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In this paper, we examine Brazil’s international activism and ascent to the status of rising state during the presidencies of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff (2011–2014). We focus on the dissemination of social policies under an innovative model of development that reflected the political and economic context of a developing country. We argue that this activism was framed in terms of Brazil’s socio-economic and cultural peculiarities, whereby these were treated not as obstacles but as positive contributions to developing states’ attempts to reform global governance structures. We argue that this reflects an alternative form of foreign policy politicisation in which the social dilemmas, particularities and contradictions of the Brazilian experience are incorporated in the foreign policy agenda to leverage its international stature as a rising state. We explain how Brazil’s international cooperation through transferring its public policies and development models (policies for fighting hunger and poverty, agrarian development and income generation) to its Southern partners has been discursively articulated as representing Brazil’s normative potential to contribute to political and institutional solutions, and rebuild norms and standards that affect the distribution of international power and wealth.

Cano offers a short history of how women gained the vote in Mexico, arguing that women’s enfranchisement was delayed until the mid-twentieth century and was extended in two stages, first at the local level and then at the federal level because the political elite feared that women were more conservatively inclined than men. Women’s suffrage was framed as a danger to the secularization of society and to the education, labor, and agrarian reforms dictated by revolutionary governments. Such fears proved groundless in the end as women’s votes shored up the ruling party. Cano proposes female voting behavior and the political challenges that women face are not very different than those that men face. Lack of interest in politics and distrust of parties and elected officials all have a negative effect on society at large and on democracy in Mexico.

This chapter explores how Romesh Chunder Dutt’s historical novels set out to repossess the British myth of feudal India. At a time of crisis in agrarian relations, the future nationalist politician and economic historian saw the possibility of reworking the discrete jurisprudential stages of kinship and contract proposed as the exclusive European route to modernity. Seizing instead on the medieval past as a prior moment of change, Dutt’s popular fiction turned the Mughal empire into a vast (and eerily familiar) transcolonial network of uneven capital relations, spurring on the contractual affiliation of dispossessed—and decidedly modern—strangers to the impoverished nation-in-waiting.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, which is one of Lenin’s most controversial ideas, constantly changed with the development of revolutionary practice. Generally speaking, Lenin considers the dictatorship of the proletariat to be the social reformation enforced by the Bolshevik leader, and in a sense the whole society is the object of this dictatorship. Lenin’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat is based on the precedence of ideology in Marx’s and Engels’ formulations of the theory socialist revolution. It is also relevant to Lenin’s understanding of socialism. Lenin’s view about the dictatorship of the proletariat stemmed from the real situations that obtained in Russia. The agrarian foundation of its entire social life and the predominant ‘East-ness’ of its culture determined the grand scale of the Russian socialist revolution, and dictatorship was necessary for the normal functioning of the social experiment. It is thus unreasonable and unjust to criticize Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat from a so-called humanitarian perspective.

The outbreak of World War I intensified the use of strikes, riots and demonstrations, and brought new challengers into the political arena, first syndicalists and later on communists. The first half of the 1920s witnessed some large strikes and lockouts often backed by demonstrations and riots in the streets; but after these incidents labour market conflicts vanished. This stillness, however, contrasted sharply with the social movement sector where anti-democratic movements were taking the lead. The Communists were very active in street-level politics, and were followed by agrarian protest movements, violent political youth organizations and marching Nazis. Nazi seizure of power in Germany 1933 caused widespread political unrest in Denmark, especially in North Schleswig, and provoked a counter-offensive by organizations and groups in Southern Jutland. The chapter ends with a discussion of Social Democratic and Liberal class hegemony as a defence against authoritarian and anti-democratic currents in Denmark.

‘Gender and the Historicity of Parricide: A Case Study from the Nineteenth-Century North American West’, by Peter Boag, places parricide in the context of larger social forces. In this case, the alchemy of agrarian depression, rural decline, problematic boyhood, idealized motherhood and imperilled fatherhood created the horrific events that tore apart a family and a North American farming community in the 1890s. Exploring a double parricide committed in a rural, western American community in 1895, Boag uses historical evidence and source critique to challenge the traditional psychological and sociological explanations of parricide.

In many countries globally, intentional self-injury has become a frequent reaction to emotional distress, particularly among young adults. In high-income countries, the substances ingested are analgesics, antidepressants and sedatives, all of which are relatively harmless. However, the scenario is quite different in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), especially in rural areas where agricultural pesticides are used to attempt self-harm. All across the world countries have accrued tremendous benefits from pesticide use. Pesticides have enhanced agricultural production dramatically in most countries thereby ensuring food for the increasing population. They have been instrumental in effectively controlling vector-borne diseases. In the 1950s and 1960s there was much glorification about the advantages of pesticides in reducing world hunger, increasing crop productivity, controlling pest infestation and crop damage and so on. However, recent evidence suggests that pesticides have considerable deleterious impact on the environment and human health. Moreover, accidental poisoning and pesticide-related self-harm/suicide is emerging as a grave public health issue in several nations, particularly in LMICs. The present chapter aims to highlight the issue of easy availability of pesticides in an agrarian region in India, the aggressive marketing by pesticide companies, the limited role of the local administration in the sale of pesticides, and specific sociocultural contexts such as dowry and domestic violence, in which pesticides are consumed.

In comparison to an advanced agrarian society like that of Roman Palestine, the highly urbanized environments of the Eastern Mediterranean provided new opportunities for capital formation that secured the social status of the elites, often to the detriment of the economically worse off. In this respect, the savings of the wealthy could embody a spiritual meaning if they proved their intrinsic value as the material infrastructure of the new communities. Their use could be transformed through benevolent practices, thus facilitating social cohesion among the faithful. This chapter focuses on early patristic contributions (mainly of the so-called “Apostolic Fathers” and Clement of Alexandria) to resolving the dilemma of social antagonisms through the proper use of surplus income in financial and material terms.

Contrary to expectations that the governments of the ‘pink wave’ in Argentina and Brazil would take a ‘left turn’ to address the demands of peasant movements in their struggle to bring about alternative agrarian policies, the structural conditions of these movements have continued to be fraught with violence and criminalisation. New mechanisms to demobilise their bases, including social conformism, have also played a role. Some institutional changes and policies have benefited peasants, yet these are marginal in comparison to the consolidation of agribusiness. The peasant movements have interpreted the political economy of commodity export and poverty reduction in terms of an alliance between ‘progressive’ governments and agrarian elites. They have concluded, therefore, that their main power lies in sustained mobilisation.

This chapter seeks to explore changing forms of Maoist mobilization in the plains of northern Telangana from the 1970s onwards. Bringing to view mutually constitutive relations between Maoist mobilization, the state and agrarian change, this chapter challenges the dominant view of the decline and collapse of the Maoists in northern Telangana.I argue that prevailing scholarly accounts leave unexplored patterns of mobilization and demobilization that are crucial to a comprehensive understanding of the Telanganacase. Presenting empirical material in the form of oral historical narratives, I show that the disintegration of landlordism in the region profoundly affected the Maoist movement and gave shape to subsequent developments. This chapter thus seeks to show the value of centering regionally specific processes of state formationand agrarian political economies in analyses of Maoist trajectories in India.

Since the mid-1980s, double-digit gross domestic product (GDP) growth has driven the Chinese economy from an agrarian peasant base to the manufacturing center of the world, its economy now second in size only to the United States. This industrial expansion has, naturally, been accompanied by an explosion in resource consumption. China accounts for about one-fifth of the world’s population, yet consumes half of its cement, one-third of its steel, over a quarter of its aluminum, two-thirds of its iron ore, and more than 45 percent of its coal.1 In only the past 13 years, China has also swallowed up over four-fifths of the increase in the world’s copper supply.2 For most of the country’s fantastic growth, its own vast resources proved sufficient to support its industrial expansion. In the past decade, however, China has recognized the need to augment these supplies with foreign sources, and Chinese companies, normally state-owned enterprises (SOEs), have tapped into the vast reserves of the state and state-owned banks (SOBs) to secure access to mineral deposits abroad.

An exodus of young people from rural areas and agrarian futures can be observed globally. Yet, despite significant obstacles, some young people still aspire to become farmers. This chapter proposes the concept of ‘age-class’—the intersection of age and socioeconomic position—to analyse the limitations and differential impacts of policies and support structures aimed at helping young people start farming futures. The analytical discussion is illustrated and expanded via a case study of the eastern Canadian province of Nova Scotia. This case highlights the importance of collective agency demonstrated by the province’s young farmer community via the formation of organisations, in reaction to the absence of government policies that support all groups of (aspiring) young farmers regardless of their background.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Norway changed from a mainly agrarian to a more urban and industrialized society. These changes offered women new possibilities. In 1884 they were admitted to academic studies, and through a complicated process between 1890 and 1913, they gained suffrage rights. Both these events offered women access to worlds that had until then been reserved for men. Consequently, understandings of both masculinity and femininity were questioned. Troubled understandings of gender identities departed from a long period of what in this chapter is called a secure gender identity, accepting hegemonic masculinity and difference femininity as the norm.

The election of Urho Kekkonen as the President of Finland in 1956 consolidated the country’s political position between East and West. He emerged from the Agrarian Leagues (the Centre Party after 1965), but he succeeded in getting across an image of himself as the only political leader able to maintain favourable relationships with the socialist Soviet Union (USSR). His presidency lasted for 26 years, for the most part through democratic procedures: four times by elections and once by the enacting of an emergency law. Although Finland had to respect the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with the USSR, it was also able to maintain political, commercial and cultural relationships with Western countries and to proclaim its neutrality in global political affairs. In many ways things worked out remarkably well. Finland was the only country with a major land border with the USSR (1340 km) that was able to maintain fully working democratic institutions, despite a degree of stagnation and political manoeuvring in certain aspects of the country’s foreign relationships. Finland gained prestige as a mediator between East and West, a balancing act that culminated in its hosting of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975.

For Bulgaria the First World War was a continuation of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. Those conflicts ended in defeat as a result of which Bulgaria lost most of the Macedonian territory it had just gained. Great bitterness was felt in Bulgaria, and it was not until the end of the 1990s that a settlement of the Macedonian question in Bulgarian politics seemed to have been found. The War also meant for Bulgaria the loss of its access to the Mediterranean, despite the peace treaty’s promise of economic access to the Aegean. In domestic politics, the War produced radicalization that led to the formation of a reforming Agrarian government — deposed in a violent coup in 1923.

As in other cotton-growing agrarian environments colonised by Europeans,1 the onset of British colonial rule in rural western India was accompanied by pressures on local peasants to adopt and cultivate new foreign varieties of cotton so as to transform the species into one of the main commodities for the export market. Moreover, the potential of raw cotton to generate high land revenue assessments in western India was held to be considerable; indeed, the entire structure of colonial rule at local rural level was organised around the levy and collection of land revenue, which comprised the colonial state’s primary source of income.2 In 1835, revenue officials of the Government of Bombay, anxious to find out why the raiyats (peasant cultivators) of the district of Dharwar had not taken advantage of opportunities to grow ‘superior’, allegedly more profitable, foreign (mainly American) cottons, in preference to their ‘country cotton’, sent out local mamlatdars (junior indigenous revenue officials) to each taluka (district administrative sub-division) to investigate the possible reasons. The responses of the peasants articulated their understandings of the social and ecological dynamics that lay at the heart of their farming practices.

Distributions of income and wealth remained highly unequal in Britain until the twentieth century. During the feudal period, land was the predominant store of wealth, and landownership was concentrated in the hands of the crown, church, and aristocracy. Wealth was slowly redistributed to the gentry and merchant classes as feudalism gave way to mercantilism and agrarian capitalism, and more rapidly concentrated in the hands of the emergent capitalist class during the Industrial Revolution. It was only after the First World War that the combination of technological change, trade union power, and progressive taxation triggered a Great Levelling in income and wealth distributions. However, since the 1980s globalization and financialization have empowered a neoliberal Counter-Revolution, causing inequalities to widen once more.

On the eve of the Arab Spring uprisings, the AW was itself in the throes of an inextricable agrarian crisis. The chronic and profound Arab food insecurity had been exposed by the global food crisis of 2008. The stripping of entitlements from the agrarians had created a massive migration to urban centres and resulted in the largest rate of youth unemployment in the world. The mining of the landscapes, especially its soils, water and biodiversity components, had created an environmental catastrophe. The AW was ripe for insurrections. The Tunisian spark set motion to Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Syria and now Iraq. The remaining countries felt the tremors and experienced their share of instability.

Despite many attempts by Caribbean governments to resuscitate the industry, agriculture has declined in economic importance over the years (Potter et al. 2004). The 1970s and 1980s saw the region-wide promotion of manufacturing industries epitomized by the preponderance of free trade zones and apparel export industries (Potter et al. 2004). In recent decades, service-based industries, particularly tourism, have dominated regional economies (Mullings 2004; Nurse 2007)—and as some would argue—at the expense of traditional industries such as agriculture (Pattullo 2005). The tourism industry has been criticized for its high import content and limited integration in local economies. This is ironic since, from the onset, the promotion of tourism development throughout the Caribbean was largely premised for its potential to stimulate other local industries (particularly agriculture) through its anticipated multiplier effects and market linkages.

This chapter explores a series of issues that seem to have been ignored in the many debates about Egypt’s post-25 January uprising and the toppling of dictator Hosni Mubarak.1 I want to ask why it is that Egypt’s small farmers have been ignored or abjected (cast out) of debates about Egypt’s economic and political future. And I want to mention some of the reasons for this in the context of what elsewhere have been called agrarian questions (Bernstein, 2004, 2006). These questions relate broadly to issues of accumulation, production and politics. Does agriculture in Egypt have the capacity to generate food and non-food output that exceeds an amount necessary for self-provisioning, and, if it does, what obstacles prevent this potential being realised? And what policy would be needed to ensure a more equal distribution and consumption of food in Egypt, where more than 30 per cent of Egyptian children are stunted because of dietary constraints yet 35 per cent of adults are obese (FAO, 2013, p. 23). To what extent has capitalist production become generalised in rural Egypt? Is there widespread wage labour, or (just) the expansion of market activities and dispossession of opportunistic landlords and smallholder pre-capitalist farmers, who may block increases in productivity, restrict accumulation, and operate on the basis of patron-client relations and non-market imperatives? And at the level of politics, have large-scale peasant movements, independently or in class alliance with workers and other social forces, promoted policies for social justice and economic transformation (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010, pp. 255–256; Bernstein, 2010)?

European and American industrial nations and the slave plantations of the Spanish Caribbean were not opposing economic systems during the nineteenth century; rather they were deeply entwined: the ‘sugar industrial revolution’ occurring on Cuban plantations coincided with the industrialisation of the Atlantic World economy.2 During the central decades of the century Cuba experienced a period in which agrarian capitalism expanded, and creole planters managed to transform their small-scale slave plantations into large agro-industrial complexes. Cuba emerged as an advanced agro-industrial region where planters, sugar masters, and prominent businessmen embraced the latest technical innovations and participated in transnational networks of commercial and knowledge exchange. It became the largest sugar producer in the Atlantic World.

In the preceding pages, I have made a case for ‘decentring’ or making peripheral the objectives, predefined questions and expected outcomes of intentional development. In this conclusion, I reflect on the value and limitations of such an exercise. Often the pressure to fit knowledge into certain ‘outputs’ that are measured against project objectives, pre-determines what is seen as useful knowledge and what is not. ‘Residual’ knowledge is not discarded as there is no opportunity to construct it in the first place. The costs of not producing such knowledge are evident in the failures of development intervention, as accounts after the fact have often demonstrated. An insufficient appreciation of context and societal processes can, at best, frustrate the ability of projects to achieve positive impacts and, at worst, may contribute to the underlying causes of the problems they are seeking to overcome. Rather than produce knowledge about a particular problem or solution, I suggest that we broaden our focus to first understand societal processes more broadly.

The north-western Indian state of Punjab experienced non-violent mobilization by large segments of its Sikh population for increased regional autonomy during the early 1980s, and a subsequent armed separatist insurgency for an independent state from the mid-1980s to early 1990s. This initial non-violent agitation and subsequent armed insurgency were remarkable because they occurred in one of the most prosperous states in the Indian Union that had been hailed as a model for agrarian development in the late-1960s and 1970s (Grewal, 1994). In this chapter, I argue that Sikh mobilization and violent separatism can best be explained by examining the complex and multi-faceted interactions of the economic and political dimensions of the conflict. Specifically, I identify two causal pathways linking economic discontent in Punjab to political mobilization and insurgence. First, the economic dislocation of marginal and small Sikh farmers due to the unintended so-called ‘distortions’ of the Green Revolution resulted in a deep sense of socioeconomic frustration and grievance which was utilized by the Akali Dal (the main Sikh political party) to mobilize against the central government. And, second, the economic restrictions placed by the central government on the emerging class of middle and large capitalist farmers in post-Green Revolution Punjab frustrated and alienated segments of the rural Sikh population.

Gustav Aubin, Professor at Halle University, noted in 1924: ‘there is an economic region in the middle of Germany with a characteristic struc-ture, based on local resources: fertile ground, lignite and salt. The process of industrialization in this region was stimulated by the beet sugar industry’ (Aubin, 1924, pp.15, 21). The initiation of industrialization by an agrarian industry in the absence of traditional industries – heavy industry and the textile industry – in this region raises the question about a specific trajectory of industrialization.