular sovereignty. Tracing the politics of ethnicity and nationalism in India and Sri Lanka from the late nineteenth century to the late 1970’s, the analysis shows that the accommodation of Tamil identity within Indian nationalist frameworks and the escalation of Tamil – Sinhala ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka cannot be linked to differences in ethnic demography, political system, historical experiences or the structure of economic incentives. 
It reveals instead that these divergent outcomes are best explained as effects of contingent and competitive processes of political organisation and mobilisation through which deliberately more or less ethnically inclusive national identities are asserted, established and then contested.

Tamils and the Nation: India and Sri Lanka Compared

Author(s): Boyk, David Sol | Advisor(s): Bakhle, Janaki | Abstract: Scholarly and popular discussions of cities tend to concentrate on the largest exemplars—Bombay and Calcutta, in the case of South Asia—and to neglect the smaller cities and towns where most urban people live. This dissertation examines the history of Patna, a small city in the north Indian region of Bihar, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Patna had been a bustling center of trade, culture, and administration for much of the early modern period but, like many cities in the Gangetic plains, it was marginalized by the political and economic changes of the nineteenth century. To many observers, it seemed to have become part of the provincial hinterland or, to use the term that developed under colonial rule, the "mofussil."Even a diminished and demeaned Patna, however, remained a major center. Despite the city's apparent decline, it sustained its connections with other mofussil towns and with the rest of the world, and maintained ways of being urban and urbane that distinguished it from larger cities as well as from more rural places. Patna was still Bihar's economic and political hub and a central node in the dynamic public culture that linked Patnaites with readers and writers in nearby towns and distant cities. Questions of the "backwardness" of Patna and Bihar entered national politics when activists based in the city began to call for Bihar to be separated from Bengal and established as a new province with Patna as its capital. When they succeeded in 1912, the city itself was reshaped along with its forms of community and authority. The same transformations that seemed to reverse Patna's decline also weakened its links with the networks that had defined its public culture.This dissertation documents Patna's distinctiveness and vitality by combining several approaches. First, it is a cultural history of provinciality and urbanity that shows how these concepts were formed through social practice. Secondly, it is an urban history that examines the city's politics and social geography together with its relationships with its region. And thirdly, it is a social history of intellectuals that locates their literary and scholarly activities within their urban community. Ultimately, it argues, Patna's urbanity was inextricably linked with its provinciality.

Provincial Urbanity: Intellectuals and Public Life in Patna, 1880-1930

This essay offers a critical reexamination of the works of Friedrich List by placing them in the context of nineteenth-century imperial economies. I argue that List's theory of the national economy is characterised by a major ambivalence, as it incorporates both imperial and anti-imperial elements. On the one hand, List pitted his national principle against the British imperialism of free trade and the relations of dependency it heralded for late developers like Germany. On the other hand, his economic nationalism aimed less at dismantling imperial core–periphery relations as a whole than at reproducing these relations domestically and expanding them globally. I explain this ambivalence with reference to List's designation of imperial Britain as the prime example of successful economic development and a model to be emulated by late industrialisers. List thereby fashioned his ideas on national development out of the historical experience of an empire whereby he internalised its economic logic and d...

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3244&context=soss_research

Tanja Neumann

Papers

Producing India From Colonial Economy To National Space