Book round-up: Latest works by CLaSP members
A compilation of recent books by CLaSP members “just in time” for teaching.
This is the first of many posts highlighting the extremely rich work of CLaSP members. The recent books listed below cover a range of subjects from migrant and domestic labour, logistics and supply chains, finance and development, health and pandemics.
While the list is non-exhaustive and only covers books over the past 4 years, it provides a snippet of the engaging interdisciplinary research which many in the Centre take focusing on the political economy of labour, critical approaches to sustainable production, business and enterprise, finance and state regulation, nature, political economy and ecology, and global supply chains. You can check out our members’ staff pages for a more complete list of our research outputs.
Below you can find a list of the book titles, followed by expanded summaries of each work.
Books
Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture. By Matan Kaminer, Stanford University Press, 2024.
The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism. By Michael Shane Boyle, Stanford University Press, 2024.
Paid to Care: Domestic Workers in Contemporary Latin American Culture. By Rachel Randall, University of Texas Press, 2023.
Remittances and Financial Inclusion: Contested Geographies of Marketisation in Senegal and Ghana. By Vincent Guermond, Taylor & Francis, 2023
Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar. By Benjamin Neimark, University of Arizona Press, 2023.
Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism. By Paula Serafini, Vanderbilt University Press, 2022.
Labour Regimes and Global Production. Edited by Elena Baglioni, Liam Campling, Neil M. Coe and Adrian Smith, Agenda/Columbia University Press, 2022.
Unprecedented? How COVID-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy. By William Davies, Sahil Jai Dutta, Nick Taylor, and Martina Tazzioli, MIT Press, 2022.
Brazilian Elites and their Philanthropy: Wealth at the Service of Development. By Jessie Sklair Routledge, 2021.
Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World. By Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, Verso, 2021.
Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture
by Matan Kaminer
For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel's arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labor-Zionist commitment to abstaining from hiring outside labor. But beginning in the late 1980s, the region's agrarian economy was rapidly transformed by the removal of state protections, a shift to export-oriented monoculture, and an influx of disenfranchised, ill-paid migrants from northeast Thailand (Isaan).
Capitalist Colonial, Matan Kaminer's ethnography of the region and its people, argues that the paid and unpaid labor of Thai migrants has been essential to resolving the clashing demands of the bottom line and Zionist ideology here as elsewhere in Israel's farm sector.
Kaminer's account mobilizes capitalism and colonialism as a combined analytical frame to comprehend the forms of domination prevailing in the Arabah. Placing the findings of fieldwork as a farm laborer within the ecological, economic, and political histories of the Arabah and Isaan, Kaminer draws surprising connections between the violent takeover of peripheral regions, the imposition of agrarian commodity production, and the emergence of transnational labor flows. Insisting on the liberatory possibilities immanent in the "interaction ideologies" found among both migrant workers and settler employers and raising the question of the place of migrants who are neither Jewish nor Arab in visions of decolonization, this book demonstrates anthropology's ongoing relevance to the struggle for local and global transformations.
"Ethnographically vivid, analytically sharp, and resonant with global historical echoes, Capitalist Colonial exposes the racialized cruelty of postcolonial neoliberalism. Israeli entrepreneurs built a profitable agriculture by replacing a dispossessed Arab peasantry with a rural Thai proletariat, politically disciplined to appear complaisant despite exploitative pay, social exclusion, and backbreaking labor. While the brutal geopolitics of the 2023 Hamas raid and vengeful Israeli response fatally trapped the migrants, Kaminer movingly probes the still-fertile ashes for seeds of a potential multi-ethnic future."
—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism
by Michael Shane Boyle
We live in a world where nothing is untouched by supply chains—art included. In this major contribution to the study of contemporary culture and supply chains, Michael Shane Boyle has assembled a global inventory of aesthetics since the 1950s that reveals logistics to be a pervasive means of artistic production.
The Arts of Logistics provides a new map of supply chain capitalism, scrutinizing how artists retool technologies designed for circulating commodities. What emerges is a magisterial account of the logistics revolution that foregrounds the role played by art in the long downturn of global capitalism.
With chapters on art produced from technologies including ships, barrels, containers, and drones, Boyle narrates the long history of art's connection to logistics, beginning in the transatlantic slave trade and continuing today in Silicon Valley's dreams of automation. The global reach of the artists considered reflects the geographies of supply chain capitalism itself. This incisive study demonstrates that art and logistics are linked by the infrastructures and violence that keep supply chains moving.
"This book is by far one of the most brilliant books in a crop of very brilliant books on logistics. It is original, beautifully written, gorgeously illustrated, and it fizzes and pops with imagination, righteous outrage, hefty analysis, and humor."
—Laleh Khalili, University of Exeter
"This is the book about logistics and art that we have been waiting for. Both broad and deep enough to do justice to its topic, it is engagingly written and a pleasure to read."
—Susan Zieger, University of California Riverside
Paid domestic work in Latin America is often undervalued, underpaid, and underregulated. Exploring a wave of Latin American cultural texts since the 1980s that draw on the personal experiences of paid domestic work or intimate ties to domestic employees, Paid to Care offers insights into the struggles domestic workers face through an analysis of literary testimonials, documentary and fiction films, and works of digital media.
From domestic workers’ experiences of unionization in the 1980s to calls for their rights to be respected today, the cultural texts analyzed in Paid to Care provide additional insight into public debates about paid domestic work. Rachel Randall examines work made in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. The most recent of these texts respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, which put many domestic workers’ health and livelihoods at risk. Engaging with the legal histories of domestic work in multiple distinct national contexts, Randall demonstrates how the legacy of colonialism and slavery shapes the profession even today. Focusing on personal or coproduced cultural representations of domestic workers, Paid to Care explores complex ethical issues relating to consent, mediation, and appropriation.
—Gavin O’Toole in Latin American Review of Books
“A compelling analysis of representations of domestic workers in contemporary Latin America. Randall shows how different types of sources—literary testimonios, documentary and fictional films, and digital media artifacts, produced by, about, and with domestic workers—all reveal the painful coexistence of intimacy and affection with exploitation and domination. The book is an important reminder that racism, sexism, classism, and the overall legacy of slavery and colonialism can only be challenged if cultural representations are meticulously scrutinized and consciously denaturalized.”
—Patricia Pinho, University of California at Santa Cruz
This book comprehensively explores the messy and contested relationship between everyday practices of remittance sending and receiving, processes of market making, and operations of micro- and global finance.
Remittances and Financial Inclusion critically investigates a global migration-development agenda that aims to harness remittances for development by incorporating remittance flows and households into global financial circuits.
The book develops a multidisciplinary perspective and combines insights from economic, development, and financial geography as well as international political economy and economic anthropology. It sets out a geographies of remittance marketisation approach to investigate the intricate and grounded ways in which remittance markets are constructed, the extent to which remittance flows and households can be (re)configured and incorporated into global finance, and why such processes are always fragile, contested, and in need of constant renegotiation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork research, the book provides an in-depth critical interrogation of the policies and initiatives that underpin remittance marketisation in Senegal, Ghana, and beyond.
This volume will be especially useful to those researching and working in the areas of international development, contemporary geographies of finance and market making, and migration and remittances. It should also prove of interest to policymakers, practitioners, and activists concerned with the relation between migration, remittances, and finance in the Global South.
"Vincent Guermond provides the essential critical guide to the remittances-financial inclusion agenda with this definitive account of how migrant payments have become marketised. Built on rich empirical data, this book delivers a textured and intricate analysis both of the political and behavioural engineering involved in remittance market-building and of the ways ordinary people are contesting the burgeoning digital poverty finance agenda."
—Dr Phil Mader, University of Sussex, UK
"This book investigates the complex relationships between migrant remittances, financial inclusion and economic development. It unearths a universe of rationalities, practices and social networks stretching from the local to the global made invisible by standard accounts of migrant experiences. An exquisite writing combining theoretical freshness, empirical wealth and policy-relevant perspectives."
—Dr. Ndongo Samba Sylla, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Senegal
Read a review in The Journal of Development Studies.
Continually recognized as one of the “hottest” of all the world’s biodiversity hotspots, the island of Madagascar has become ground zero for the most intensive market-based conservation interventions on Earth.
This book details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding of drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves.
It documents the tensions that exist at the local level, as many of these programs incorporate populations highly dependent on the same biodiversity now turned into global commodities for purposes of saving it. Proponents of market conservation mobilize groups of ecologically precarious workers, or the local “eco-precariat,” who do the hidden work of collecting and counting species, monitoring and enforcing the vital biodiversity used in everything from drug discovery to carbon sequestration and large mining company offsets.
Providing a voice for those community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, this volume proposes critiques that aim to build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the local eco-precariat.
See a full review in Society & Natural Resources.
“Benjamin Neimark’s fascinating new book, the Hottest of the Hotspots shines a light on the hope and excitement of alternative models and actors now asserting themselves on national and global stages of ecological conservation work. This, despite intricate and complex challenges of ‘market conservation’ and the ‘industrialisation of nature,’ negatively impacting some of the most vulnerable populations on earth.”
—Dr Jessica Northey, Assistant Professor, Coventry University, UK
Honorable Mention, Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture Studies, Latin American Studies Association–Visual Culture Studies Section, 2023
Extractivism has increasingly become the ground on which activists and scholars in Latin America frame the dynamics of ecological devastation, accumulation of wealth, and erosion of rights. These maladies are the direct consequences of long-standing extraction-oriented economies, and more recently from the expansion of the extractive frontier and the implementation of new technologies in the extraction of fossil fuels, mining, and agriculture. But the fields of sociology, political ecology, anthropology, and geography have largely ignored the role of art and cultural practices in studies of extractivism and post-extractivism.
The field of art theory, on the other hand, has offered a number of texts that put forward insightful analyses of artwork addressing extraction, environmental devastation, and the climate crisis. However, an art theory perspective that does not engage firsthand and in depth with collective action remains limited and fails to provide an account of the role, processes, and politics of art in anti- and post-extractivist movements.
Creating Worlds Otherwise examines the narratives that subaltern groups generate around extractivism, and how they develop, communicate, and mobilize these narratives through art and cultural practices. It reports on a six-year project on creative resistance to extractivism in Argentina and builds on long-term engagement working on environmental justice projects and campaigns in Argentina and the UK.
It is an innovative contribution to the fields of Latin American studies, political ecology, cultural studies, and art theory, and addresses pressing questions regarding what post-extractivist worlds might look like as well as how such visions are put into practice.
"[Creating Worlds Otherwise] is thorough and its research deep and comprehensive. The issues it tackles are timely and important, and it introduces key Latin American examples of struggles, campaigns, artists, and collectives into a broader English-speaking readership."
—Julia Ramírez-Blanco, author of Artistic Utopias of Revolt: Claremont Road, Reclaim the Streets, and the City of Sol
Review by Claudia Mattos Avolese for Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture
Labour Regimes and Global Production
Edited by Elena Baglioni, Liam Campling, Neil M. Coe, Adrian Smith
The book traces the intellectual development of labour regime concepts across various disciplines, notably political economy, development studies, sociology and geography. Building on these foundations it considers conceptual debates around labour regimes and global production relating to issues of scale, informality, gender, race, social reproduction, ecology and migration, and offers new insights into the work conditions of global production chains from Amazon's warehouses in the United States, to industrial production networks in the Global South, and to the dormitory towns of migrant workers in Czechia. It also explores recent mobilizations of labour regime analysis in relation to methods, theory and research practice.
“This ambitious and compelling collection sets the theoretical and methodological terms for research on labour regimes and what possible avenues for solidarity that shedding light on these can reveal. … [T]he volume will have a transdisciplinary value for political economists, development scholars, geographers, and other interested in how labour is organized, exploited, and ordered within global capitalism. It is a rich and compelling volume for unpacking the complexity of labour control and diversity of labour regimes, as well as the potential avenues to be explored to confront them”
—Adam Fishwick, Capital and Class
“The concept of labour regimes is remarkably important in analysing the organisational structure and dynamics of global systems related to production (of commodity) and reproduction (of labour).”
—Fahmi Panimbang, Asian Labour Review
“The book demonstrates a careful balance between consolidating the framework on the one hand, while on the other hand noting differences in perspective, incipient debates and areas for further development. … Overall, the volume achieves a remarkable breadth and depth that will serve scholars of labour and political economy well. And … sets out a clear agenda for further developing a framework that is capable of attending to the myriad aspects of a critical political economy of labour.”
Siobhán McGrath, British Journal of Industrial Relations
Unprecedented: How Covid-19 Revealed the Politics of our Economy
by William Davies, Sahil Dutta, Nick Taylor, Martina Tazzioli
A critical and evidence-based account of the COVID-19 pandemic as a political–economic rupture, exposing underlying power struggles and social injustices. The dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic represented an exceptional interruption in the routines of work, financial markets, movement across borders and education.
The policies introduced in response were said to be unprecedented—but the distribution of risks and rewards was anything but. While asset-owners, outsourcers, platforms and those in spacious homes prospered, others faced new hardships and dangers.
Unprecedented? explores the events of 2020-21, as they afflicted the UK economy, as a means to grasp the underlying dynamics of contemporary capitalism, which are too often obscured from view. It traces the political and cultural contours of a "rentier nationalism," that was lurking prior to the pandemic, but was accelerated and illuminated by COVID-19. But it also pinpoints the contradictions and weaknesses of this capitalist model, and the new sources of opposition that it meets.
An empirical, accessible and critical analysis of the COVID economy, Unprecedented? is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the political and economic turbulence of the pandemic's first eighteen months.
“A powerful and persuasive examination of how Covid-19 both illuminated and compounded the vast debts - monetary and non-monetary, sovereign and interpersonal - underpinning contemporary capitalism, and of the staggering inequalities associated with the establishment and repayment of those debts. The political nature of ‘the economy' has rarely been as clear.”
—Brett Christophers, Uppsala University, Sweden
You can read an interview between Michelle Chihara and the authors in the Los Angeles Review of Books, an extract in The New Statesman and a review by Malcolm Sawyer in The European Legacy.
This book explores the philanthropy of Brazilian elites during a key period in recent Brazilian history, from Workers Party president Lula’s last term in office through to the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Against this backdrop of political upheaval, the book asks what philanthropy can reveal about the role of corporate and wealth elites in upholding the structures of socioeconomic inequality that continue to define Brazilian society.
The book argues that around the world the private sector’s growing engagement in international development has led to the emergence of a global philanthropic project centred on practices of "philanthrocapitalism" and "social finance," which ultimately seeks to legitimise global capitalism and the elite interests it serves.
Drawing on an in-depth and wide-ranging ethnographic study among philanthropists and their advisors in over 30 Brazilian foundations and intermediary organisations, the book combines a structural critique of the capitalist ideologies underlying philanthropic practice with a robust exploration into the ways in which wealthy Brazilians appropriate philanthropy directly to legitimise elite reproduction and the accumulation of wealth.
The book was reviewed by Arun Kumar in Organization.
"Sklair’s beautifully written, incisive book makes original points about family dynasties, perceptions of sacrifice, and morality in both the home and public sphere. An important study of philanthropy, inequality and family ties."
—Professor Linsey McGoey, University of Essex, UK
Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World
By
Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás
The global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of our carbon civilization - warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.
In this book, Campling and Colás analyse these and other sea-related phenomena through a historical and geographical lens. In successive chapters dealing with the political economy, ecology and geopolitics of the sea, the authors argue that the earth's geographical separation into land and sea has significant consequences for capitalist development.
The distinctive features of this mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land-sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, engendering new alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources.
The book has been translated into Spanish as El capitalismo y el mar: El factor marítimo en la construcción del mundo moderno, Verso Libros, 2025.
Capitalism and the Sea won the BISA IPEG 2022 Book Prize and was reviewed in The AAG Review of Books, Antipode, Boston Review, Economic Geography, International Socialism, The Jacobin, Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of Peasant Studies, The Mariner’s Mirror, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, Odisha Economic Journal, Review of Agrarian Studies, Society and Space, Tribune, What’s Worth Reading; and was the subject of a symposium in International Journal of Maritime History
“As the reader progresses through the chapters, the book adds layers to our understanding of capitalism and makes powerful interventions in a whole host of historical and contemporaneous scholarly debates including on the transition to capitalism, on the role of the state and on how to conceive of the nature–society relation. It does this through a continuous and seamless move back and forth between the abstract and the concrete with mobilization of an impressive amount of existing literature and archival material as well as the authors' own empirical data.”
—Mads Barbesgaard, Journal of Agrarian Change
“Campling and Colás highlight the negative externalities that capitalist accumulation has imposed on the oceans, from depletion of global fisheries through overfishing to rising sea levels and higher temperatures, slower currents, and acidification. The bill owed to the natural world remains, of course, unpaid, though it has now been called upon for collection as dramatic weather events disrupt global trade and capital’s ability to exploit the seas’ natural bounty.”
—Katy Fox-Hodess, Jacobin
“The underlying hypothesis is that the ocean poses certain risks and constraints to the logistical imperatives that subordinate the maritime world to the logic of global commodity exchange. These risks are both geophysical, resulting from the degradation of the natural environment and climate change, and socioeconomic, as a result of class struggle, increased competition, or issues such as terrorism and piracy. [T]he authors characterize the new relationship between sea and land as a terraqueous predicament (the first term is composed of terra and aqua), resulting from the primacy of land-based infrastructures and social networks in the reproduction of capitalism at sea, especially through labor, capital, and value.”
—Markus Hesse, Economic Geography