Description: Contemporary scholars debate the factors driving despotic labour conditions across the world economy. Some emphasize the dominance of global market imperatives and others highlight the market's reliance upon extra-economic coercion and state violence. At the Margins of the Global Market engages in this debate through a comparative and world-historical analysis of the labour regimes of three global commodity-producing subregions of rural Colombia: the coffee region of Viejo Caldas, the banana region of Urabá, and the coca/cocaine region of the Caguán. By drawing upon insights from labour regimes, global commodity chains, and world historical sociology, this book offers a novel understanding of the broad range of factors - local, national, global, and interregional - that shape labour conditions on the ground in Colombia. In doing so, it offers a critical new framework for analysing labour and development dynamics that exist at the margins of the global market.
Brief description: Phillip A. Hough is a Colombian-American sociologist who specializes in political economy, labour and agrarian movements, global commodity studies, comparative and world historical sociology, and Latin American development. His current research focuses on labour/agrarian struggles, state and paramilitary violence, class and state formations, and forced displacement and surplus populations.
Review Quotes: 'This book makes invaluable contributions to our understanding of labor regimes, commodity and value chains, and world historical sociology. Scholars interested in these fields, not to mention Colombian and Latin American historiography, will find a clearly argued, thoroughly researched, and theoretically sophisticated study. As the Trump administration attempts to dismantle what remains of postwar US hegemonic institutions, At the Margins of the Global Market offers insights into the kinds of developmental politics that could bring social welfare in a time of world systemic chaos.' César Bowley Castillo, The Journal of Development Studies