Wilma Dunaway breaks new ground by focusing on slave experiences on small plantations in the Upper South. She argues that the region was not buffered from the political, economic, and social impacts of enslavement simply because it was characterized by low black population density and small slaveholdings. Dunaway pinpoints several indicators that distinguished Mountain South enslavement from the Lower South, by drawing on a massive statistical data base derived from antebellum census manuscripts and county tax records of 215 counties in nine states, slaveholder manuscripts, and regional slave...

Wilma Dunaway contends that studies of the U.S. slave family are flawed by the neglect of small plantations and export zones and the exaggeration of slave agency. Using data on population trends and slave narratives, Dunaway identifies several profit-maximizing strategies that owners implemented to disrupt and endanger African-American families. These effective strategies include forced labor migrations, structural interference in marriages and childcare, sexual exploitation of women, shortfalls in provision of basic survival needs, and ecological risks. This book is unique in its examination...

In The Capitalist World-Economy Immanuel Wallerstein focuses on the two central conflicts of capitalism, bourgeois versus proletarian and core versus periphery, in an attempt to describe both the cyclical rhythms and the secular transformations of capitalism, conceived as a singular world-system. The essays include discussions of the relationship of class and ethnonational consciousness, clarification of the meaning of transition from feudalism to capitalism, the utility of the concept of the semi peripheral state, and the relationship of socialist states to the capitalist world-economy. This...

Until recently, capitalism has been regarded as unique to Europe and as an organic outgrowth of Western civilization. By examining China in these Eurocentric terms, China has been perceived, by Westerners and Asians alike, to be a failed version of the West. The aim of this collaborative project is to examine how the experience of capitalism as a European social formation, and as a world system, has shaped knowledge of China. In addition the volume seeks to establish new foundations on which a theory of Chinese society might be built.

The main objective of this book is to dispel some of the conventionally-held views surrounding trade between Europe and Asia in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, through a comparative and comprehensive study of merchant communities, markets and commodities, the individual authors demonstrate that Asian merchants were in no way inferior to Europeans in terms of their commercial operations and business acumen. The book as a whole attempts to view trade between Europe and Asia in its totality and emphasizes similarities rather than differences in the two regions.

Until recently, capitalism has been regarded as unique to Europe and as an organic outgrowth of Western civilization. By examining China in these Eurocentric terms, China has been perceived, by Westerners and Asians alike, to be a failed version of the West. The aim of this collaborative project is to examine how the experience of capitalism as a European social formation, and as a world system, has shaped knowledge of China. In addition the volume seeks to establish new foundations on which a theory of Chinese society might be built.

Wilma Dunaway breaks new ground by focusing on slave experiences on small plantations in the Upper South. She argues that the region was not buffered from the political, economic, and social impacts of enslavement simply because it was characterized by low black population density and small slaveholdings. Dunaway pinpoints several indicators that distinguished Mountain South enslavement from the Lower South, by drawing on a massive statistical data base derived from antebellum census manuscripts and county tax records of 215 counties in nine states, slaveholder manuscripts, and regional slave...

Domestic Strategies offers a new reading of the historical sources in order to understand the social relations and strategies of laboring families toward the organization of productive processes and institutional arrangements in early modern Europe. In contrast to many other works, the essays in Domestic Strategies place laboring families as the actors on the historical scene, rather than as passive recipients of historical changes. Conceptual insights derived from both anthropology (Sahlins and Geertz) and sociology (Bourdieu, Elias and Mary Douglas) are applied to individual case studies of...

This book presents a bold and original reinterpretation of Western industrialization from the eighteenth century to the present day in terms of the interplay between flexibility and mass production. Drawing on extensive new research by a multinational and multidisciplinary team of scholars, the volume challenges standard views about the inevitable triumph of the large-scale, vertically-integrated corporate enterprise. In contrast, World of Possibilities highlights the plurality of forms of successful industrial organization, past and present, throughout the Western world.

Throughout the seventeenth century, Holland was the unrivalled centre of world trade and banking. This economic success fascinated contemporaries, and questions about it still exercise historians today. Is it appropriate to view the economic position of the Dutch during this period in terms of 'supremacy', or, as Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, of 'hegemony'? If so, how is this to be explained, as well as measured? Did it mark a radically new stage in the history of international trade? Was the role of Amsterdam really more important than that of Antwerp and Venice together? And how did such...