Chapter One: Reinstating Commercial Capitalism
Chapter Two: The Infrastructure of Commercial Capitalism
Chapter Three: The Competition of Capitals: Struggles for Commercial Dominance from the 12th to 18th Centuries
Chapter Four: British Mercantile Capitalism and the Cosmopolitanism of the Nineteenth Century
Chapter Five: Commercial Practices : Putting-Out, or the Capitalist Domestic Industries
Chapter Six: The Circulation of Commercial Capitals: Competition, Velocity, Verticality
Appendix: Islam and Capitalism
Notes
Select bibliography
Targeted academic promotion to courses teaching world, medieval and early modern history. Extensive outreach to relevant journals. Reviews in Historical Materialism, Peasant Studies, Race & Class, Third World Quarterly, Jacobin, New Socialist, and across other left outlets. Launch events at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Historical Materialism conferences, and independent bookstores.
Jairus Banaji spent most of his academic life at Oxford. He has been a Research Associate in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, for the past several years. He is the author of Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2007), Theory as History (Haymarket Books, 2011) — for which he won the prestigious Isaac and Tamara Deutsche Memorial Prize — and numerous other volumes and articles.
Endorsements“In this majestic work of critical historical
scholarship, Jairus Banaji has built a de?finitive argument that
commercial capitalism is the essence of capitalism, that it has
dominated eras usually asserted to be pre-capitalist, and that it
has persisted into the present.”—BARBARA HARRISS-WHITE, emeritus
professor of development studies, Wolfson College, Oxford
University“This book is Jairus Banaji at his scholarly and
provocative best. With his remarkable knowledge of world
literatures, Banaji has produced a major exercise in the global and
historical analysis of capitalism, affecting how we grasp
capitalism today and how we understand and use Marx to do so—theory
as history indeed.” —HENRY BERNSTEIN, emeritus professor of
development studies, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London“With mind-boggling erudition, command over an
extraordinary range of historical materials in multiple languages,
and a theoretically sophisticated irreverence for received dogma,
Jairus Banaji dislodges many a eurocentric account to offer an
absorbing, thought-provoking, and truly global story of the
emergence and varieties of capitalism.”—LALEH KHALILI, professor of
international politics, Queen Mary University of London and author,
Sinews of War and Trade More praise for Jairus Banaji“From the
impact of slavery, the rise of the poor taking control, and the
role of other philosophies and faiths impacting the discussion,
Theory as History is a unique way to discuss history, economics,
and the people behind it, a core addition to any community library
history collection.”
—Midwest Book Review“The great merit of this volume is that it
establishes an approach for [the debates about the nature and
origin of capitalism] that is deeply theoretical, but at the same
time refreshingly unhampered by the kind of doctrinaire attachment
to a perceived (and often misread) orthodoxy that plagued so much
of “historical materialism” for the past century. It is scholarly,
without being purely academic ... Banaji’s book deserves to be read
and debated as one of the starting points for a new wave of Marxist
historiography, still in the process of liberating itself from the
ghost of its formalist past." ”
—Pepijn Brandon, International Socialism“Banaji’s seemingly
idiosyncratic but in fact highly sophisticated and original
approach to historical analysis provides not only a welcome
stimulus and a challenge for scholars today, but also will give
them plenty to think about for many years to come." ”
—Marcel van der Linden, research director of the International
Institute of Social History“Theory as History is a book written at
the summit of a lifetime’s engagement with issues of Marxist theory
and practice ... Banaji’s work demonstrates that no aspect of human
history is irrelevant to the present. His scholarship shows immense
skill, depth and range … [proving] it is not the Marxist method
that has been at fault, but the dominance of non-Marxist theory and
method in the minds of Marxist.”
—Counterfire
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