Political Economy and History

The study of the Demidoff / Demidov industrial enterprises during the latter half of the XIX Century has been hampered by the reliance on exclusively Russian sources, even though the owners spent most of their time during this period in Finland, France and Italy, and the correspondence with the company was conducted mostly in French.
The present article endeavors to right this distorted perspective to such a degree as is possible at this time through a presentation of the owners of the company during this period, using not only Russian sources, but also archival material kept in archives in Italy, France and Finland. The narrative naturally centers around the matriarch of the family: Aurora Karamzin, formerly Demidoff, born Stjernvall.

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2017. Rescaling the local: Multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (2), 171-185

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy.  Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance.  In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy.  In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.  On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

L’intento di questo lavoro è presentare un quadro che sia il più completo possibile nell’analizzare il percorso dell’Unione delle Repubbliche Socialiste Sovietiche dalla sua nascita, nel 1922, fino al suo crollo, nel 1991 e, successivamente, la delicata fase di transizione russa dal comunismo all’economia di mercato, cercando di mettere in luce i problemi incontrati dal Paese nell’instaurare la democrazia. L'ultima parte analizza la figura della Banca Europea per la Ricostruzione e lo Sviluppo ed il suo ruolo specifico nella delicata fase di transizione economica della Russia.

Anthropocene or Capitalocene? offers answers to these questions from a dynamic group of leading critical scholars. They challenge the theory and history offered by the most significant environmental concept of our times: the Anthropocene. But are we living in the Anthropocene, literally the “Age of Man”? Is a different response more compelling, and better suited to the strange—and often terrifying—times in which we live? The contributors to this book diagnose the problems of Anthropocene thinking and propose an alternative: the global crises of the twenty-first century are rooted in the Capitalocene; not the Age of Man but the Age of Capital.

Among the deficiencies demonstrated by the world financial crisis of 2008–9, one was the limited capacity of G-8 to provide for global economic governance. The developed economies quickly realised that they should seek joint solutions and coordinated policies in cooperation with the leading emerging-market economies. As a result, the G-20 turned into the main forum for managing the crisis. This in fact pointed to an early institutional acknowledgement that important changes were underway in the global distribution of power. These changes derive from the substantially higher growth rates of the emerging-market economies in comparison with those of the developed economies, a trend named ‘the rise of the rest’ (Zakaria, 2008, pp. 2–3).

My task today is to present the international situation, the Covid 19 pandemic and the peoples’ response.

Let me state at the outset that the world capitalist system was already in trouble even before the Covid-19  pandemic arose.  And the pandemic has unmasked and aggravated the crisis of global capitalism.  It is of urgent  importance to know how the people are affected and how they are responding.

80 years ago the Spanish Civil War ended, one of the most remarkable events of the twentieth century. The purpose of this text is to carry out a brief analysis of the collective management that rural and urban workers have carried out on the means of production. The period understood by the actions in revolutionary Spain was the one in which in the USSR occurred the second quinquennial plan. Although these two parallel experiences of economic management occurred, there would probably be more motives and characteristics at the moment for distances rather than approximations. Here, therefore, we will seek whenever possible to draw a comparison between the two experiences, taking into account some of the debates related to issues such as centralization and self-management, the role of unions and parties, the market conjunctures and the survival possibilities of small economies of enclave in a globally structured economy.

In monarchies, power, law, finances, and economy are intertwined aspects of the royal household.
The aim of this research seminar is to discuss research on economic and financial aspects of monarchies and dynasties from antiquity to present day. In particular, the interdependencies of finances, economics and monarchical rule are of interest. The research seminar, furthermore, hopes to encourage further research into this topic, and to enable comparative and interdisciplinary studies between different times and spaces.

This book argues that 'social democratic criminology' is an important critical perspective which is essential for the analysis of crime and criminal justice and crucial for humane and e ective policy. The end of World War II resulted in 30 years of strategies to create a more peaceful international order. In domestic policy, all Western countries followed agendas informed by a social democratic sensibility. Social Democratic Criminology argues that the social democratic consensus has been pulled apart since the late 1960s, by the hegemony of neoliberalism: a resuscitation of nineteenth-century free market economics. There is now a gathering storm of apocalyptic dangers from climate change, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and other existential threats. This book shows that the neoliberal revolution of the rich pushed aside social democratic values and policies regarding crime and security and replaced them with tougher 'law and order' approaches. The initial consequence was a tsunami of crime in all senses. Smarter security techniques did succeed in abating this for a while, but the decade of austerity in the wake of the 2008 fi nancial crisis has seen growing violent and serious crime. Social Democratic Criminology charts the history of social democracy, discusses the variety of confl icting ways in which it has been interpreted, and identifi es its core uniting concepts and infl uence on criminology in the twentieth century. It analyses the decline of social democratic criminology and the sustained intellectual and political attacks it has endured. The concluding chapter looks at the prospects for reviving social democratic criminology, itself dependent on the prospects for a rebirth of the broader social democratic movement. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, cultural studies, politics, history, social policy, and all those interested in social democracy and its importance for society.

La «historia desde abajo», promovida por intelectuales como E.P. Thompson y Christopher Hill, modificó el modo de entender la historia desde una perspectiva de izquierda. La historiografía asumió rigurosidad y compromiso político, a la vez que evidenció que ciertas visiones «desde arriba» omitían a actores populares trascendentales para comprender el pasado y el presente. Los cambios globales en el mundo del trabajo y los desplazamientos ideológicos podrían haber horadado este modo de pensar la historia. Sin embargo, sus actualizaciones han mantenido viva a esta corriente que hace historia «al ras del suelo».

In 1899, MIT chemist Ellen H. Richards (1842-1911) instigated a series of annual "Lake Placid Conferences" (1899-1908) that became known as the foundation of the home economics movement. Richards's first interest was in improving the household's well-being by using sanitary and nutrition sciences, an objective that was passed on to the movement. However, by the 1920s, home economists rather identified their field of expertise as the "science of consumption," emphasizing the idea of "rational consumption." My aim in this article is to give an account of how this shift in focus came about, by telling the story of the home economics movement founded by Richards. I examine how the movement problematized consumption by highlighting its relationship, and perception of itself, regarding economics. I argue that the concept of consumption was central to the structuring of the movement from its beginning and allowed home economists to claim it as their field of expertise because, as they believed, economists were not addressing the issue.

The article attempts a comprehensive review of the human security concept in order to question its utility for both research and policy-making. It notes the term’s interdisciplinary and extensively normative content that have facilitated its evolution into a successful security discourse. On the other hand, human security’s wide appeal has as a side-effect an extended conceptual polysemy inhibiting the cumulation of knowledge and the development of a relevant theory. Absence of conceptual clarity has also complicated its policy implementation. The article attempts to break the deadlock and move the debate forward by using the work of John Gerring and Paul A. Barresi on concept formation as an organizing device.

Iz uvodnika: "Prav v teh okoliščinah je še toliko pomembnejše, da politično ekonomijo komuniciranja vnovič vzpostavimo kot temelj kritičnega (če že ne celotnega) komunikološkega raziskovanja. Razlog ni le v dejstvu, da kritična komunikologija – s tem pa tudi politična ekonomija komuniciranja – vprašanj, povezanih z mediji, komunikacijskimi sistemi, informacijskimi tehnologijami ali komunikacijsko sfero ne obravnava zaradi njih samih, temveč zaradi njihove konstitutivne vloge, ki bi jo morali igrati v demokratičnih družbah. Še pomembnejši vzrok je: a) v fokusu tega pristopa, ki je odločno usmerjen v proučevanje asimetrij moči, globokih družbenih razkolov in skrajnih neenakosti v nadzoru nad proizvodnimi sredstvi, ter b) v njegovih temeljnih izhodiščnih značilnosti, ki jih v prevedenih besedilih omenjajo tako Meehanova, Mosco in Waskova kot McChesney, torej v zgodovinski perspektivi, združevanju in preseganju ločnice med teorijo in prakso, izhajanju iz družbene totalitete in moralni filozofiji oziroma normativnih predpostavkah, zaradi katerih je pristop odkrito političen. Ta izhodišča so še zlasti pomembna v času globoke krize, saj je skrajni čas, da se domnevno kritični del znanstvene sfere začne zavedati svojega poslanstva in se preneha pretvarjati, da je lahko izločen iz družbenih bojev."

The article contains a legal analysis of the property relations resulting from the marriage of Jan Klemens Branicki to Katarzyna Barbara Radziwiłł. The events here depicted reveal that the economic success of an aristocratic family to a large extent consisted in a skilful construction of the prenuptial agreement and later in enforcing its fulfilment.

During the 1780s, the Spanish crown endeavored to facilitate and expedite commercial exchange within its vast Atlantic territories, a goal which it hoped to accomplish by creating new consulados (merchant chambers and courts) in many port cities of the empire. The need to create new consulados became an especially important issue after the implementation of the new system of comercio libre in 1778, which significantly stimulated economic activity across the Atlantic. Paying attention to Spain's efforts to create a modern commercial empire, this article asks why new metropolitan consulados were created in the mid-1780s, while, in the colonies, they came to fruition in the 1790s, after the infamous minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez, died in 1787? The article argues that, unlike Gálvez, who was committed to an extractive system of imperial governance, the ministers who came to power after 1787 were inspired by a distinct kind of soft colonialism, espousing that, if the empire were to survive, it had to govern its colonies with gentleness. This, in turn, entailed stimulating economic improvement in the colonies while promoting bonds of reciprocity among subjects from both sides of the Atlantic. By reconstructing the events that led to the creation of new consulados in the colonies, this article uncovers how a new regime of colonial economic improvement was put into place in order to bind the empire during a moment of impending crisis.

The Transatlantic Financial Crisis of 1837 produced a global depression that lasted until the mid-1840s. Falling cotton prices, a collapsing land bubble, and fiscal and monetary policies pursued by individual actors and financial institutions in the United States and Great Britain were all responsible. A comprehensive understanding of the panic must take into account the global movements of gold and silver that linked Mexico, China, the United States, and Great Britain in complex networks of credit and debt. In the United States, businesses, banks, and individuals declared bankruptcy; states defaulted on their debts; commodity prices dropped; credit instruments lost their value; and unemployment rose amid a general atmosphere of pessimism and an erosion of confidence. The severity of the panic prompted politicians and financial theorists to reevaluate their ideological assumptions regarding the proper role of governmental regulation in an economy. In a larger sense, the panic demonstrated how the expansion of slavery in the United States, British imperialism, financial speculation, and recurring cycles of boom and bust were emerging as defining features of modern capitalism.

Considering the law as a social phenomenon intrinsic to political economy is key to engaging the work in this new volume of scholarly articles edited by Professor Poul Kjaer – The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020).  The book is relevant on many levels to the events unfolding around us including unresolved issues between the private and the public realms (e.g., think banking and government in relation to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008).  Current manifestations (post-book publication) include the ruling of the German Constitutional Court in May, which at core, appears to challenge the legitimacy of EU law for German financial interests.  However distant such regulatory and legal matters may, at first appear, the idea that theories ‘are reflected in our social relationships’ anchors a more general observation made in this book’s introductory chapter concerning theoretical architectures as differentiating ‘between a holistic or a differentiation-based worldview, that is, between an understanding of society as a whole, which is larger than the sum of its parts, or an understanding of society as a mere collection of differentiated parts.’
In this NBn episode, Professor Poul Kjaer distinguishes such concepts among others, and sets the context for those with an interest in learning about ‘the law and political economy’ as a field of study including an explanation of the differences between the European and American approaches to this field.  Some other points of elaboration include more detailed thoughts on his introductory chapter, his previous books dealing with governance and governing, corporatism’s many guises, intermediary institutions as key locations for social integration and dis-integration, the concept of crisis and how law regulates the economy and politics, with Georg Simmel, in a sense, underlying it all with the question: ‘how is society possible?’
Professor Kjaer explains key concepts and thinkers in this field as he provides a lay of the land as surveyed from the ‘Copenhagen School’.  He also shares his impressions with the book editing process, and some of the more foundational concepts and sources. The book brings ‘together an exceptional group of scholars’ providing a ‘novel conceptual framework for studying the role of law and legal instruments in political economy contexts, with a focus on historical transformations and central challenges in both European and global contexts’.  This volume’s many contributions cover legal subfields ‘ranging from competition and consumer protection law to labour and environmental law, giving a comprehensive overview of the central challenges of the law of political economy.’ It should be added that the 15 chapters are compellingly written, and the book is available in hardcover and Kindle.

Poul F. Kjaer is a professor at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Denmark with a research focus on European and global governance, the law and political economy.

Tesis de licenciatura presentada por Lutz Alexander Keferstein Caballero al sínodo respectivo de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, campus Aragón.
Primera tesis en la Historia de la Facultad de Derecho de la UNAM con un tema tan actual en aquel entonces, a sólo dos años de la entrada en vigor del TLC de América del Norte.
Dumping, prácticas desleales de comercio internacional y los páneles internacionales para dirimir diferencias.

This paper considers China’s economic development and place in the world economy. The People’s Republic of China is becoming the most powerful country in the world in terms of GDP. Nowadays, China is an important partner in world trade both as an exporter and importer. Thus far, the United States has been the leading force in managing and coordinating the global economic and especially financial system, but now the economically advancing socialist China is a challenge to the USA. The Chinese model, socialism with Chinese characteristics, is discussed and compared with earlier stages of socialist construction, e.g. the NEP experiment of Soviet Union. The paper ends with
notes about environmental and ecological problems, stressing the importance of socialist answers to these challenges. In this regard there are encouraging aspects in the current political program of the Chinese leadership.

A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the 'Atlantic Heartland'. However, if we look at the history of the 'Heartland' economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and 'neoliberal' practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a 'manifesto for a doomed youth' in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.

In the 21st century, the scientific study of the history of colonial policy pursued by the great empires on the basis of modern approaches has not lost its relevance. Their policies in different regions have led to political, economic and cultural changes as well as conflicts of interest. In particular, in the XVIII century in Central Asia  there  was  a  sharp  political  process.  Not  only  will  there  be  military  conflicts  in  the  region,  but  the political  interests  of  several  major  empires  will  clash  in  the  region.  In  particular,  the  growing  economic potential of the Russian Empire increased its aspirations for East Turkestan, and on the other hand, after the Manchu dynasty took the Chinese throne, their bold move to the region aggravated the political situation. The  short-lived  occupation  of  Mongolia, Tibet,  Lobnor,  and  the  present-day  Xinjiang Uyghur  Autonomous Region by the Qing Empire resulted in the abolition of the centuries-old statehood of the peoples of Central Asia. In this sense, the occupation of East Turkestan by the Manchus was the responsibility of the Russian Empire and the Chinese administration.

Bengal in the first half of the eighteenth century was a prosperous and flourishing province, noted for its wealth and manufactures. It was this affluence which induced the contemporaries to describe Bengal in such terms as 'Paradise of Nations', 'the Paradise of India', or 'the realm of Paradise'. It was the same lure of wealth which also brought to the shores of Bengal a host of foreign merchants from far and wide, including a great many Europeans of diverse nationalities. Their travel accounts and descriptions were no less copious in glorifying the land which had 'a hundred open gates to enter...and not one to come away again'.

The wealth of this nation was created of course by the bounteous soil of the region which produced a wide variety of agricultural commodities like rice, wheat and other grains, sugarcane, cotton, opium, indigo, oils of different kinds and vegetables. Other economic products found in abundance were lacca, wax, long pepper, salt and saltpetre. But more than anything else Bengal was then the general storehouse of a wide variety of cotton and silk products not only for Hindustan of the Empire of the Great Mughal, but also for the Kingdom and for Europe itself. The goods so manufactured were not only known for their exquisite fineness and delicacy of workmanship but were also relatively cheap. Bengal's industrial economy during the pre-colonial period compared thus very favourably with that of any nation on earth.

In this chapter, an attempt will be made to study the state of the major indigenous industries during the colonial period. An attempt will also be made to explain the causes of their ultimate collapse. In this connection, the role of the state which could stimulate or inhibit industrial development would be looked into to ascertain the real motive of British rule. Did they create an appropriate climate for promoting and encouraging indigenous industrial enterprises? Was the destruction due to natural causes or was it deliberate? The economic policies of the colonial state in relation to industries need, therefore, also to be looked into to ascertain the total effect of such policies on the domestic manufacturing industries.