A local history of global capital : jute and peasant life in the Bengal delta / Tariq Omar Ali.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ali, Tariq Omar, author.

Series:

Histories of Economic Life

Histories of Economic Life ; 5

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Commodity exchanges.

Jute industry--Bengal Basin--History.

Jute industry.

Bengal Basin--Economic conditions--History.

Bengal Basin.

Bengal Basin--Social conditions--History.

India--Bengal Basin.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital.Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century.A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Maps

Introduction

1. Cultivating Jute

2. Consumption and Self- Fashioning

3. The Spaces of Jute

4. Immiseration

5. Agrarian Forms of Islam

6. Peasant Populism

7. Pakistan and Partition

Conclusion

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781400889280

1400889286

OCLC:

1024311072