The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries

Race & Class, 2009

Third World Quarterly, 2020

We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a‘peace dividend’– remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world became multipolar and the West, led by the United States, engaged in unprecedented economic and military aggression against countries that contested its power. If this were not enough, social unrest and explosions in the First World as well as the Third underlined the relevance of revolutions. To trace their lineage, we recall capitalism’s intimate relation with revolution. It has needed revolutions to usher it into history and to usher it out. In addition to revolutions against developed capitalism, we also underline how important and necessary revolutions against nascent capitalism in various parts of the world have been. The contributions in this volume explore different parts of this lineage and vivify revolutions for our time.

New West Indian Guide, 2013

Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1975

Through this essay I wish to restate that which has been known to us for centuries: capitalism and the reality it seeks to create and reproduce is nothing but a complex system of power-dynamics through which, everywhere and at any time, a minuscule group of elites dominates and exploits, disciplines and punishes the majority of the people, keeping them contained in a logical universe that serves to justify their power. Ultimately Anthropology needs to talk about this reality, past and present, if it is to understand and study the human condition.

International Review of Social History, 2003

Despite the title, this work stretches beyond the confines of England's Industrial Revolution and situates Africans as the prime labor force which built the modern world. Based on more than thirty years of research and drawing on a vast array of primary and secondary sources, Professor Inikori has produced a masterpiece arguing for the centrality of Africans not only in the Industrial Revolution, by itself a bold claim, but more broadly in the rise of the Atlantic world economy between 1650 and 1850. In addition, Inikori continues the recent historiographic trend, of which he notes, by placing slavery at the core for understanding the rise of western Europe and the United States. Inikori persuasively argues that Britain's Industrial Revolution was fueled by international overseas trade centered in the Atlantic that was dependent upon the utilization of enslaved Africans in the Americas. Inikori produces overwhelming evidence for support, including a vast array of quantitative material documenting the pre-eminent position of African labor in the production of strategic materials for the industrial revolution, especially cotton. Drawing on an impressive blend of primary and secondary sources, he provides thorough case studies of key industries linked to the industrialization process and profiles individual firms engaged in this transformation. Following the introduction, each chapter contains helpful tables that present impressive quantitative data and a separate thirty-six-page appendix supplies additional documentary evidence. A chapter outlining the major historiography of the Industrial Revolution traces three major interpretive trends. The first, from 1880 to 1945, and the most recent, from 1985 to the present, stress the role of overseas trade. By contrast, the dominant argument from 1945 to 1985 centered on internal factors, especially English technology. Inikori points out however, that internal factors like technology fail to explain England's economic growth from 1650 to 1850. In fact, as he demonstrates, to the extent that certain key technologies proved essential to industrialization, like cotton textile production, these were, in turn, dependent upon overseas trade with the slave-based economies of the Atlantic. Inikori moves beyond the profits debate begun by Eric Williams to a more thorough and exhaustive analysis of Williams's larger point: the centrality of African labor in the making of the Industrial Revolution. Inikori begins by charting the English economy over eight centuries from 1086 to 1850, and dividing this longue durée into two sections, 1086 to 1660 and 1660 to 1850. In the former phase, a combination of population growth and expansion of overseas trade generated important socioeconomic changes in the southern counties of England. In the latter period the English economy underwent a structural transformation from agriculture to industrial production. He locates the center of the Industrial Revolution in England in certain regions, which underwent radical alterations, the most important of which was Lancashire between 1660 and 1850, followed by the West Riding of Yorkshire, and finally the West Midlands. Continuing a regional focus, Inikori charts the African impact upon specific Atlantic

Labour / Le Travail, 1988

Few issues were more central to second-wave historical sociology than revolution. Figures such as Theda Skocpol (1979) and Charles Tilly (1978, 1993 saw revolutions as essential to unraveling processes of state formation. Others, such as Barrington Moore Jr. (1967) and Jack Goldstone (1991), argued that revolutions were fundamental to the emergence of modernity Finally, this chapter is explicitly relational in that it sees revolutions as 'entities-in-motion'. This means shifting enquiry away from a view of revolutions as bundles of properties towards examination of the ways in which trans-boundary interactions are generative of revolutionary struggles. The constitutive role played by these trans-boundary interactions is illustrated in the first part of the chapter through a discussion of the Haitian Revolution. The second section widens this analysis into a general critique of the ways in which second-wave historical sociology and recent revolutionary theory have conceptualized the relationship between revolutions and global dynamics. The third section demonstrates the advantages of an 'intersocial' approach to revolutions. A brief conclusion lays out the promise of this approach.