A local history of global capital : jute and peasant life in the Bengal Delta / Tariq Omar Ali.
Material type: TextSeries: Publication details: New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2019.Description: xv, 244 pages : mapsISBN:- 9780691195506
- 382.0954 OMA
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382.094205 ROB The corporation that changed the world : | 382.094205 ROY The East India Company : | 382.09469054 DIS Twilight of the pepper empire : | 382.0954 OMA A local history of global capital : | 382.0954 STE The Indian trade at the Asian frontier / | 382.09546 RIZ Trans-Himalayan caravans : | 382.0954918 MAR The global world of Indian merchants, 1750-1947 : |
Introduction -- Cultivating jute: peasant choice, labor, and hunger -- Consumption and self-fashioning: the politics of peasant consumerism -- The spaces of jute: metropolis, hinterland, and Mofussil -- Immiseration -- Agrarian forms of Islam: the politics of peasant immiseration -- Peasant populism: electoral politics and the "rural Muhammadan" -- Pakistan and partition: peasant utopia and disillusion -- Conclusion.
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.
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