Historia Crítica, a journal of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), announces a call for papers for its special issue “Capitalisms of the “Global South”, X-XIX centuries, guest-edited by Constanza Castro (Assistant Professor. Department of History and Geography. Universidad de los Andes) and Kaveh Yazdani (Assistant Professor. Department of History. The University of Connecticut). Articles should be submitted between October 1 and November 15, 2022.
The capitalist world is conventionally conceived to be either rooted in European regions such as north Italian city-states, England and the Dutch Republic or inter-imperial rivalries and colonizing processes stimulated by the search for new trade routes to the East. The agrarian and commercial revolutions, colonialism, the European Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, which preceded the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, were long considered to be the result of specifically European conditions in the organization of land, capital, and labor as well as the development of unique European ideas and culture. The alleged Western exceptionalism and internally produced development of these processes, which for many years have predominantly explained the so-called “great divergence” or the “European miracle,” i.e., the Euro-American socio-economic and geo-political supremacy, the quantitative and qualitative leap in living standards and techno-scientific progress in the West compared to China and India, has been widely contested in the past two decades.
Works by members of the California School (André Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone), revisionist scholars and global historians (Jack Goody, Christopher Bayly, John Hobson and Prasannan Parthasarathi), and recent Marxist writings (Giovanni Arrighi, Samir Amin, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Jairus Banaji), have questioned some of the normative concepts of political economy, the persistence of Eurocentric national or diffusionist narratives, and have also challenged contemporary studies that equate global history with the history of capitalism. Instead, they have privileged histories of capitalism that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state and try to explain both interconnections and global inequalities while spatially and temporally expanding upon the various manifestations and forms commonly associated with capitalism.
These analyses have undoubtedly highlighted the relationship between capitalism’s local and global histories and vice versa. In this sense, they show the diverse forms in which competition, labor relations, monetary regimes, the processes of insertion into the world economy, or society-state relations are organized both geographically and temporally. These arrangements, which result from social and political struggles, shape specifically localized and, therefore, diverse accumulation regimes and regulatory systems.
This special issue aims to add to this recent historiography by analyzing how capitalism took shape through global connections with centers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, before and after the era of colonization. It seeks to de-center the history of capitalism, question the idea of European exceptionalism, transcend the analysis of national boundaries, and challenge economic histories based on an exclusively Eurocentric version of the “great divergence” to explore how knowledge, technologies, and practices originating outside Europe were central to the accumulation of capital, the formation of European powers, and the structure of relations of domination from and outside Europe. Hence, it is intended to contribute to the renewed interest in capitalism by showing that the history of the capitalisms of the “Global South” is fundamental to understanding capitalism, as a complex, diverse, and global phenomenon.
We are interested in receiving contributions analyzing South, West, and Southeast Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and China since the 10th century, and of course, Latin America during the colonial period up to the 19th century.
This dossier seeks to open up space for the study of these dynamics in different historical moments and geographical areas and is interested in contributions that, in addition to approaching the problems raised, have the following characteristics:
• Works located in specific places and periods.
• Texts constructed with sufficient empirical evidence.
• Pieces introducing recent historiographical or theoretical debates on the emergence and rise of capitalism.
Papers analyzing some of the following problems are of particular interest for this special issue:
• The role of regions, structural conditions, individual and collective activities, and social groups in Africa, Asia or Latin America in the emergence and advancement of agrarian, commercial, financial or industrial capitalism.
• The socio-economic, technological and intellectual relations between Asia, Africa and Latin America that contributed to the emergence of capitalism in and outside Europe.
• The relationship between slavery and capitalism. • Capitalism not only conceived as a socio-economic system based on the extraction of surplus-value and the accumulation of capital on a global scale but also as a result of relations of domination and power, including global hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race or knowledge.
• Pieces that grapple with the understanding of a colonial economy as either necessary or distinct from a capitalist one; or texts that analyze the character and function of coercion and violence in colonial capitalism or the role of pre-colonial socio-economic forms in the advancement of capitalism.
• The analysis of the formation of markets, commercial and financial networks, and legal regimes linked to the emergence and rise of capitalism outside the North Atlantic space.
• The examination of different periods, stages, and phases in the development of capitalism, including the specific characteristics of distinct manifestations of capitalisms or varieties of capitalism.
• Theoretical and methodological deliberations about the dynamics, existence and underlying conceptions of capitalist structures and practices, including rigorous definitions of capitalism, according to which certain regions and periods are regarded as pre- or non-capitalist.
We invite participants to submit unpublished contributions in English, Spanish or Portuguese. Manuscripts should be submitted in Word format for Windows and conform to the journal's guidelines: maximum length of 11,000 words, New Roman font, 12 points, single-spaced, letter size, with equal margins of 3 cm. The author's details are presented in a separate file. Footnotes and bibliography follow the adaptation of the Chicago Manual of Style.
Detailed rules for manuscript submission can be found at https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/for-authors/histcrit/editorial-policy
Non-compliance leads to automatic rejection of the manuscript.
Texts must be submitted through OJS, using the link provided on the journal's website during the call for papers period (-Submission of articles-).
Material submitted to Historia Crítica cannot be simultaneously under review in another publication.