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Ghana's petroleum industry is located several nautical miles offshore in the Western Region of the country. Yet, the mechanisms and processes of production and transportation of crude petroleum are accompanied by the dispossessing of the adjoining coastal communities of their means of (re)production both on the ocean and on land. Although the insights of agrarian political economy have been deployed fruitfully to analyse land grabs in Africa, similar efforts are rare when it comes to ocean grabs. With reference to the new development thinking on the ocean economy—or 'blue economy'—as the new frontier of resource‐based industrialization in Africa, we re‐frame the agrarian question and apply it to the offshore petroleum industry, expanding agrarian political‐economic theory of industrialization beyond its traditional confines of land and agriculture. Our paper makes two main theoretical contributions. First, it contributes to efforts in agrarian political economy to incorporate the ocean and fisheries. Second, we contribute a fresh theoretical framework for analysing offshore petroleum industries and their potential to contribute to industrialization in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a novel Social Reproduction feminist approach to re‐evaluate the Soviet experience of industrialization within the context of global research on primitive accumulation. I analyse the first Five‐Year Plan as a unique process of 'primitive Soviet accumulation,' focusing on the Zhenotdel collectivization campaign and the often‐overlooked role of Zhenotdel peasant women delegates [krestyanki delegatki]. The study explores their involvement in peasant women's revolts against collectivization, emphasizing the significance of these events for the Zhenotdel's emancipatory programme in the village. Considering class as a social relation to the conditions of life's reproduction, I demonstrate: (1) how primitive Soviet accumulation reshaped the gendered metabolic relationship between land and labour during the first Five‐Year Plan and (2) yet, the allocation of surplus into the expanded Soviet state apparatus laid the foundation for the distinctive Soviet mother–worker gender contract and social citizenship model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a contribution to a long-standing 'conversation' between Henry Bernstein and Terry Byres on capitalist agrarian transition, encompassing the development of capitalist agriculture and capitalist industrialization. Two themes are central: first, the divergence of view with respect to the possible relevance of past transitions for the present (posited by Byres) and the contemporary, pre-emptive power of globalization (argued by Bernstein); and, second, the basic difference of analytical procedure. There is discussion of how, in India, before 1947, colonialism sought unsuccessfully to replicate an 'English model' of transition in eastern India; and how, throughout India, colonialism through surplus appropriation and remittances to Britain prevented the creation of the underlying structural conditions necessary for successful agrarian transition. Aspects of the nature of the Byres treatment of the Scottish experience of agrarian transition in the eighteenth century are considered, to illustrate the nature of the Byres method. The paper seeks to advance the conversation by clarifying the contrast between the two approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-2000s, rural development and politics in China has entered a new phase that revolves around what the central government calls 'agricultural modernization'. Transforming the once-dominant smallholding, family-based agriculture has become a focal point of the government's programme of rural rejuvenation, where a range of economic changes unleashed by urbanization and industrialization also converge. We argue that in this new context, agrarian change has become the key vantage point from which to study rural China. We review key contributions of the papers in this special issue and highlight their insights on rural differentiation, land politics and rural livelihoods. We discuss how studying the ' Chinese path' of agrarian transition can contribute to ongoing debates on key themes in agrarian studies, including both the agrarian questions of capital and of labour, and how agrarian political economy offers unique perspectives on the overall processes of capitalist development in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a paper of two parts. The first suggests a number of questions concerning agrarian change in capitalism, grouped by their concern with social forces and dynamics internal to the countryside, rural-urban interconnections internal to the 'national', the contributions of agriculture to industrialization likewise within the 'national' and those 'external' determinants grounded in capitalist world economy. The second part draws on the papers in this special issue by Chinese scholars, to argue the continuing relevance of questions about commodification, differentiation and accumulation from below and from above, in agrarian change in China today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the food crisis cannot solely be equated with abrupt food price increases or seen as merely market induced. The unprecedented price increases of the first half of 2008, and the extremely low prices that followed, are expressions of a far wider and far more persistent underlying crisis, which has been germinating for more than a decade. It is the complex outcome of several combined processes, including the industrialization of agriculture, the liberalization of food and agricultural markets and the rise of food empires. The interaction of these processes has created a global agrarian crisis that has provoked the multifaceted food crisis. Both these crises are being accelerated through their interactions with the wider economic and financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the historical literature on the forms of industrialization has assumed that agriculture and industry must develop along separate and specialized lines, linked only at the macro level through inter-sectoral resource transfers. This paper uses the Japanese historical case, combined with the recognition, in much work on contemporary developing and developed countries, of the significance of diversification as a rural household strategy, to argue that a pattern of industrialization based on micro-level complementarity between agricultural and non-agricultural activities is possible. After summarizing the changing characteristics of the diversification pursued by Japanese rural households since the nineteenth century, the paper seeks to demonstrate that technical and organizational change in agriculture and rural industry can be seen as conditioning each other to produce the inter-connected structure of flexible manufacturing and small-scale, ‘part-time’ farming on which the significant role of the rural sector in Japan's economic growth has been based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to contribute to the discussion on the causes and the trajectories of the process of industrialization and economic development between the 18th and the 19th centuries. Focusing on the case study of the Lombard Alpine area, it will test the usefulness of the concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) in order to better understand the process of economic growth. The Alpine case study is particularly interesting because, in some Lombard Valleys, it involves a shift from a very advanced economy in the Early Modern period to a demographic and economic collapse from the mid‐19th century onward, when in contrast, other mountain territories in the Italian area were moving towards industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses poverty and calorific undernourishment in the Indian state of Gujarat, where high and market-led industrial growth has resulted in rapid economic improvement. The study is carried out through a combination of secondary and survey-based data. We conclude that the neoliberal agenda of uncontrolled, outward-looking growth has not resulted in significant reduction of poverty or malnourishment in rural areas. Furthermore, while land ownership is officially used as a proxy for wealth distribution, class position appears a better predictor of poverty status in the rural areas than landownership per se. At the policy level, there is a need to revive the agrarian economy and create new non-agricultural assets, and the primary focus in the state must shift to the distribution of created assets rather than a single-minded focus on growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a broad strategic assessment of the experience of rural industrialization in India. It does so from a policy perspective with the aim eventually of highlighting specific outstanding policy issues. Rural and small-scale industrialization (RSSI) has held a special place in Indian development thinking and policy formulation from the outset. This privileged position, however, does not derive from a universal consensus with regard to the rationale and policy framework applicable to this sub-sector. However, such has been the symbolic power and populist appeal of RSSI that it has retained its special status within diverse strategic and ideological frameworks. But how has the sub-sector performed? Is the infant industry still in need of paternalistic protection at the age of fifty? Are there any credible indications of a strategic break with longstanding policy frameworks inherited from the past? Can any crucial policy gaps be identified? How well does rural small-scale industry satisfy the extensive developmental claims made by its proponents? These are the general questions addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]