A Forgotten Instrument of Global Capitalism?International Concessions, 1870–1930

From the mid-1800s through the 1930s, concessions were an institutional foundation of modern capitalism about which we have little systematic, comparative knowledge. Concessions - contracts given by governments in less-developed states to foreign investors - supplied elements that were lacking in the host country, including a congenial legal order and an attractive investment environment. Cash-poor governments eager to modernise often added special privileges and monopoly rights to concessions in order to attract capital. In Africa and Asia, all the colonial powers granted concessions to promote the building of infrastructure and development of commercial agriculture without burdening the Treasury. After providing a global survey of concessions with special attention to Russia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and French West Africa, the author concludes that concessions, by their nature, entailed contradictions that made them a ‘third best’ option for political elites eager to incorporate peripheral regions into the world economy.     

Disaster Financialization: Earthquakes,Cashflows and Shifting Household Economies in Nepal

The political economy literature on post-disaster reconstruction tends to contrast ‘disaster capitalism’ narratives denouncing the predatory character of neoliberal rebuilding, and ‘building back better’ policies supporting market-driven reconstruction. This article seeks to provide a more nuanced account, developing the concept of ‘disaster financialization’ through a case study of household-level changes experienced through processes of post-earthquake reconstruction in Nepal. The concept of disaster financialization describes not only the integration of disaster-affected households into the cash-based logic of reconstruction instituted by donors and government authorities, but also the financialization of their lives, social relations and subjectivities. It is a transitive process involving a shift into financialized mechanisms of disaster prevention, adaptation and recovery. Analysing contrasting experiences across three earthquake-affected districts in Nepal, this study proposes disaster financialization as an integrative term through which to understand the simultaneous acceleration of monetization, the leveraging of cash incentives by donors and government to ‘build back better’, and the flurry of financial transactions associated with reconstruction processes. While some aspects of disaster financialization have had negative social impacts, such as debt-related anxieties and a breakdown of voluntary labour exchanges hurting the most vulnerable, the process has taken on variegated forms, with equally variegated effects, reflecting household characteristics and interactions with financial institutions.     

Maltese ‘gallarija’: a gender and space perspective

In Malta, there are hundreds of balconies, especially in Valletta. However, the most fascinating ones are boxed-balconies known as ‘Gallarijia’ in Maltese. The Knights, an ultra religious Roman Catholic military Order who ruled Malta for over 260 years, adopted covered-balconies designed and used in Muslim countries; in the hope that it would ensure their segregated life style as well as; concealing their illicit sexual activities with Maltese women. The Grand Master de la Cassiere built the first covered-balcony in his palace in Valletta; soon it found affinity with the Maltese well-to-do families who called it their own. Although, cultural and technological transfers between Muslim and Christian worlds have always been a way of life in the Mediterranean region, successfully adopting an innovation from another culture requires suitable social, economic and cultural environment in the host country. The objective of this article is to explain how and why a Christian military order has successfully adopted a Muslim inspired design for their balconies. We suggest the key to understand this phenomenon and the paradox it poses is the status of women in Malta during the Knights' rule.     

The Development of Social Insurance in Iran: Technical-Financial Conditions and Political Rationales, 1941–1960

This text brings the case of Iranian social insurance (SI) to bear on the processes shaping Iranian politics from 1941 to 1960. It holds that the political needs of upper class rule (1941–51) and of the early autocratic regime (1953–1960) helped to shape SI's nature, extent, and limits. A key objective was to propagandistically use a minimal version of SI to try undermining communist and workers' trade unionist agitation. Iranian SI had two rationales. Although a few workers demanded SI measures during the Constitutional Revolution, the first SI program (1922, 1931, 1933) covered government employees, i.e. was a function of state-building. This paper focuses on a second program, targeting non-government workers. Starting in 1936 (1943, 1949), it was meant to tackle the social and political challenges posed by a nascent industrial working class. However, throughout the 1940s, workers' SI laws remained a dead letter, and the first integrated SI bureaucracy (1953), although ensuring 180,000 people, was in reality quite inefficient.     

Dispossession and the Depletion of Social Reproduction

Gender is largely under‐theorized in the now well‐developed literature on dispossession; this paper contributes to the analysis of the gender dimensions of dispossession by bringing the literature on dispossession into conversation with the feminist literature on social reproduction, specifically, depletion of social reproduction. Drawing on qualitative field research, the paper provides a gendered analysis of the multiple vectors of dispossession affecting the Miyana, a Muslim community living in the Little Rann of Kutch, an estuarine zone in central Gujarat within which prawn harvesting and salt production are their symbiotic seasonal livelihood activities. Using the concept of depletion as a diagnostic tool, I argue that the assessment of depletion due to dispossession requires investigation of the levels of mitigation, replenishment or transformation available to individuals, households and communities within the circuits of production and social reproduction.