I’ve divided this presentation into four distinct parts.[1] A shorthand description of these might be
- Conventional narratives of capitalist origins
- Commercial capitalism as a better alternative
- Modern capitalism, and
- Capital & the peasantry
Imagine these themes as chapters to a book called Introduction to a History of Capitalism. So, what this talk sets out to do is simply construct a framework where we can think about capitalism historically. To start with the conventional narratives, these are based on one or both of two approaches we can call ‘primitive accumulation’ and ‘transition’, both drawn from Marx. In Marx’s eight chapters on primitive accumulation, the most fruitful ones are Chapters 27 and 31. Chapter 27 deals with the expropriation of the English peasantry, and the more general theme one can extract from it is dispossession. Chapter 31 contains a concise view of the world economy, and the corresponding theme here is the way the state bolsters the expansion of capital across nations and territorial boundaries. It also describes the two main trading companies of the seventeenth century as ‘powerful levers for the concentration of capital’.[2]
I
The later of the two transition debates developed around a paper Robert Brenner published in 1976.[3] The argument, in a nutshell, is that the peasantry’s failure to establish freehold rights over much of the land in England paved the way for its eventual decimation in the seventeenth century, as landlords forged ahead to ‘engross, consolidate and enclose, to create large farms and to lease them to capitalist tenants who could afford to make capitalist investments’ and cultivate them with wage-labour.[4] It was, crucially, this triumph of large-scale agrarian capitalism that created the basis for what Brenner calls ‘the breakthrough from “traditional economy” to relatively self-sustaining economic development’.[5] The counterpoint was what happened in France, where the peasantry’s ‘powerful property rights over comparatively large areas’ presented a major barrier to consolidation on English lines and doomed that country to enduring backwardness.[6]
Now, quite apart from exaggerating the strength of the French peasantry which, in fact, ‘trembled on the verge of expropriation for perhaps three centuries’, as two of Brenner’s critics wrote,[7] the argument contains several assumptions: first, that, after serfdom, the English peasantry failed to secure the sort of legal protection it wanted in terms of freehold rights over land; second, that the Crown supported the aristocracy in its drive to undermine security of tenure by transferring customary and copyhold land to leasehold; third, that wage-labourers were available in sufficient numbers to underwrite the expansion of capitalist farming in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and, finally, that large-scale agriculture of the English kind made a decisive contribution to the wider growth of capitalism in Britain. Of course, none of this has gone unchallenged, least of all the idea that the Tudors left the English peasantry entirely bereft of legal protection when the opposite seems to have happened, as Tudor courts extended property rights to peasants to offset the alarming destruction of villages entailed by the first wave of enclosures in the decades after 1450. Allen writes that, ‘Copyholds and beneficial leases became secure forms of tenure by which many small farmers held their land’ and that it was this ‘legal revolution’ that underpinned the flourishing of yeoman farmers under Elizabeth and the Stuarts. Indeed, owner-occupation was widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[8]
There are several fine critiques of Brenner, especially those by Patricia Croot and David Parker and by Jane Whittle in her book The Development of Agrarian Capitalism.[9] In my view, the most radical challenge to Brenner’s thesis comes from Bob Allen’s book Enclosure and the Yeoman (1992). Brenner displays an unshakeable belief in the efficiency of capitalist farming, the sort of Agrarian Fundamentalism that is the precise target of Allen’s systematic critique. He also assumes that the English peasantry had more or less disappeared by the seventeenth century, when there is considerable agreement now that the late eighteenth century was the watershed, with the Board of Agriculture and other sections of the ruling class mounting a concerted attack on common right as the last barricade standing ‘between the survival of the common-field peasantry and its proletarianization’.[10] ‘[C]ommon right was widespread and probably useful enough to offer significant independence of the wage’, Neeson argues.[11] And Whittle concludes her own study of Norfolk with the claim that it was the Parliamentary enclosures of the later eighteenth century that ‘created a truly capitalist rural labour force whose only means of obtaining subsistence was wage-earning’.[12] All of which is much later than either Tawney or Brenner would have liked to date the ‘transition’ to capitalism in England’s countryside.
Peasants in possession of farms of up to 50 or 60 acres run largely with family labour, many of them freeholders, were, in Allen’s account, the true pioneers of the agricultural revolution in England.[13] If the large estates of the eighteenth century boosted productivity, they did so largely by shedding labour. What the yeomen class did was make substantial contributions to doing the same by improving crop yields through careful husbandry. This reassessment turns Brenner on his head and explains why the eighteenth century was the dismal watershed that led to widespread impoverishment and wage-dependency in the nineteenth. At any rate, the ‘agrarian origins of capitalism’ orthodoxy is largely mythical.
II
If we’re going to write histories of capitalism over a longer span, it makes more sense to find this in the way large-scale trade and finance were reshaping economies across a wider swathe of geographies. For example, Verlag was widespread in textiles and metalworking by the fourteenth century.[14] The medieval/early modern manufactures that Marx saw as embodiments of industrial capital were largely the work of powerful merchant groups in regions such as South Germany and the north of Italy. They were the earliest examples of standardised mass production geared to export markets and should be seen as integral parts of the merchant capitalism that established itself in Western Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.[15] Commercial capital can be traced in every single century from the middle Middle Ages, the period covered by Wickham’s latest book, down to our own times.[16] If one wants a consistent economic history of the evolution of capitalism over the centuries, this can scarcely lie in a notion of ‘transition’ between modes of production and can more plausibly be found in the idea of commercial capitalism. The seeds of this alternative perspective can also be found in Marx’s chapters on primitive accumulation, but in Chapter 31 specifically where it is projected as a global story whose different moments embrace Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England ‘in more or less chronological order’, as he says.[17] The reference here is to the way the state bolstered the expansion of capital across much of the world, unleashing struggles between the major imperial powers and their drive to enforce commercial monopolies over entire regions. But if, as he says in this chapter, ‘Holland was the model capitalist nation of the seventeenth century’,[18] today there is little doubt that the kind of capital Marx had at the back of his mind was commercial capital. Holland’s decline as the dominant trading nation, he says elsewhere, is a history of the ‘subordination of commercial capital to industrial capital’.[19]
It’s worth avoiding one confusion at the outset. When Marx refers to the subordination of commercial capital in this passage, he obviously cannot be describing the latter in the strict sense it acquired once it was in fact fully subordinated. This strict sense is the one he lays out in Capital Volume 3, where commercial capital is seen as a form of merchant’s capital and the latter defined strictly as a function of the circulation of industrial capital. The merchant, a dealer in commodities, is defined there as an agent of industrial capital whose sole function is the circulation of the commodities produced by industrial firms. That is the definition that matters for the purposes of analysis in Capital. However, it is not the definition implied in the purely historical idea that the decline of the Dutch world-trading system in the early eighteenth century entailed the subordination of commercial capital, since the Dutch were a trading nation and (in Marx’s view) it was Britain that encapsulated industrial capital.
In short, the wider or more expansive sense of commercial capitalism is what should underpin the longer histories of capitalism we badly need. In this broader, more historical sense, shipping was a branch of commercial capital, and so too were the bill brokers, discount houses, and merchant banks that made London an international money market of unrivalled liquidity, or the plethora of dealers, brokers, managing agencies, shipping agents, freight forwarders, marine insurers and so on that sustained the bulk of the world’s trade from their base in London. It was the conglomeration of these commercial functions that made the City the bastion of commercial capitalism it became for the greater part of the nineteenth century till World War One when British merchant shipping suffered massive losses. In my Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, I argued that, in retrospect, Marx turns out to have been wrong to think of Britain as the incarnation of industrial capital that subordinated commercial capital, since the latter was entrenched at the heart of the British economy (as Geoffrey Ingham argued in the eighties) and a much better incarnation would soon emerge with the Second Industrial Revolution when modern vertically integrated firms would undercut the position of merchant firms in both the U.S. and Germany.
In relation to the pervasive impact of commercial capitalism, it’s worth foregrounding two ideas in particular.
First is Chayanov’s idea of the vertical concentration of capital as the form in which capitalist firms tended to establish a more widespread domination over household producers in the countryside. He referred to ‘trading capitalism’ establishing an ‘economic dictatorship over considerable sectors of agriculture’ and saw this as a more accurate picture of the Russian countryside than capitalism emerging through the disintegration of the peasantry, as Lenin had once forecast.[20] When Chayanov wrote in the mid-twenties, he was almost certainly not aware that Marx had in fact drawn a distinction between the real and the formal subsumption of labour under capital. What Chayanov posited was a rather widespread system of formal subsumption that tied mercantile houses like the Moscow cotton merchants Knoops to peasant producers. The point of drawing attention to this is that it gives capitalism a much wider reach than more conventional constructions of it do.
Second, the last 165 years have seen two major commercial revolutions. Michael Miller’s Europe and the Maritime World is a brilliant account of the more recent of these, the massive transformation of world economy that began in the seventies with the container revolution. What one doesn’t have is any comparable account of the changes that swept through the world market in the last forty years of the nineteenth century. A major part of that story, to my mind, is the tighter integration of Third World countrysides with European firms such as Ralli Brothers, as a wholly new period of agrarian commercialisation took place from the 1860s, starting with the American Civil War and the cotton famine. There is a mass of local studies, some dealing with whole countries like Mexico and Egypt (Knight, Owen), others with regions within countries (Tuscany, the Central Provinces in British India, the Burmese lower delta) but what doesn’t exist is any synthesis of all this material into a coherent narrative of how both commercial and industrial capital affected the rural populations who made up the bulk of humanity at that time. Mexico in the 1880s and 90s saw a ‘land grab of unprecedented proportions’ with nearly 39 million hectares of untitled land converted into private property. Alan Knight notes that, by 1910, four-fifths of Mexican rural communities were located within hacienda boundaries.[21] The start of the 1880s saw French interests, led by the banks and other financial institutions, moving in to acquire large tracts of land in Tunisia at rock-bottom prices; close to a million hectares had been acquired by 1914.[22] In both Mexico and Tunisia commercial agriculture was based on large estates with markedly capitalist characteristics. Elsewhere, in Egypt, India, Lower Burma and so on, much of the commercial expansion exemplified the pattern described by Chayanov of the subsumption of household production to capital, and the result was widespread indebtedness and an expanding class of landless labourers. In short, whichever pattern predominated, dispossession was a major outcome, so that the story Marx narrates in Chapter 27 is less a European story than a colonial or quasi-colonial one. It’s worth reiterating that the dispossession of the peasantry is tantamount to the primitive accumulation of land which is then valorised as capital. In Egypt and parts of the world east of Suez, a major role was played by the European export houses and local moneylenders (Greeks in Egypt, in India traders from the moneylending castes, in Lower Burma the Chettiars from Tamilnad), who were the earliest firms to build supply chains for a wide range of cash crops such as cotton, wheat, jute and paddy.
III
Turning to the third of my topics. Much of Alfred Chandler’s work can be seen as a working out of Marx’s theory of the concentration and centralisation of capital; not consciously of course, since Chandler never saw himself elaborating Marx’s theory as laid out in Volume One, but ‘objectively’. Thus, the argument in Chandler is about how scale transformed the nature of industrial enterprise from the 1880s on, in industrial sectors that Marx himself never lived to see. Chandler saw the new enterprises of the Second Industrial Revolution as high-volume enterprises that were driven to create their own sales organizations in order to capture and retain the market shares necessary to keep throughput at minimum efficient scale. This meant, first, that new managerial hierarchies had to be built to achieve the sort of coordination this required both in production processes and across global markets. And, second, a drive to integrate mass production and mass distribution within the same enterprise, so that commercial capital ceased to have any independent basis, as Marx predicted it would. A major part of Chandler’s argument was that the new firms first integrated forward by investing in marketing and distribution facilities both domestically, in the huge American market, and abroad. This was the logic that underpinned their rapid evolution into multinationals. When they invested abroad, they did so first in marketing and only later in production. Thus, investment in production abroad ‘almost never preceded the building of an overseas marketing network’. The other feature Chandler drew attention to was that, apart from clustering in the same advanced industrial sectors (oil, chemicals, machinery, food, rubber and glass), the vertically integrated corporations of the early twentieth century were so huge that the structure of those industries quickly became oligopolistic. A few plants could meet existing demand not just domestically but across the globe.[23]
Parts of this general analysis can already be found in Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s work on German fascism. His adoptive father Poensgen was the head of Weimar Germany’s largest steel corporation Vestag and that, doubtless, is where he first learnt about the overriding importance of economies of scale before finding a more theoretical exposition of the same in the work of the managerial economist Schmalenbach. What Sohn-Rethel described as ‘the new production economy of fixed costs’ was exactly what Chandler would go on to discuss at great length in his own work several decades later.[24] Of course, both ideas harked back to Marx’s notion that industrial capitalism would be characterised by progressively higher levels of the organic composition of capital, that is, the ratio of fixed capital to living labour. What neither of them did, though Sohn-Rethel came closer to it than Chandler, was discuss what David Noble would later call the ‘ideology of automation’, capital’s drive for total control through technologies embodying that.[25]
I’ve argued elsewhere that ‘Large integrated enterprises, mass manufacturing, managerial hierarchies, sales offices and mass advertising, and global scales of operation defined a culture of capitalism that was largely atypical of British capital – certainly before the 1920s. The U.S. built a substantial early lead in foreign manufacturing investment, whereas in the U.K. the share of direct foreign investment in the total stock of British foreign investments was still only about 20 per cent as late as 1927’.[26] Here is how John Stopford summarised Britain’s lag. ‘Judged relative to other countries, economies of scale were not exploited, mass production techniques were not introduced, [and] the new industries were not developed in Britain’.[27] If the backwardness of Britain’s modern capitalism was a key theme that ran through the Nairn-Anderson theses in the 1960s, then this was one stark expression of it.
However, Chandler’s assumption of an essential industrial stability failed to hold. By the mid to late 1970s, U.S. industrial capital, for a long time an epitome of the kind of vertically integrated giants he was talking about, ran into serious trouble. In some industries, this reflected the culmination of a more gradual process of decline starting with the challenge of Europe (for example, the U.S. share of world steel production fell from 47% in 1950 to barely 11% in 1985), in others, such as tyre manufacturing, the crisis was more dramatic with almost every major U.S. firm being taken over by a foreign rival. (Goodyear was the only one of those early giants that remained American.)[28] This was the background against which new management orthodoxies began to be forged, most of those presaging the decline of the kind of industrial firm Chandler had celebrated. And, just as the rise of the integrated corporation and managerial capitalism had been preceded by massive revolutions in transport and communications going back to the 1860s, so now the supply-chain capitalism of the end of the twentieth century would have been inconceivable without similar convulsions in transport technologies and communication systems, starting with containerisation and the growth of intermodal transport in the 1970s and going on to the rise of the new computing and information technologies. ‘The computer was indispensable to containerization’,[29] and, between them, the synergies they involved produced one of those massive revolutions in the world market that have punctuated the history of capitalism since the sixteenth century. Logistics emerged in a more expansive sense to mean management of the entire supply chain, and giant retailers emerged as an increasingly powerful fraction of capital in a part reversal of what Marx had called the subordination of commercial to industrial capital. Companies like Wal-Mart invested heavily in information technologies, buying satellite systems as early as the early 1980s. ‘By 1988 it had the largest privately owned communications network in the US’.[30] ‘Containerization would spread like wild fire’, revolutionising the shipping industry, reshaping ports, and allowing for the production networks on which end-of-century global sourcing came to be based.[31] Beyond the watershed of these new infrastructures and their major impact on the world economy lies the largely uncharted territory of AI and a highly automated capitalism that big data and machine learning are designed to bring into being. Investment in AI research escalated rapidly from 2015. The real challenge here is probably not AI but Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).[32] When that is achieved, some decades down the line, we shall have a capitalism where, in Marx’s own vision of this process, value itself breaks down.[33]
IV
Let me end with a few words about the fate of the peasantry under capitalism. In a paper on petty commodity production that Barbara Harriss-White published in 2023, three models of this were usefully envisaged. The peasantry is (1) either wiped out by capital, (2) integrated into it, that is, ‘subsumed’ under it, or, finally, (3) forced to survive by ‘self-exploiting’ at capital’s expense. Of course, all of these can work simultaneously, engendering a picture of great complexity.[34] ‘Wiped out by capital’ was generally understood by the Marxists of the Second International to mean eradicated as a class. Yet even Kautsky postulated limits to this (the first model), since large estates needed the seasonal labour of impoverished peasants and found it prudent to retain a sector of smallholdings.[35] The Peruvian Marxist Mariátegui reports one landowner telling him ‘it was essential for the large estate to have small farms nearby from which to draw labor, in order not to have to depend on migrant workers or indenture’.[36] Regarding the second (subsumption to capital), Mike Cowen famously argued that an alliance of state and international capital intent on encouraging household commodity production might eventually regenerate the peasantry, as it did in Kenya. Households survive as units of commodity production stabilised by capital.[37] Thus Model 2 is Chayanov’s capitalist model, where ‘peasants are conceived as workers, maintaining a semblance of independence in the form of household production, but actually providing labour-power to capitalist firms’.[38] That ‘semblance’ is crucial to the nature of supply-chain capitalism, both for legal reasons and because ‘self-exploitation is essential to the cost-cutting power of the supply chain’.[39] For their part, ‘capitalists are able to command the value of the labour-power of rural producers without having to organise and manage the production process itself’ (Gavin Williams). The main form this takes today is contract farming. Harriss-White’s third model of what happens to peasants under capitalism is that they become indistinguishable from the larger mass of petty commodity producers in most capitalist societies. Whether ‘petty commodity production’ is in fact the best description for the survival strategies of small farmers in the world today, the fact is that the vast majority of them ‘are trying to survive through wages earned outside’ their farms.[40] The wage-dependency of a majority of agrarian producers is what keeps the vast mass of marginal farmers in existence. And, in countries like India, where the landless and near-landless make up the bulk of the active rural population, even capitalist farmers depend vitally on the minimum support price programmes without which a lot of farming would simply collapse.
Rural exodus has been a major theme of the postwar decades. In Spain and Italy there was massive out-migration in the 1960s. Tuscany lost two-thirds of its rural labour force between the fifties and the seventies. In the U.K., between the mid-eighties and the end of the century, ‘something like 100,000 men and women left agriculture’.[41] In China, in the early 2000s, an estimated 40 million villagers found themselves dispossessed and ‘left without land, employment or social security’.[42] As Lora-Wainwright shows, in China, whole villages are demolished and peasants expected to cope with the resulting loss of land by buying unaffordable social insurance.[43] In India, the state would like to be able to have comparable powers of coercion, but the caste ties of most farming communities gives them considerable leverage politically and makes widespread coercion impossible. What we are witnessing is the end of the peasantry in any viable sense of that term, but not in the straightforward ways that were once seen as key drivers of this process in many predictions on the Left.
[1] This is the draft of a guest lecture for UCL’s IIPP postgraduate module, Rethinking Capitalism, 30 January 2025. My thanks to Damon Silvers and Carolina Alves for the invitation to address their students, which I had to do on Zoom.
[2] Marx, Capital, 1, p.918.
[3] Robert Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’, Past & Present № 70 (Feb. 1976), 30-75.
[4] Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure’, p. 63.
[5] Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure’, p. 47.
[6] Brenner, ‘Agrarian Class Structure’, p. 46.
[7] Patricia Croot and David Parker, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development’, Past & Present № 78 (Feb., 1978), 37-47, at 42.
[8] Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford, 1992), pp. 14, 75.
[9] Jane Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440-1580 (Oxford, 2000).
[10] J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 34.
[11] Neeson, Commoners, p. 42.
[12] Whittle, Development of Agrarian Capitalism, p. 305.
[13] Allen, Enclosure, p.57 for this kind of farm.
[14] Rudolf Holbach, Frühformen von Verlag und Grossbetrieb in der Gewerblichen Produktion (13. – 16. Jahrhundert) (Stuttgart, 1994).
[15] Wolfgang von Strömer, ‘Une clé du succès des maisons de commerce d’Allemagne du Sud: le grand commerce associé au Verlagssystem’, Revue Historique, 285 (1991), 29–49, esp. 44.
[16] Chris Wickham, The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180 (Oxford, 2023). About the twelfth century Wickham writes, ‘it is clear that Venetians behaved in Constantinople just as they did in Rialto, the city’s principal island. In both places, they stood loans to each other and financed sea voyages…The embolos or Venetian quarter of the Byzantine capital was, in a sense, their second city. Mostly, they dealt in money…they were proper capitalists, in the specific sense that they started with money and ended with (ideally) more money’ (p. 333).
[17] Marx, Capital, 1, p. 915.
[18] Marx, Capital, 1, p. 916.
[19] Marx, Capital, 3, p. 451.
[20] A.V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, tr. R.E.F. Smith (Illinois, 1966), pp. 49, 257 ff., cf. Henry Bernstein, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change (2010), pp. 92–94.
[21] Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, Volume 1: Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants (University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pp. 95–6.
[22] Jean Poncet, La Colonisation et l’agriculture européennes en Tunisie depuis 1881. Étude de géographie historique et économique (Paris, 1961).
[23] The most concise summary of Chandler’s views is his paper ‘The Emergence of Managerial Capitalism’, Business History Review, 58/4 (1984), 473-503.
[24] Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism, tr. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London, 1978), esp. Chapter 3.
[25] David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New Brunswick, NJ, 2011), e.g., p. 57: ‘The new computer-based ideology of total control’, p. 58: ‘the postwar ideology of total control’, p. 72: ‘the postwar worldview of total control’, etc.
[26] Jairus Banaji, A Marxist Mosaic, Historical Materialism Book Series 316 (Brill, 2024), p. 554.
[27] John M. Stopford, ‘The Origins of British-Based Multinational Manufacturing Enterprises’,
Business History Review, 48/3 (1974), 303–335, at 312.
[28] Seymour Melman, After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Democracy (New York, 2001) was precocious in documenting America’s ‘industrial depletion’, with one chapter, Chapter 3, even called ‘The United States as a Third-Rate Economy’.
[29] Michael Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2012), p. 342.
[30] Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson, Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 9.
[31] Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, Chapter 9.
[32] Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and James Steinhoff, Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2019), the best account from the Left.
[33] Marx, Grundrisse, p. 705: ‘As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value…With that, production based on exchange value breaks down’.
[34] Barbara Harriss-White, ‘Petty Commodity Production’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 50/1 (2023), 295-314.
[35] Karl Kautsky, La Question agraire (Paris, 1900), pp. 242–49.
[36] José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, tr. Marjory Urquidi (University of Texas Press, 1971), p.65.
[37] Michael Cowen, ‘Commodity Production in Kenya’s Central Province’, in Judith Heyer et al., Rural Development in Tropical Africa (1981), 121-42.
[38] Gavin Williams, ‘The World Bank and the Peasant Problem’, in Heyer et al., Rural Development in Tropical Africa, p. 31.
[39] Anna Tsing, ‘Supply Chains and the Human Condition’, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 21(2) (2009), 148–76, at 168.
[40] Harriet Friedmann, ‘Changes in the International Division of Labor, in William H. Friedland et al., eds., Towards a New Political Economy of Agriculture (New York, 1991).
[41] Alun Howkins, The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside since 1900 (Routledge, 2003), p. 209.
[42] Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University of California Press, 2007), p. 259.
[43] Anna Lora-Wainwright, ‘Rural China in Ruins: The Rush to Urbanize China’s Countryside Is Opening a Moral Battleground’, Anthropology Today, 28/4 (2012), 8-13.
