Jairus Banaji
Biographic Data
| ID | 97859 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jairus Banaji |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jairus |
| FAMILY NAME | Banaji |
| SIGNATURE | BANAJI J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4935-3080 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 313 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 45 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
A Marxist Mosaic
Historical materialism as Marx understood this was always an integrated conception or field of research, not one divided into separate disciplines. The essays gathered in this volume are a remarkable example of how this works across a wide range of subjects as diverse as agrarian history, capitalism, Hegel's influence on Marx, and class struggles in India. They were written over some fifty years of both activism and academic work, embodying Banaj…
From the Commodity to Capital
Los orígenes del capitalismo comercial, la expansión colonial y la historia como teoría. Una entrevista a Jairus Banaji
Objetivo/Contexto: En esta entrevista planteo un recorrido por la trayectoria intelectual de Jairus Banaji. Esta se enfoca en distintos aspectos que comprenden el estudio de la historia del capitalismo desde una perspectiva marxista, ahondando en la expansión de la economía monetaria en el Imperio romano tardío, el dinamismo económico del mundo islámico en la época medieval y el papel que los comerciantes y mercaderes desempeñaron en el surgimien…
The Crisis of British Anthropology
Two events have transformed the background of post-war anthropology: the colonial revolution leading to the rise of struggles against imperialism, now on the defensive, and, at a different level, the growth of structural anthropology. The one reflects the other, for the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss is an extended
Globalising the History of Capital
Anievas and Nişancıoğlu’s attempt to shift the terms of the debate about early modern capitalism by a major widening of its perspectives is a welcome move. Accepting this, the paper suggests that their argument can be more forcefully made if the theoretical residues of earlier traditions of Marxist historical explanation are purged from the way they expound that argument. The most ambivalent of these relates to their continued use of the idea of …
Merchant Capitalism, Peasant Households and Industrial Accumulation
My paper underscores the theoretical contribution of an early essay by Henry Bernstein, 'Notes on Capital and Peasantry', published in 1977. It uses the ideas in that essay to construct a general argument about the ways in which capitalism dominates household producers. The first section summarizes the arguments of Bernstein's essay and relates them to key passages of A.V. Chayanov's work. The second section builds a model of how commercial capit…
Exploring the Economy of Late Antiquity
Putting Theory to Work
This reply defends the need for a specifically materialist historiography of modes of production other than capitalism; argues that Marxists should see history as being driven by the state as much as it is by classes; defends the scientific value of the category ‘merchant capitalism’; and explains why Marx came around to seeing the slave plantations as part of ‘total capital’. It concludes by suggesting both that Marx allowed for different levels…
Seasons of Self-Delusion
To grasp current trends within capitalism without abandoning the framework of Marx’s Capital we need to return to the category of ‘fictitious capital’ and make it central to our explanations. Based on the 2012 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Lecture, this essay combines reflections on Marx’s account of ‘fictitious capital’; an investigation of the role of bills of exchange; and an analysis of the recent turmoil in British and US banking. It l…
Economic Trajectories
This article attempts to trace the multiple economic trajectories that occurred in Late Antiquity. The discussion includes the dissolution of the Western aristocracy; the erosion of the Gallic aristocracy that proceeded apace with the consolidation of Gothic power in the fifth century; and the collapse of Italian aristocracy in the sixth century.
Fascism as a Mass-Movement
This Introduction to Rosenberg’s essay starts with a brief synopsis of his life, then summarises the key arguments of the essay itself before looking briefly at the twin issues of the social base of the fascist parties (wider than just the ‘petty bourgeoisie’) and the passive complicity/compliance of ‘ordinary Germans’, as the literature now terms whole sectors of the civilian population that were defined by their apathy or moral indifference to …
Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages
The stereotype of slave-run latifundia being turned into serf-worked estates is no longer credible as a model of the transition from antiquity to the middle ages, but Chris Wickham’s anomalous characterisation of the Roman Empire as ‘feudal’ is scarcely a viable alternative to that. If a fully-articulated feudal economy only emerged in the later middle ages, what do we make of the preceding centuries? By postulating a ‘general dominance of tenant…
Chapter Ten. Capitalist Domination And The Small Peasantry
There is a widespread notion that the Indian countryside is still to a large extent dominated by precapitalist relationships of a semi-feudal variety. This chapter attempts to show why a dilemma of this sort represents only a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. It attempts to argue that the positions of Bhaduri and Patnaik, and many others of a similar tendency, rest on an erroneous conception of intervention in the process of product…
Theory as History
Winner of the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. The essays collected here straddle four decades of work in both historiography and Marxist theory, combining source-based historical work in a wide range of languages with sophisticated discussion of Marx's categories. Key themes include the distinctions that are crucial to restoring complexity to the Marxist notion of a 'mode of production'; the emergence of medieval relations of prod…
Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages
This paper sets out to establish a general contrast between the traditions of agrarian bondage that characterized the West in the wake of the disintegration of the Roman empire and the peculiar vulnerability of the peasantry in the Byzantine, Sasanian and Islamic Near East. Within this general contrast between peasantries, I explore the differences between aristocracies in the late antique and post-Roman worlds, date the beginnings of the medieva…
Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism
Marxist notions of the origins of capitalism are still largely structured by the famous debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This essay suggests that that tradition of historiography locates capitalism too late and sees it in essentially national terms. It argues that capitalism began, on a European scale, in the important transformations that followed the great revival of the eleventh century and the role played by mercantile é…
The Fictions of Free Labour
The conception of contracts as the outcome of a free choice generalises to all sorts of contracts, including contracts of employment. Liberal legalism, or the pure or general theory of contract that developed in the nineteenth century, grounded the almost limitless subordination of the wage-labourer in the anodyne fictions of consent. Marx himself defined free labour primarily in terms of the dispossession of labour, and then, of course, its abil…
Conclusion
It has been a major argument of this book that the emergence of gold as a stable high-value coinage revolutionized the economic conditions of the late empire. In gold the aristocracy rediscovered a powerful medium of accumulation, and the state a medium of taxation that would progressively displace taxes in kind as the dominant form of public revenue. The dogma of late antique isolationism, deeply rooted in the first generation of scholars who tu…
Estates
The large rural properties of the Mediterranean evolved in a variety of distinctive cultural and ecological settings which exerted an obvious influence on their topographies and structural form. In abstraction from these settings, the term ‘estate’ conveys little beyond the rough impression of a large agricultural property. Even if we hold the factor of scale constant, the large properties of the Roman Mediterranean display irreducible diversity.…
Appendix 2
Note To The Revised Edition
Subject European History Ancient History (Non-Classical, to 500 CE) Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Glossary
Subject European History Ancient History (Non-Classical, to 500 CE) Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
The Monetary Economy of the Late Empire and its Social Presuppositions
In Aspetti sociali del quarto secolo Mazzarino argued that the Constantinian monetary order differed fundamentally from Diocletian’s. He saw the differences mainly in terms of social ones. Constantine promoted the interests of the owners of gold. The basis of this is the idea that Diocletian, on the contrary, held the price of gold artifically low. The evolution of Constantine’s system destroyed these value relations with inexorable permanence. I…
Appendix 3
A Late Antique Aristocracy
While Flavius Strategius I is the first landowner from a discernibly Byzantine tradition (in Rémondon’s sense of the aristocracy which he characterizes as ‘les hauts fonctionnaires latifondiaires’), other surviving exemplars of this group embody its essential features in an even purer form. But their connection with the Oxyrhynchite is worth emphasizing. With the appearance, in our evidence, of Strategius, Hardy’s suggestion that Count John, come…
The Fictions of Free Labour
The conception of contracts as the outcome of a free choice generalises to all sorts of contracts, including contracts of employment. Liberal legalism, or the pure or general theory of contract that developed in the nineteenth century, grounded the almost limitless subordination of the wage-labourer in the anodyne fictions of consent. Marx himself defined free labour primarily in terms of the dispossession of labour, and then, of course, its abil…
Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History
the extremely dubious speculative juggling, with the concepts and terms of the materialist method, which has under the pens of some of our Marxists transplanted the methods of formalism into the domain of the materialist dialectic; which has led to reducing the task to rendering definitions and classifications more precise and to splitting empty abstractions into four equally empty parts; in short, has adulterated Marxism by means of the indecent…
Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic Dominance
The economy of the late antique Mediterranean is still largely seen through the prism of Weber's influential essay of 1896. Rejecting that orthodoxy, this book argues that the late empire saw substantial economic and social change, propelled by the powerful stimulus of a stable gold coinage that circulated widely. In successive chapters Dr Banaji adduces fresh evidence for the prosperity of the late Roman countryside, the expanding circulation of…
Merchant Capitalism, Peasant Households and Industrial Accumulation
My paper underscores the theoretical contribution of an early essay by Henry Bernstein, 'Notes on Capital and Peasantry', published in 1977. It uses the ideas in that essay to construct a general argument about the ways in which capitalism dominates household producers. The first section summarizes the arguments of Bernstein's essay and relates them to key passages of A.V. Chayanov's work. The second section builds a model of how commercial capit…
Illusions about the peasantry
The Agrarian Question, by Karl Kautsky. Two volumes. Translated by Pete Burgess, with an Introduction by Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin. London: Zwan Publications, 1988. Pp.xxxix + 459. £25 per volume (hardback). The first English translation of the complete 1899 edition of Karl Kautsky's The Agrarian Question prompts a critical assessment of that work: as a political intervention, and as a work of theory; in its own time, and with respect to toda…
The farmers’ movements
1994). The farmers’ movements: A critique of conservative rural coalitions. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 21, New Farmers' Movements in India, pp. 228-245
The peasantry in the feudal mode of production
Over the last thirty years a substantial body of historical writing has evolved which deals in one way or another with the nature and tendencies of feudal economy. From the shorter conjuncture-studies published in Annales, the regional monographs sponsored in France, the monographic estate-studies popular in England, to the more concentrated historical synopses based on them, this literature1 covers a vast field, geographically and chronologicall…
Backward capitalism, primitive accumulation and modes of production
1973). Backward capitalism, primitive accumulation and modes of production. Journal of Contemporary Asia: Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 393-413
Gunder Frank in Rětreat
World Accumulation, 1492–1789, by Andre Gunder Frank. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978. Pp. 303, index. £3.95, paper. In this review article, Andre Gunder Frank's latest book, World Accumulation, is given extended critical treatment. It is argued that, in generalising his earlier arguments (which were formulated with respect to Chile and Brazil) across space and time, and in responding to a decade of criticism of his work, Frank has moved clo…
The Metamorphoses of Agrarian Capitalism
Book reviewed in this article: Daniel Thorner (ed.), Ecological and Agrarian Regions of South Asia circa 1930 Daniel Thorner’s agrarian atlas of India, fully prepared for the press by 1965, was belatedly published two decades later thanks to the untiring efforts of Alice Thorner. The heart of the atlas consists of a series of descriptions written by the historian Chen Han‐seng to illustrate his division of the subcontinent into 21 agrarian region…
Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism
Marxist notions of the origins of capitalism are still largely structured by the famous debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This essay suggests that that tradition of historiography locates capitalism too late and sees it in essentially national terms. It argues that capitalism began, on a European scale, in the important transformations that followed the great revival of the eleventh century and the role played by mercantile é…
The Crisis of British Anthropology
Two events have transformed the background of post-war anthropology: the colonial revolution leading to the rise of struggles against imperialism, now on the defensive, and, at a different level, the growth of structural anthropology. The one reflects the other, for the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss is an extended
Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages
This paper sets out to establish a general contrast between the traditions of agrarian bondage that characterized the West in the wake of the disintegration of the Roman empire and the peculiar vulnerability of the peasantry in the Byzantine, Sasanian and Islamic Near East. Within this general contrast between peasantries, I explore the differences between aristocracies in the late antique and post-Roman worlds, date the beginnings of the medieva…
Globalisation and restructuring in the Indian food industry
1996). Globalisation and restructuring in the Indian food industry. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 24, Agrarian Questions Essays in Appreciation of T.J. Byres, pp. 191-210
Globalising the History of Capital
Anievas and Nişancıoğlu’s attempt to shift the terms of the debate about early modern capitalism by a major widening of its perspectives is a welcome move. Accepting this, the paper suggests that their argument can be more forcefully made if the theoretical residues of earlier traditions of Marxist historical explanation are purged from the way they expound that argument. The most ambivalent of these relates to their continued use of the idea of …
Putting Theory to Work
This reply defends the need for a specifically materialist historiography of modes of production other than capitalism; argues that Marxists should see history as being driven by the state as much as it is by classes; defends the scientific value of the category ‘merchant capitalism’; and explains why Marx came around to seeing the slave plantations as part of ‘total capital’. It concludes by suggesting both that Marx allowed for different levels…
Seasons of Self-Delusion
To grasp current trends within capitalism without abandoning the framework of Marx’s Capital we need to return to the category of ‘fictitious capital’ and make it central to our explanations. Based on the 2012 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Lecture, this essay combines reflections on Marx’s account of ‘fictitious capital’; an investigation of the role of bills of exchange; and an analysis of the recent turmoil in British and US banking. It l…
Fascism as a Mass-Movement
This Introduction to Rosenberg’s essay starts with a brief synopsis of his life, then summarises the key arguments of the essay itself before looking briefly at the twin issues of the social base of the fascist parties (wider than just the ‘petty bourgeoisie’) and the passive complicity/compliance of ‘ordinary Germans’, as the literature now terms whole sectors of the civilian population that were defined by their apathy or moral indifference to …
Backward capitalism, primitive accumulation and modes of production
1973). Backward capitalism, primitive accumulation and modes of production. Journal of Contemporary Asia: Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 393-413
The peasantry in the feudal mode of production
Over the last thirty years a substantial body of historical writing has evolved which deals in one way or another with the nature and tendencies of feudal economy. From the shorter conjuncture-studies published in Annales, the regional monographs sponsored in France, the monographic estate-studies popular in England, to the more concentrated historical synopses based on them, this literature1 covers a vast field, geographically and chronologicall…
Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History
the extremely dubious speculative juggling, with the concepts and terms of the materialist method, which has under the pens of some of our Marxists transplanted the methods of formalism into the domain of the materialist dialectic; which has led to reducing the task to rendering definitions and classifications more precise and to splitting empty abstractions into four equally empty parts; in short, has adulterated Marxism by means of the indecent…
Gunder Frank in Rětreat
World Accumulation, 1492–1789, by Andre Gunder Frank. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978. Pp. 303, index. £3.95, paper. In this review article, Andre Gunder Frank's latest book, World Accumulation, is given extended critical treatment. It is argued that, in generalising his earlier arguments (which were formulated with respect to Chile and Brazil) across space and time, and in responding to a decade of criticism of his work, Frank has moved clo…
Illusions about the peasantry
The Agrarian Question, by Karl Kautsky. Two volumes. Translated by Pete Burgess, with an Introduction by Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin. London: Zwan Publications, 1988. Pp.xxxix + 459. £25 per volume (hardback). The first English translation of the complete 1899 edition of Karl Kautsky's The Agrarian Question prompts a critical assessment of that work: as a political intervention, and as a work of theory; in its own time, and with respect to toda…
Beyond Multinationalism
Multinationalism and the Decline of Employment Main Differences in the Bargaining System Pay and Benefits Grading Practices Leave, Working Hours and Labour Use Working Conditions, Health and Safety Back to Bargaining Attitudes, Organisation and Conflict Trade Union Strategies The Strategy of Multinationalism Towards a Conclusion
The farmers’ movements
1994). The farmers’ movements: A critique of conservative rural coalitions. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 21, New Farmers' Movements in India, pp. 228-245
Globalisation and restructuring in the Indian food industry
1996). Globalisation and restructuring in the Indian food industry. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 24, Agrarian Questions Essays in Appreciation of T.J. Byres, pp. 191-210
Conclusion
It has been a major argument of this book that the emergence of gold as a stable high-value coinage revolutionized the economic conditions of the late empire. In gold the aristocracy rediscovered a powerful medium of accumulation, and the state a medium of taxation that would progressively displace taxes in kind as the dominant form of public revenue. The dogma of late antique isolationism, deeply rooted in the first generation of scholars who tu…
Estates
The large rural properties of the Mediterranean evolved in a variety of distinctive cultural and ecological settings which exerted an obvious influence on their topographies and structural form. In abstraction from these settings, the term ‘estate’ conveys little beyond the rough impression of a large agricultural property. Even if we hold the factor of scale constant, the large properties of the Roman Mediterranean display irreducible diversity.…
Appendix 2
Note To The Revised Edition
Subject European History Ancient History (Non-Classical, to 500 CE) Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Glossary
Subject European History Ancient History (Non-Classical, to 500 CE) Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
The Monetary Economy of the Late Empire and its Social Presuppositions
In Aspetti sociali del quarto secolo Mazzarino argued that the Constantinian monetary order differed fundamentally from Diocletian’s. He saw the differences mainly in terms of social ones. Constantine promoted the interests of the owners of gold. The basis of this is the idea that Diocletian, on the contrary, held the price of gold artifically low. The evolution of Constantine’s system destroyed these value relations with inexorable permanence. I…
Appendix 3
A Late Antique Aristocracy
While Flavius Strategius I is the first landowner from a discernibly Byzantine tradition (in Rémondon’s sense of the aristocracy which he characterizes as ‘les hauts fonctionnaires latifondiaires’), other surviving exemplars of this group embody its essential features in an even purer form. But their connection with the Oxyrhynchite is worth emphasizing. With the appearance, in our evidence, of Strategius, Hardy’s suggestion that Count John, come…
Existing Accounts of the Byzantine Large Estate
For Hardy the Byzantine large estate grew up in a context of major changes in the social and administrative system of the late empire. The large estate, fully formed by the end of the fith century, emerged through some process which enabled a bureaucratic élite, the ffficals who were ‘among the most frequent patrons and founders of estates’, both to accumulate holdings and to assert new types of control over the population.
Title Pages
The Rural Landscape of the Late Empire
When the merchant Ibn Hauqal described the countryside of Egypt around the middle of the tenth century, the distribution of cash crops was dominated by a certain specialization, with Assouan (Syene) noted for its abundance of date palms, Ashmunein for flax, ‘Fayyum’ (the former Arsinoe) for fruit orchards and rice cultivation, Bahnasā (Oxyrhynchus) for its diversified textile industry, and so on.
Appendix 5
Appendix 1
Wage Labour and the Peasantry
Ge ō rgoi regularly described themselves as ‘ge ō rgoi of such and such owner’, as in P. K ö ln III 152 (477?) where John son of Apphu called himself in an advance sale of fodder,1 or in P. Berl. Zilliacus 8 (663) where Sarapion son of Victor signed a good conduct bond with Peter, bishop of Arsinoe, calling himself . he implication is that such ‘peasants’ worked as regular employees of the owner rather than tenants bound by short-term contracts. …
Abbreviations
Weber, Mickwitz, and the Economic Characterization of Late Antiquity
In ‘Finance, Coinage and Money from the Severans to Constantine’, which he published in 1975, Michael Crawford summed up the economic background of the late empire in the following terms: ‘Empire-wide, the debasement of the silver coinage brought about a move to the collection of taxes and the payment of soldiers and offcials largely in kind ... The monetary circle simply became increasingly meaningless. It was doubtless completely abolished in t…
The Changing Balance of Rural Power ad 200–400
The major conclusion of the analysis presented in this and the following chapter will be that in the eastern provinces the advent of the late empire revolutionized provincial landholding, signalling the rapid decline of the élites which had dominated urban and agrarian life for most of the earlier period, and the gradual emergence, especially in the course of the fith century, of a new group of landowners whose social and professional roots were …
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