The Imperial and Transpacific Origins of Chinese Capitalism

This article restores early colonial Hong Kong to a key role in the history of capitalism and the integration of the Pacific. It argues that in the 1840s Hong Kong became the first identifiably capitalist Chinese society and a nexus between the China coast and both the expanding British and US imperial systems. It first demonstrates how Hong Kong's colonial regime swiftly re‐structured the island's social‐property relations and scaffolded its residents toward the ceaseless accumulation of capital. It then examines how this nascent node of Chinese capitalism integrated with the westward expansion of American capitalism amid the California Gold Rush and concludes by analyzing how Hong Kong's transpacific networks facilitated the expansion of capitalist systems into late nineteenth‐century China, most especially Shanghai.     

The Two Hundred and Fifty Year Transition: How the American Empire Became Capitalist

This paper aims to rethink United States history from the colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction by examining how capitalism and empire joined together as the logic of expansion increasingly became driven by the logic of capital over approximately two hundred and fifty years. Specifically, it argues that (what became) the United States originated as a ‘society with capitalism’ and became a ‘capitalist society’. This transition was a highly complex and uneven process as a variety of social forms developed and interacted, and in which there was not one road to capitalism, but a variety, depending on the historical circumstance. To accomplish this, first, the article reviews the Marx‐Weber debate to develop a theoretical and methodological approach to the historical sociology of capitalism. The remainder of the paper focuses on narrating an empirical interpretation of the transition to capitalism including the diversity of labor forms capital historically utilized.     

Empowered Women,Failed Patriarchs: Neoliberalism and Global Gender Anxieties

Notions of “empowered women,” promoted by NGOs, economists, and feminists beginning in the 1970s, do not necessitate a countervailing notion of “failed patriarchs.” However, our review of the feminist literatures on globalization, development, and migration in the United States, the former Soviet Union, and South Asia suggests that discourses of empowered women and failed patriarchs are fused in the specter of the “reverse gender order.” A presumption of this new order is that global capitalism has liberated women to such an extent that they have surpassed men who are now the truly “disadvantaged.” Drawing on these literatures as evidence, we argue that the large‐scale incorporation of poor and working‐class women into global capitalism relies upon an ideology of the family that keeps women's labor “cheap” and draws support from the feminist idea that work is empowering for women. Diverse nationalisms uphold the ideology of the family as central to capitalist expansion, providing culturally resonant justifications for women's unpaid reproductive work, while men are breadwinners. Thus, poor and working‐class men experience a painful dissonance between breadwinning expectations and economic opportunities. We show that these tensions between ideologies and material conditions make women's responsibility for reproductive work a structural feature of neoliberalism.     

Applying a Critical and Peace Education Lens to the American Revolution in the Social Studies Classroom

Abstract

The American Revolution is central to the identity of citizens of the United States. It is, therefore, rarely critiqued in the U.S. social studies classroom. This article examines how teachers can discuss the American Revolution using both a critical historical approach and the ideas of peace education, particularly the strand that focuses on the problematization of war. Specific examples are given for how teachers can critique some of the national myths surrounding the American Revolution. Furthermore, the rationale for this critique of the American Revolution is presented, particularly as it relates to the problematic history of minorities in the aftermath of the Revolution and the relationship between students’ views of the American Revolution and the ties to modern-day violence and military engagements. The goal for this more nuanced understanding of the American Revolution is not only to make students more critical thinkers in regard to their history but hopefully to also help them gain a healthier societal outlook in regard to the issues of peace and conflict.     

Donald Trump's discursive field: A juncture of stigma contests over race,gender, religion,and democracy

Donald Trump's election to the U.S. Presidency in 2016 qualifies as one of the more shocking events in American political history. This article reviews the literature on the social construction of Donald Trump's political career. It finds prominent ideological laminations over racism, Islamophobia, nativism, sexism, Christianity, and right‐wing populism in Trump's discursive field. This article argues that Trump's discursive field comprises a juncture of stigma contests over the moral worth of numerous collective identities including men, women, racial minorities, immigrants, Muslims, Christians, and the middle class. Such stigma contests likely exacerbate recognition gaps created by neoliberal policies. This review suggests that scholars should continue to examine the connection between Trump's political career and stigmatization. Moreover, cultural sociologists should ready themselves to track the dialectical response to Trump and to assess the lasting impact on the American normative order.     

Toward Fortress Capitalism: The Restrictive Transformation of Migration and Border Regimes as a Reaction to the Capitalist Multicrisis

The article develops the concept of “fortress capitalism.” The concept has two dimensions. First, it describes those elements within today's migration and border regimes that aim to control the mobility of the global working class in repressive ways. Second, it designates a dystopian future scenario, in which these repressive elements have massively expanded. Such a formation might develop as part of a twenty‐first‐century fascism. Based on historical materialism and critical theory, the article makes four points. First, it asserts that migration regimes are being transformed toward a new level of restrictiveness. Second, it argues that fortress capitalism complements theoretical motives that emphasize the uncontrollability of migration. Third, it contends that migration and border regimes in their emergence, dynamics, forms, and effects are closely linked to the intersectional dynamics of global capitalism as a whole. Fourth, it points out that global capitalism fundamentally depends on border regimes to regulate its contradictions.     

Between “Here” and “There”: Immigrant Cross‐Border Activities and Loyalties

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the prevalence and determinants of cross‐state social exchanges and attachments among Latin American immigrants living in the United States. As we shall show, using data from a recent survey of Latin American migrants living in the United States, migrant cross‐state social action comes in a variety of types, with the direction of conditioning factors differing from one type to another. Moreover, social and political incorporation in the United States reduces affective ties and provision of material support, all the while facilitating other forms of cross‐state social action. Consequently, while international migrants regularly engage in trans‐state social action, the paper shows that neither transnationalism as condition of being, nor transmigrants, as distinctive class of people, is commonly found.     

Re‐examining Cultural Contradictions: Mothering Ideology and the Intersections of Class,Gender, and Race

Hays argues the dominant ideology of mothering in the United States is intensive mothering. Women embracing this ideology are completely devoted to their children and cultural contradictions of motherhood make it difficult to juggle work and family. Rothman argues further that ideologies of patriarchy, technology, and capitalism shape our notions of mothering. I explore these ideologies in this paper, paying careful attention to the labor performed by mothers – paid, childcare, and reproductive. Finally, using surrogacy as an example of how these ideologies interact, I argue that Rothman’s identifications of ideologies helps explain how the cultural contradictions of motherhood vary among mothers based on race and class.     

Religion,Nationalism, and Transnational Civil Society in the Eritrean Diaspora

This article examines the emergence and significance of religion among Eritreans in the United States as a basis for building community in diaspora, reconfiguring nationalist identity, and constituting transnational civil society. It argues three related points: that religious identity and gatherings help mitigate against fractured political identities that have weakened secular diaspora associations; that practicing Eritrean identity through religion challenges the hegemonic power of the Eritrean state to transnationally control diaspora communities and dictate national identity; and that the very incipience of religious bodies as transnational avenues provides Eritreans in diaspora with an autonomous space to resist the state's totalizing demands. Through a critical ethnographic investigation of religious identity and church bodies in Eritrea and one United States diaspora community, the article shows that uneven transnational networks between the United States and Eritrea create new spaces for political action. Specifically, the relative autonomy of churches and the incipience of their transnationalism allow diaspora Eritreans to use religion in the constitution of an emergent transnational civil society.     

The Many Faces of Rural Capitalism

The territorial growth and capitalist development of the United States that began in the late eighteenth century entailed ‐‐ among other things ‐‐ a massive expansion of agriculture that continued until the 1920s. Though based on private, freehold property in land there was no single pattern to this agrarian growth or to agriculture's integration into national and global flows of commodities, finance, and labor. Slave and non‐slave systems expanded in parallel until 1860, but even the destruction of slavery during the Civil War and the subsequent emergence of industrial and finance capitalism did not impose uniformity on American agriculture or undermine independent, household‐based farming.     

Immigration and Transnationalism: Rethinking the Role of the State in Latin America

As more Latin American migrants make their way to the United States, the issue of transnationalism has received increased scholarly attention. Transnationalism refers to the delinking of the individual from his or her government and an increase in international ties as a result of the economic globalization that promotes the movement of people, goods, money, and ideas. Prevailing consensus is that the state, particularly in Latin America, is weakened by transnationalism because individuals are freer than ever from state control. This article argues that examining Latin American emigrant policies yields a different conclusion, namely that the state's response to transnational pressures has made governments more active and relevant in certain ways than in the past. Studies of transnationalism must therefore incorporate state strategies for a better understanding of its impact on Latin American governments.     

Theorizing the US Racial State: Sociology Since Racial Formation

This article reviews theoretical developments in the sociology of the US racial state since the publication of Michael Omi and Howard Winant's groundbreaking Racial Formation in the United States. After briefly outlining their theory, it surveys the still diminutive literature and concludes by pointing to promising future directions, drawing on insights from other disciplines and incipient stirrings from within sociology. Destabilizing the unquestioned assumption that the United States is and has been a nation‐state, the article reconceptualizes it as an empire‐state. This turn establishes a firmer footing for the claim that the United States is intrinsically a racial state and yields a generative framework for reconsidering and stimulating scholarship toward more effective analysis and critique.     

Managing ‘American Islam’

Focusing on the case of Islam in post-9/11 United States, this article highlights the particularity of how US secularism is enacted by the state. In much sociological theory, the United States has been understood to be a neutral and non-interfering state with regard to religion, thereby fostering a pluralist religious context of free consumer choice. Some Muslim reformists have argued that this context makes the US highly fertile ground upon which to reform Islam and to improve women's status in Islam. This article argues that, in the context of the US-led ‘war on terror’, the government has drawn on and amplified this discourse in the service of producing a representation of the US as tolerant, while also seeking to promote a concept of ‘true’ Islam and produce patriotic Muslim citizens. At the center of this discourse are contested portrayals of Muslim women as symbolic of a modern and liberated Islam that is uniquely ‘American’ and opposed to other presumably oppressive Islams. While this context may in fact promote the reform of Islam, it does so with state involvement rather than as a result of state neutrality.     

“An Instrument for Reaching Into Experience”: Progressive Film at the Rockefeller Boards, 1934–1945

The emergence of progressive filmmaking in the interwar period is often associated with John Grierson, the British documentary movement and the influence it traced abroad. This paper argues, however, that more particular attention needs to attend the specific context for progressive filmmaking in the United States. To make this argument, this paper foregrounds two strands of progressive filmmaking that were pursued alongside, and often in tension with each other at the Rockefeller Boards between 1934 and 1945. The Rockefeller Boards pursued both a version of social‐realist documentary in the Griersonian tradition as well as a project focused on “human relations” films. As this paper suggests, the human relations project contrasted with Grierson's social documentary by linking film to a particular kind of psychological interior; a self not oriented to the social world but to the internal spaces of psychological and personality development. This implies a complex process of cultural diffusion in which Grierson's model was filtered through, and ultimately displaced by, a set of concerns and preoccupations unique to the American context.     

Robert Monroe Harrison,British Abolition,Southern Anglophobia and Texas Annexation

This article contributes to the larger project of situating the United States' struggle over slavery within the Atlantic World. Based on the public and private writings of Southern political leaders and the diplomatic correspondence of Robert Monroe Harrison, consul to Kingston, Jamaica, from 1831 until 1855, the article argues that Southern Anglophobia was a dominant factor in the movement to annex Texas to the United States. Britain's abolition of colonial slavery in her West Indian colonies was a seminal event for the American South. This was especially true for Harrison, a ‘native born Virginian’, who had a fearful personal experience with the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. Harrison came to believe that British abolitionism would be turned against American slavery and he shared his views with the State Department. He even feared that the British would use the West Indies as a staging ground for an attack on America with an emancipated black army that would sow insurrection in the South. Moreover, when several American ships involved in the coastal slave trade wrecked in the Bahamas, British colonial authorities freed the slaves, validating Harrison's central accusation. In 1842, on the slave ship Creole, a group of young men to be sold in New Orleans rebelled, seized control of the ship and made their way to the Bahamas. They had heard through the grapevine of the freedom to be gained there. The white South was outraged. From their perspective, Britain had not only expropriated American property, but now had also instigated violent rebellion. Southern political leaders within the Tyler Administration, especially the Secretaries of State Abel Upshur and then John Calhoun, were deeply concerned with British intentions. They believed that the Republic of Texas was the next target of British abolitionism, and in order to defend civilisation as they knew it, they launched the movement to annex Texas to the United States to protect and expand American slavery. They succeeded in 1845.     

The Neoliberal Food Regime: Neoregulation and the New Division of Labor in North America

We undertake a comparative investigation of how neoliberal restructuring characterizes the third food regime in the three North American countries. By contrasting the experience of the two developed countries of the United States and Canada with that of the developing country of Mexico, we shine some empirical light on the differential impact of neoliberal regulatory restructuring on the division of labor in agriculture within the North American Free Trade Agreement region. In particular, we investigate these countries' agricultural production markets, trade, and food vulnerability—with an emphasis on Mexico—as analytical points for comparing and contrasting their experience with this neoliberal restructuring. We start with a synthesis of food‐regime theory and outline the key features of what we call the “neoliberal food regime.” We then discuss our case‐study countries in terms of food vulnerability and resistance in Mexico, their differential relationships to trade liberalization, and what these trends might mean for the evolution of the neoliberal food regime. We conclude that, while dominant trends are ominous, there is room for an alternative trajectory and consequent reshaping of the emerging regime: sufficient bottom‐up social resistance, primarily at the level of the nation–state, may yet produce an alternative trajectory.     

How capitalism and the bourgeois virtues transformed and humanized the family

McCloskey's two volumes argue that a change in our ideas about the dignity of human beings laid the groundwork for the tectonic changes in economic organization known as the advent of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution also changed human behavior by cultivating further the virtues that nourished it. This process can be seen in the way in which the capitalism transformed the family from the realm of “Prudence mostly” to “Love mostly.” Rather than undermining some romanticized vision of family life, capitalism is responsible for humanizing it by opening space for Love.     

A Modern Day Caesar? Donald Trump and American Caesarism

This article argues that the American political system under Donald Trump is an example of what Antonio Gramsci dubbed “Caesarism,” a situation where a taut balance of warring class forces allows for the emergence of a third force to freeze the antagonism and challenge/usurp established political institutions. To concretise Gramsci's rather abstract formulation and to better illuminate the nature of American Caesarism, this article employs a reading of the Roman poet Lucan's magisterial Civil War. Through a close reading of this text, we can explore the origins of Caesarism and study the efficacy of different means of struggle against it. Lucan thus helps us reinvigorate the concept of Caesarism and apply it in the contemporary American context. In particular, it will be demonstrated that whereas Lucan depicts a progressive form of Caesarism with a qualitatively new state form, the Trump administration embodies a regressive form of Caesarism within an old state form.     

Model Hong Kong malls and their development in mainland China: consumer iconicity and the trans/national capitalist class

Relational geographies of capital and consumption between Hong Kong and mainland China have been forming through tourism engagement in Hong Kong and the development of model Hong Kong malls in China. This analysis of urban restructuring for the consumer economy identifies how landmark Hong Kong malls are reproduced in major cities of China by networks of Hong Kong property firms and mainland elites. Adapting Leslie Sklair's formulation of architectural iconicity in the culture‐ideology of consumerism, this economic relationship, which restructures urban space, constructs iconic built forms and develops Chinese consumerism, marks hegemonic opportunities of a national capitalist class, suggesting how Chinese state capitalism and its Hong Kong networks limit and incrementally engage transnational capital while instantiating Hong Kong‐style consumer iconicity. New malls in mixed‐use developments in China often occupy sites of historical markets and thus affirm Sklair's prediction that iconic architecture increasingly proclaims consumer space while claiming historic forms of public space.     

The uncertain connection: free trade and rural Mexican migration to the United States

"Will a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) decrease Mexican migration to the United States, as the U.S. and Mexican governments assert, or increase migration beyond the movement that would otherwise occur, as NAFTA critics allege? This article argues that it is easy to overestimate the additional emigration from rural Mexico owing to NAFTA-related economic restructuring in Mexico. The available evidence suggests four major reasons why Mexican emigration may not increase massively, despite extensive restructuring and displacement from traditional agriculture....NAFTA-related economic displacement in Mexico may yield an initial wave of migration to test the U.S. labor market, but this migration should soon diminish if the jobs that these migrants seek shift to Mexico."