Capitalism In Global History*

Maritime temporalities and capitalist development

“…A further theoretical advance is in Jairus Banaji's painstaking research (2010, 2016, 2020) into the multiple expressions of commercial capitalism across the world either side of the long sixteenth‐century, which simultaneously provincialises the European origins of capitalism and invites reconsiderations of this mode of production that avoid what he deems to be excessively formalistic definitions requiring extensive free wage labour or widespread commodification as conditions of possibility. The co‐existence of multiple temporalities on the Atlantic slave ship that we started out with, is especially illustrative of how capitalism has from the beginning relied on older seaborne institutions of profit and rule like slavery, piracy or maritime insurance which buttressed new social forms like generalised free wage labour, shareholder company ownership or national banks (Edwards et al., 2020). The ‘oceanic turn’ in recent economic and environmental history (Armitage et al., 2017) has further de‐centred the historical geography of modernity and the sea, demonstrating the socio‐economic and political interconnections between the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans in forging the modern world (Bishara & Wint, 2020; Sivasundaram, 2020), as well as identifying the legacies and continuities of regional maritime histories upon the emerging world‐system first explored in classic works by Chaudhuri (1985) and Abu‐Lughod (1989).…”

The Peruvian Amazon Company: An Accounting Perspective

“…64 Balance sheets at December 31, 1908 and1909 show "Rubber and agricultural estates, tramway river craft, buildings and town properties" of £676,263 in 1908 and £668,461 in 1909. Although such "omnibus" headings were conventional in the disclosure of fixed assets, 65 further detail was provided in handwritten notes on the company's balance sheets. These reveal that 'estates' were the PAC's principal properties and investments (see Table 1).…”

No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800–1975 by MichaelO'Sullivan, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2023, xiv + 386 pp.

“…No Birds of Passage arrives in a moment of renewed scholarly interest in global and non‐Western histories of capitalism and business, a move that has increasingly drawn attention to vitality of South Asian corporate structures. Despite this scholarly turn, as Edwards, Hill, and Neves‐Sarriegui (2020) have argued, studies which center non‐Europeans as actors in the development of global capitalism remain relatively rare. No Birds of Passage is an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the internal, social, economic, and religious structures of South Asian mercantile, moneylending, and corporate communities that were often (though not always) rooted in caste and kinship affiliation.…”