Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 1994. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 425-468).

abstract: "Navigation, Trade, and Consumption in Seventeenth Century Oxfordshire" investigates how the inhabitants of Oxfordshire transitioned from an agricultural to a consumer community during the Jacobean and post-Restoration eras. In agrarian England, this reconfigured landscape was most clearly embodied in the struggle over the access to available land. Focusing on the gentleman farmer's understanding of the fiscal benefits of enclosure and land acquisition, I argue that the growth in agricultural markets within Oxfordshire led to a growing prosperity, which was most clearly articulated in the community's rise as viable luxury goods consumers. By juxtaposing probate documents, inventories, pamphlets, and diaries from the market towns of Burford, Chipping Norton, and Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, this study examines the process by which these late sixteenth and early seventeenth century agricultural communities began to embrace the consumption of luxury goods, and, most importantly, purely market-based understanding of agrarian life. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Interdisciplinary Studies 2013

A central concern of this study is to confront both neoclassical and Marxist interpretations of two “semi-feudal” institutions—bonded labor and sharecropping—which are regarded as either inert and inefficient, by neoclassical economists or as repressive and exploitative, by Marxists. Both interpretations believe the demise of these institutions to be inevitable and welcome, and explain their prevalence and persistence by situating these institutions in a “prolonged transition” from feudalism to capitalism. Both interpretations are united in their assumptions that non-wage relations such as bonded labor and sharecropping (and the multitude of contractual arrangements they encompass) are static, homogenous, and an obstacle to technological change and economic development. This dissertation seriously questions whether these contracts are less “advanced” than fixed-rent or wage contracts, and challenges these assumptions both theoretically and empirically. In particular, I challenge the common perception that both bonded labor employment contracts in the labor market and sharecropping contracts in the land rental market are undifferentiated categories. Part I highlights the importance of taking labor heterogeneity into account, and develops a dissaggregated approach to do so. Important quality variation in different labor-employment types is found to lie in the differing incentives and wage characteristics each type of labor faces. Part II explores differences within sharecropping contracts, in which the labor and land markets overlap. We differentiate sharecropping contracts by the social distance that keeps tenants and landlords apart. This new variable proves to be statistically significant in explaining productivity differentials among share tenants in the Nepalese Tarai.

This dissertation consists of three essays on topics in economic history. The first two chapters focus on historical place-based policies in the United States. Chapter One studies the United States Army's role in shaping the spatial distribution of the population. Chapter Two studies the construction of the Interstate Highway System (IHS) in the city of Detroit. Chapter Three examines mechanisms for financing creativity in the British publishing industry. In Chapter One, I link the location of US Army forts to spatial patterns in population density across counties on the American frontier. Fort establishment predicts initial increases in density, indicative of their role as man-made factors in explaining the origins of local spatial patterns. Long after fort abandonment, increased density persists at fort locations, indicating path dependence. Long-run persistence is driven by if, and when, a fort county was connected to the nineteenth century railroad network. Chapter Two studies the political economy behind site selection for urban segments of the IHS and measures effects of construction on neighborhoods in Detroit. Using variation at the census-tract level, I show that interstates were routed through neighborhoods with low property value to minimize land acquisition costs and future losses to the city's tax base. Following construction, interstates led to short-run declines in property values, population density, and the percentage of a neighborhood's black residents. In the long run, property values declined further in tracts with an interstate, and tracts closest to construction remained less dense with lower shares of black residents. Chapter Three uses book-level data on Romantic Period English literature to investigate crowdfunding as a mechanism for financing creativity in the publishing industry. We show that new authors and female authors faced substantially greater demand uncertainty in the industry, compared to both established and male authors, and these authors are more likely to crowdfund their works. Subsequently, while crowdfunded works have lower average payoffs, crowdfunded titles written by females, and targeting a female audience, are relatively more successful than their traditionally-published counterparts, consistent with demand in excess of expectations.

This dissertation analyzes the logical structure of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation as two of the most important texts of Classical Political Economy. The thesis is that the central concept around which these texts are organized is the concept of "wealth." We analyze how the Classicals' development of the economic categories of money, capital, productive labor, etc. can be understood by reference to this concept of wealth. The analysis is conducted within the perspective of the Althusserian concept of "theoretical practice." This concept of theoretical practice questions the validity of empiricist and/or rationalist understandings of science. It argues that the referents for scientific discourses are to be constructed as a process (processes) of confrontation of knowledges, with political conditions and effects. Accordingly, the analysis of Smith and Ricardo not only investigates the internal logic of their texts but also, and most important, constructs that logic as a political stance. The concept of wealth, around which the logic of the Classicals' texts revolves, is understood below as having political effects. It has such effects because the construction of capitalism as a system of production of wealth provides a condition for the political reproduction of private property relations. Moreover, the internal logic of the classical texts, because of the primacy of the concept of wealth, rests upon and theoretically reconstructs a simultaneously humanist and economistic conception of social relation (this is true not only for Smith but also for Ricardo). It is this combination of humanism and economism that allows the Classicals to theoretically construct capitalism as a socially cohesive system. Smith and Ricardo understood social cohesion to be the tendential result of the system of private property and exchange. Their analysis of market relations reduced money to a mere medium of circulation and the distributional relations of capitalism to the reproduction of the social and material conditions necessitated by the division of labor and the production of social wealth. While Smith's and Ricardo's principal political problem remained the defense of private property, they nevertheless operated in different historical conjunctures. They therefore understood the determinants of social cohesion differently. While Smith's perspective was closer to that of the Age of Enlightenment, Ricardo's partook of the reaction to the Age of Enlightenment represented by the spread of Malthusianism. It is for this reason that Smith and Ricardo adopted two different objects of analysis: the division of labor and the laws of distribution, respectively. It is for this reason that Smith's and Ricardo's analysis of value differed, without however producing a break insofar as the primacy of the concept of wealth and the political defense of private property are concerned. The break with Classical Political Economy is produced by Marx. This break is inaugurated by the primacy of the concept of surplus-value in Marx, and by the subsumption of the concept of wealth to this concept of surplus-value. Marx's different object of analysis is produced by a different articulation of the various economic categories, and implies a structure of the labor theory of value different from the classical labor theory of value. This "break" between Marx and the Classicals is analyzed through the use of Marx's criticisms of the Classicals' development of the categories of analysis as well as of their overall perspective.

Abstract not available

This dissertation analyzes the Wolof social formation of West Africa prior to the 15th century historical conjuncture of European merchant penetration. The framework is that of a reformulation of Marxian theory which builds upon the work of Louis Althusser. Using the concepts of fundamental and subsumed class processes, the study shows the existence of a complex class structure within an apparent no-class, primitive communist society. Using the related concepts of overdetermination and contradiction, it then shows the eruption of a variety of class and non-class conflicts as part of the uneven development of that society. While the approach of this dissertation represents a new and different way to study the development of a primitive communist society, it is also able to propose a solution to a dilemma that has long existed within the historical tradition of Marxism. The dilemma has been to square Marx's basic notion that class struggles provide an indispensible key to understanding social change and social transitions with the transition from primitive communism where, presumably, there are no classes and hence no class struggles. The present study of the Wolof permits a distinctively Marxian analysis of the transition out of primitive communism, an analysis able to pinpoint the contributions of class struggles to that transition.

This dissertation explores the rationale behind legislative limitation of the work day for women in factories. The issue of protective labor legislation for women is analyzed through a case study of the Massachusetts ten hour law. This was the first enforceable legislation limiting the length of the work day for women in the U.S. Passed in 1874 and strengthened in 1879, this act served as a model for subsequent protective labor laws limiting the work day for women. Conclusions drawn from the case study reject the idea that this legislation was intended to limit or eliminate employment of women in the regulated industry. The study establishes, rather, that the subordinate social and economic status of women was used as justification for obtaining universal regulation. However, maintenance of gender based familial responsibilities was among the desired effects of the law. Legislation limiting the length of the work day and weekly hours in textile factories had broad based support. Initially demanded by mill workers and class conscious labor organizations as an aspect of social restructuring, the ten hour demand evolved into a single issue campaign. Labor leaders continued to assert the right of factory workers to a ten hour work day whereas philanthropists, clergy, and progressive business interests focused on cultural assimilation of the operative population. This latter view prevailed. The legislators enacted the ten hour law as a means of integrating the (mainly) immigrant factory workers into the New England traditions. Long hours of factory labor were seen as inimical to preservation of widespread literacy, a well developed common school system, democratic political institutions and the characteristic "Yankee" society. The state is shown to have intervened in the economy to promote social stability. In limiting the rights of capital and the economic exploitation of labor, the state acted to preserve traditional social characteristics, a social goal that individual firms could not pursue.

This dissertation analyzes and critiques Marxist and non-Marxist economic history, in which primitive societies are treated as devoid of history and development. The dissertation argues that in both Marxist and non-Marxist historical writing, the treatment of primitive societies as lacking an historical dynamic is linked to the use of various kinds of essentialist and teleological discourses. Chapter I is a critical presentation of the forms of writing, such as historical narrative and realism, employed by historians and social scientists who produce these discourses. This chapter begins to present the concepts of an anti-essentialist Marxist discourse, as developed by Althusser, Hindess and Hirst, and Resnick and Wolff, in contradistinction to essentialist and teleological discourses. Chapter I argues that an anti-essentialist Marxism, with the concepts of class and over-determination as its entry point, can produce concepts of primitive history and development. Chapter II continues the presentation of basic concepts, such as necessary and surplus labor, fundamental and subsumed class processes and positions, social formation, overdetermination, transition, and development, that comprise an anti-essentialist Marxist discourse. Chapter III reviews and critiques the Marxist concept of primitive communism frequently used to analyze the socio-economic structure of primitive societies. Chapter III shows how most writing on primitive communism treats primitive communism as a signifier for the absence of history and development, as a discursive representation of the concept of historical origins and/or ends, and as a social scientific type in which "primitivism" is the central defining characteristic. These treatments, exemplified in the works of Anderson, Godelier, Hindess and Hirst, Leacock, Rey, and others, make problematic the theorization of primitive history and development. By contrast, Marx's treatment of "pre-capitalist forms of the commune" in the Grundrisse provides the basis for an alternative formulation of primitive communism produced with the concepts primitive communal fundamental and subsumed class processes and non-class processes and overdetermination. Through the use of these concepts, Marx's presentation in the Grundrisse can be read as a demonstration of how an anti-essentialist Marxism theorizes history and socio-economic development in primitive societies.

This dissertation develops a theory of the functioning of a welfare, or income-maintenance, system in the United States economy; it tests this theory with evidence from the 1930's. Our current welfare system grows out of the 1935 Social Security Act, passed during the Great Depression of the 1930's and after two years of the New Deal. The original Act contained many welfare provisions, but conspicuously absent from it was any form of work relief. Yet work relief had been the primary thrust of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the New Deal relief program that preceded the Social Security Act. This dissertation explains why work relief was dropped from the Social Security Act. It first develops a theory of welfare and welfare reform which specifically addresses the nature of work relief. This theory seeks to explain the evolution of a system of relief as a function of two influences: the constraints imposed by a capitalist economic system; and the strength of political actors who attempt to make the system conform as much as possible to their demands. It posits three consequent reproductive relations, or constraints, placed on a welfare system: (1) maintaining a stigma attached to relief so that people will be encouraged to hold low-paying jobs; (2) maintaining welfare payments at levels that do not interfere with the functioning of labor markets; and (3) basing work relief on principles that are congruent with the logic of the market, i.e. profit criteria. It then shows that some programs of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration violated these constraints to such a great degree that the subsequent protests from capitalists resulted in the exclusion of all work relief from the permanent Social Security Act, and its legislation instead through the temporary Works Progress Administration. The lack of provision for permanent federal work relief then left space in local work relief programs for the resumption of the worktest. This study can inform current debates on the welfare system through its analysis of the complex relationship between work and welfare. It also evaluates various past and currently-proposed welfare programs, and examines the limits of welfare reform.