Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial IndiaFraternal Capital examines class, gender, and work in Tiruppur, South India, where export of knitted garments has been led by a networked fraternity of owners of working-class and Gounder caste origins, who explain their class mobility as hinging on their "toil." This book asks how these self-made men drew from their agrarian past to turn Gounder toil into capital, and how they continue to make an entire town work for the global economy. Fraternal Capital decenters understandings of global capitalism by linking agrarian transition with the adaptation of a singular past in the interests of accumulation. As Tiruppur shifts to global production, this book tracks ways in which gender links sexed bodies to processes of differentiation, in the tenuous search for consent to increasingly despotic work politics. Tiruppur demonstrates the importance of gender and geography to the globalization of capital as it affects the lives of working people in provincial India and elsewhere. This book links the political economy of development to postcolonial and cultural studies, rooting the analysis of globalization ethnographically and geographically. Fraternal Capital provides a window into a decentralized capitalism and thereby critiques macroeconomic portrayals of globalization by showing how history, geography, gender, and work practice shape local sites of global production. For orders from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, please e-mail Permanent Black at perblack@ndb.vsnl.net.in. |
Contents
A Worker Path to Capital? | 1 |
PART I | 51 |
Accumulation Strategies and Gounder Dominance | 109 |
PART II | 125 |
Agrarian and Colonial Questions | 143 |
Can the Subaltern Accumulate Capital? | 182 |
Gender Fetishisms and Shifting Hegemonies | 240 |
Globalizing the Moffusils | 274 |
Gounders in the Third Italy | 283 |
Appendix 2 | 290 |
Glossary | 340 |
348 | |
371 | |
Other editions - View all
Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, Self-made Men, and Globalization in ... Sharad Chari No preview available - 2004 |
Common terms and phrases
accumulation agrarian transition agricultural banian bank Bhai capitalist caste Cawthorne Chapter Chennai Chettiar CITU class mobility Coimbatore District Coimbatore's colonial communist contracting cotton Dalit decentralized differentiation division of labor domestic owners dominant economy elite exporters fabrication factory farmers feminization firms fraternal capital garments gendered hegemony gins global Gounder caste Gounder ex-Workers Gounder farming Gounder owners Gounder toil Hosiery Ibid important industrial Interview jobwork Khadar knitting knitwear Kongunad labor process labor unions land leader Madras Madras Presidency manufacture Marwaris masculinity Muslim Muthusamy Nalasamy networks Northern numbers organized Palanisamy particularly peasant percent piece rates politics production Ramasamy regional relations route rural Sathyaraj sector self-made shift SIHMA sister concerns social labor South India spatial spinning mills stitching machines stitching section strategy strike subaltern Tamil Nadu textile tion Tiruppur Tiruppur knitwear town trade units urban Velusamy village wages women workers working-class yarn