Lauren Benton

Invisible factories : the informal economy and industrial development in Spain

Invisible Factories The Informal Economy Invisible Factories analyzes the role of the informal economy in national development and weighs alternative claims about its impact on industrial development. Detailed case studies of the... Invisible Factories: The Informal Economy and Industrial ... Invisible Factories analyzes the role of the informal economy in national development and weighs alternative claims about its impact on industrial development. Detailed case studies of the electronics and shoe industries in Spain demonstrate the restructuring process. Amazon.com: Invisible Factories: The Informal Economy and ... Invisible Factories analyzes the role of the informal economy in national development and weighs alternative claims about its impact on industrial development. Detailed case studies of the electronics and shoe industries in Spain demonstrate the restructuring process. Benton examines the transformation of ideas about work and gender, the ... Invisible Factories: The Informal Economy and Industrial ... Invisible Factories analyzes the role of the informal economy in national development and weighs alternative claims about its impact on industrial development. Detailed case studies of the electronics and shoe industries in Spain demonstrate the restructuring process. Invisible Factories SUNY Press Get this from a library! Invisible factories : the informal economy and industrial development in Spain. [Lauren A Benton] Invisible factories : the informal economy and industrial ... Pulling rickshaws, selling vegetables, building malls, or working as domestic help, they toil to keep the wheels of the informal economy turning. The hitherto invisible migrants’ sudden ... The Pandemic Revealed India’s Invisible Workforce – The ... Home-based work — a hugely invisible sector of Thailand’s and the world’s informal economy — is now a major part of global supply chains. The most recently

Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism

In his geographical treatise of 1537, the Portuguese chronicler D. Joao de Castra explained that it would be possible to correlate all newly discovered lands with astronomical markers to produce an accurate map of the world. The result would be, he wrote, a “true and perfect geography.” The movement toward this vision, from the cartographic revolution of thirteenth-century Portolan charts to the use of surveying to map colonial territories in the nineteenth century, is a compelling narrative of the rationalization of space, and of the reinforcement of this trend by the pursuit of European imperial interests.

Acquiring Empire by Law: From Roman Doctrine to Early Modern European Practice

What role did the Roman legal concept of res nullius (things without owners), or the related concept of terra nullius (land without owners), play in the context of early modern European expansion? Scholars have provided widely different answers to this question. Some historians have argued that European claims based on terra nullius became a routine part of early modern interimperial politics, particularly as a response by the English and French crowns to expansive Iberian claims supported by papal donations. Others have countered that allusions to terra nullius marked a temporary phase of imperial discourse and that claimants relied more often on other rationales for empire, rarely mentioning res nullius or terra nullius and often explicitly recognizing the ownership rights, and even the sovereignty, of local polities and indigenous peoples.

Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850

Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford’s jointly-written book is slim in size – 197 pages of text, 74 of notes – but expansive in scope and interpretative ambition. It is a dense, complex piece of history, frequently operating on several levels at once. It asks us to rethink the study of international legal history in fundamental ways, not least by redrawing the boundaries between imperial, international, and global legal regimes. The authors pursue these arguments through an exploration of a series of overlapping projects of legal reform which took place within the British empire, and on its peripheries, in the first half of the 19th century. The book’s methodological claims are compelling; its contentions about the British imperial constitution are powerful, but not wholly persuasive. Approached, however, as a book about a set of themes – rather than as an authoritative treatment of specific problems – Rage for Order represents an immensely significant intervention in a wide range of debates.

From International Law to Imperial Constitutions: The Problem of Quasi-Sovereignty, 1870–1900

The roots of the international legal order have often been traced to intertwining scholarly and political traditions dating back to the early seventeenth century, in particular to early writings in international law and the rise of the nation-state in Europe. Recent scholarship has attacked this narrative from many angles. One approach has been to reexamine early modern European politics and discourse, in particular questioning whether, for example, the publication of Grotiuss writings, or the Peace of Westphalia, functioned as a foundational moment in the history of the interstate order. A second, complementary approach has been to broaden the history of global order to encompass inter-imperial politics, including the legal relations of imperial powers and indigenous subjects. The two projects have been occasionally combined in efforts to trace the impact of imperial politics on trends in international law.

Spatial Histories of Empire

There is something logical and perhaps even comforting about linking the history of European expansion to a narrative about the slow but steady rationalization of space. Periodic advances in techniques of navigation and mapping, an increasing focus on boundaries in treaty-making between imperial rivals, and the accumulation of geographic knowledge of conquered and colonized territories by the colonizers – these trends appear as defining elements of the construction of global European power both in older imperial histories and in post-Foucauldian studies emphasizing social control and governmentality in colonial societies. ‘Mapping’ features in this telling as both a technology in the service of empire and as a metaphor for the colonial project of mastery through knowledge accumulation and control.

No Longer Odd Region Out: Repositioning Latin America in World History

��� The history of Latin America has been instrumental to the rise of world history as a research field. Some of the seminal works of world history have highlighted Latin American‐centered events, from William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples to Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange. The region has also provided important subject matter for groundbreaking studies on topics that have become the bread and butter of global historians: diasporas, transnational movements, and the rise of global capitalism. It might seem, then, that the relationship between Latin American history and world history has been a close one and that the two fields have informed each other more than they have developed in isolation. Yet the reality is both more complex and more troubling. In the main paradigms of world history, Latin America has been placed not in the foreground, but off to the side, inhabiting a space that is not so much insignificant as it is simply strange. Many comparative analyses have cast the region as a contrast to patterns of change that in turn take on the character of historical models. Together, the trends produce a tendency to view the continent as “odd region out”— home to anomalous processes and perpetually out of sync with global historical periodization. Curiously, emphasis on the region’s oddities is perhaps most muted in the historiography of the precolumbian period. Here, though we might expect exceptionalism to attach itself to representations of Aztec and Incan Empires as, at the very least, technologically different from their counterparts in other world regions, historians and anthropologists have instead operated largely within a comparative framework that emphasizes shared structures of symbolic practices, social hierarchies, and agricultural regimes.1 The treatment of later

Historical Perspectives on Legal Pluralism

AbstractHistorical research represents our richest vein of information about the workings of legal pluralism. Before the long nineteenth century, all legal orders featured jurisdictional tensions without strong claims of legal hegemony by states. In a world in which plural legal orders were the norm, multicentric jurisdictional orders created continuities across diverse regions and polities. What can we learn from the history of legal pluralism in considering its relation to economic development today? To begin, legal history can provide an analytic guide to grasping the complexities of current legal patterns and behavior. A particularly helpful rubric emerges out of studies of the legal history of empires. A second relevant fi nding confi rmed by historical studies of plural legal orders, including and especially empires, consists in the observation that legal actors — again, at all levels — tended to show a preference over time for adjudication in forums that seemed to provide a greater possibility of enforcement of rulings. This paper examines these phenomena in early modern societies in order to lay the groundwork for analyzing legal pluralism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By keeping in view the jurisdictional jockeying of imperial legal orders, we gain new perspective on the role of legal pluralism at major turning points in the development of international law. In particular, it becomes possible to understand nineteenth century prohibition regimes as forming through jurisdictional restructuring within and across global empires — a view that contrasts with traditional narratives of the rise of international law. Similarly, understanding the pervasiveness and persistence of strategies of appealing to imperial legal authority allows us to appreciate the effects on legal behavior of robust claims to the dominance of state law over subordinate jurisdictions in the twentieth century.

The Laws of This Country: Foreigners and the Legal Construction of Sovereignty in Uruguay, 1830-1875

State making in nineteenth-century colonial settings involved contests over the configuration of plural legal systems. Colonial powers limited the jurisdiction of colonial courts and adopted complex, shifting rules for the articulation of imposed and indigenous law. The politics of legal pluralism in such settings became tied to discourse about cultural difference as groups challenged or justified jurisdictional boundaries by reference to the cultural characteristics of various colonial constituencies. The process of ordering legal authorities and assigning political identities reinforced the authority of incipient colonial states and emphasized the differences between colonial and metropolitan law. In postcolonial settings or in cases of informal empire, where outsiders did not impose law or oversee its articulation with local legal sources and forums, conflicts over the structure of the legal order have received considerably less attention. Such conflicts were, however, prominent elements of national state making. This article explores the politics of legal pluralism and its impact on state building in one Latin American country in the mid-nineteenth century. Legal authority in the early South American repub-

Abolition and Imperial Law, 1790-1820

Historians have represented the movement for the abolition of the slave trade as a turning point in international law, either characterising the formation of mixed commissions to adjudicate slave ship captures as elements of early human rights law or interpreting the treaty regime supporting the ban on the slave trade as marking a decisive shift towards positivism in international law. A closer look at the legal history of abolition suggests that such perspectives omit an important dimension: the ties between abolition and imperial legal consolidation. In exploring such ties, the article first examines prize law and its direct and indirect influence on calls for intra-imperial regulation of the slave trade, especially its effective criminalisation. Across the empire, efforts to ban the slave trade reflected and reinforced pressures to strengthen imperial legal authority by regulating and restricting planter legal prerogatives.