Description

By (author) Banaji Jarius

Short /annotation:
Forty years of research in historiography and marxism focused on the concept of ”modes of production.”

:
The essays collected within this text engage with the Marxist notion of a ”mode of production”, the emergence of the medieval relations of production, the origins of capitalism, the dichotomy between free and unfree labour and essays in agrarian history. Together, the insightful and thought provoking texts within Theory as History demonstrate the importance of reintegrating theory within history and of bringing history back into historical materialism. Meticulously grounded in evidence, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in capitalism and Marxism.

Table of contents:
Foreword, Marcel van der Linden
Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Themes in Historical Materialism
2. Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History
3. Historical Arguments for a ‘Logic of Deployment’ in ‘Precapitalist’ Agriculture
4. Workers Before Capitalism
5. The Fictions of Free Labour: Contract, Coercion and so-called Unfree Labour
6. Agrarian History and the Labour-Organisation of Byzantine Large Estates
7. Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: What Kind of Transition? (A Discussion of Chris Wickham’s magnum opus)
8. Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages
9. Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism
10. Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century
11. Trajectories of Accumulation or ‘Transitions’ to Capitalism?
12. Modes of Production: A Synthesis

Publications of Jairus Banaji

References
Index

Review quote:
“From the impact of slavery, the rise of the poor taking control, and the role of other philosophies and faiths impacting the discussion, Theory as History is a unique way to discuss history, economics, and the people behind it, a core addition to any community library history collection.”

Midwest Book Review

“The great merit of this volume is that it establishes an approach for [the debates about the nature and origin of capitalism] that is deeply theoretical, but at the same time refreshingly unhampered by the kind of doctrinaire attachment to a perceived (and often misread) orthodoxy that plagued so much of historical materialism” for the past century. It is scholarly, without being purely academic … Banaji’s book deserves to be read and debated as one of the starting points for a new wave of Marxist historiography, still in the process of liberating itself from the ghost of its formalist past.”

Pepijn Brandon, International Socialism

“Banaji’s seemingly idiosyncratic but in fact highly sophisticated and original approach to historical analysis provides not only a welcome stimulus and a challenge for scholars today, but also will give them plenty to think about for many years to come”

Marcel van der Linden, research director of the International Institute of Social History

Theory as History is a book written at the summit of a lifetime’s engagement with issues of Marxist theory and practice … Banaji’s work demonstrates that no aspect of human history is irrelevant to the present. His scholarship shows immense skill, depth and range [proving] it is not the Marxist method that has been at fault, but the dominance of non-Marxist theory and method in the minds of Marxist.”

Counterfire

Review quote:
“From the impact of slavery, the rise of the poor taking control, and the role of other philosophies and faiths impacting the discussion, Theory as History is a unique way to discuss history, economics, and the people behind it, a core addition to any