The Subsumption of Space and the Spatiality of Subsumption: Primitive Accumulation and the Transition to Capitalism in Shanghai,China

Abstract: Based on extensive interviews, this study is the first systematic attempt to map the spatio‐temporal evolution of production networks linking urban, state‐owned enterprises and rural, township and village‐owned enterprises in reform‐era China. It identifies two distinct regimes of urban‐to‐rural subcontracting patterns and conventions. The first, which developed and prospered from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐1990s, brought rural workers and the countryside into a relatively extensive relationship with urban capital, and thus represented a partial transition to capitalism. Its violent reconfiguration in the wake of a series of sectoral crises in the late 1990s led to the widespread privatisation of rural enterprises, and the emergence and consolidation of a second regime that simultaneously constituted a significant intensification of relations, the capture of the rural by the urban, and a new stage in this region's transition. This paper argues that these regimes are analogous to the formal and real subsumption of labor to capital, respectively, and that subsumption may be a more useful analytic for understanding the process of capture and transition than primitive accumulation: the latter concept alone, without reference to the dynamics of the social/spatial division of labor, risks missing other ways that exploitive connections can be constructed between places. This paper thus seeks to recast the relationship between these two concepts, and to develop a larger vocabulary in which subsumption, like primitive accumulation, is both spatial and ongoing and internal to capitalist accumulation.     

The Antiquities of South Jutland or Sleswick

A category of small vessels fashioned in samian ware has conventionally been interpreted as representing inkwells. This identification seems valid given their typological characteristics. The type is fairly rare in Roman Britain, as in other western provinces. Nonetheless, it is well known through illustration and is sufficiently frequent to be familiar to those who study the period. Given the likely close form-function relationship of this type, its distribution is assessed in this paper as an archaeological index of the locations of writing and recording in Britannia using ink. Indeed, study of samian inkwells offers a seemingly reliable indicator of such activity. This prospect is almost unique given the rarity of other types of direct and indirect evidence for writing in ink from Roman Britain.

Analysis shows, for the first time, that there is a clear pattern to the occurrence of samian inkwells. Most examples come from sites associated with the Roman military, with a sizeable proportion also recorded from major civil centres; elsewhere they are particularly infrequent. Examination of the spatial occurrence of these finds from within sites reveals a notable pattern. Many come from contexts at or close-by to locations where writing in ink might be expected. This is testimony to the rich potential of the archaeological record of this era to inform upon cultural practices.     

Constructing a Historiography of Mexican Women and Gender

This article outlines the historiographical importance of the International Colloquium of Women's and Gender History in Mexico, particularly in the context of the author's own scholarship, especially her dissertation. It argues for the need for women's and gender history, and for a dialogue, by means of which these separate but related bodies of scholarship can inform the other. It includes a summary of the author's dissertation and its theoretical influences, a review of historical topics discussed at the first two conferences of the International Colloquium of Women's and Gender History, and a discussion of the historiographical implications of such developments.