Join CLaSP & Journal of Agrarian Change for a brief presentation of the book which will be followed by a discussion by Dr Alessandra Mezzadri, Reader in Global Development and Political Economy, SOAS (University of London).  

The event is hybrid, register here for the zoom link: https://forms.gle/61zmU4qjrxyu7VVY9

Abstract:  

For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel's arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labour-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 labour 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 labourer 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 labour 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. 

https://www.sup.org/books/anthropology/capitalist-colonial  

This event is co-organized with the Agrarian Change Seminar Series, convened by the Journal of Agrarian Change.

Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a Lecturer at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London.