At the Margins of the Global Market: Making Commodities, Workers, and Crisis in Rural Colombia

by Phillip A. Hough

Overview

Contemporary scholars debate the factors driving despotic labour conditions across the world economy. Some emphasize the dominance of global market imperatives and others highlight the market's reliance upon extra-economic coercion and state violence. At the Margins of the Global Market engages in this debate through a comparative and world-historical analysis of the labour regimes of three global commodity-producing subregions of rural Colombia: the coffee region of Viejo Caldas, the banana region of Urabá, and the coca/cocaine region of the Caguán. By drawing upon insights from labour regimes, global commodity chains, and world historical sociology, this book offers a novel understanding of the broad range of factors - local, national, global, and interregional - that shape labour conditions on the ground in Colombia. In doing so, it offers a critical new framework for analysing labour and development dynamics that exist at the margins of the global market.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009005760
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/25/2024
Series:	Development Trajectories in Global Value Chains
Pages:	373
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Phillip A. Hough is a Colombian-American sociologist who specializes in political economy, labour and agrarian movements, global commodity studies, comparative and world historical sociology, and Latin American development. His current research focuses on labour/agrarian struggles, state and paramilitary violence, class and state formations, and forced displacement and surplus populations.  

Table of Contents

Introduction: The contradictions of Colombian development; 1. Towards a sociology of labor and development at the margins of the market; 2. The rise of Fedecafé hegemony in Viejo Caldas; 3: Fedecafé's labor regime in the arc of US world hegemony; 4. The world historical origins of despotism in Urabá; 5. Despotism, crisis, and the social contradictions of peripheral proletarianization in Urabá; 6. From despotism to counter-hegemony in the Caguán; 7. An uncertain future in the Caguán and beyond; Conclusion: Towards a labor-friendly development in an era of world systemic crisis.