Haiti is a very poor country with a stagnant economy. This title, first published in 1983, considers the Haitian economy, placing it in its historical context, and explores the reasons why it has performed so badly. Mats Lundahl examines agriculture, which has failed to provide an adequate standard of living, analyses the structure of agricultural production, and explains why the land is so unproductive. Lundahl analyses why technology in agriculture is so underdeveloped and argues that no government since 1820 has been seriously interested in fostering economic development, since vested interest consistently intervenes to discourage new projects.

Haiti is a country which, until the earthquake of 2010, remained largely outside the focus of world interest and outside the important international historical currents during its existence as a free nation. The nineteenth century was the decisive period in Haitian history, serving to shape the class structure, the political tradition and the economic system. During most of this period, Haiti had little contact with both its immediate neighbours and the industrialised nations of the world, which led to the development of Haiti as a peasant nation. This title, first published in 1979, examines the factors responsible for the poverty of the Haitian peasant, by using both traditional economic models as well as a multidisciplinary approach incorporating economics and other branches of social science. The analysis deals primarily with the Haitian peasant economy from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, examining in depth the explanations for the secular tendency of rural per capita incomes to decline during this period.

Taking a multidisciplinary and global approach, this edited book examines the dynamic role of plantations as productive, socio-political and ecological forms throughout imperial and post-colonial worlds spanning multiple and broad temporalities. Showcasing an expansive range of case studies across different geographies, the collection sheds light on the heterogeneity of plantations and offers insights into the afterlives, spectres and remnants of systems that have been analysed as schemes of production, extraction and authority. Focusing on the expansion of plantation systems throughout various political-economic and ecological projects, and across the modern (and post-modern) period, allows the authors to move beyond analyses that often deal with individual empires through human-centered lenses. The contributors explore resistance to the mechanisms of extraction and control that plantations and their afterlives demanded, shedding light on their excesses, contradictions, failures and deviations. Offering a comprehensive treatment of global plantations, this book provides valuable reading for researchers with an interest in the socio-political and environmental effects of colonialism and imperialism in their various guises. Chapters 1, 8 and 11 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Life and Money uncovers the contentious history of the boundary between economy and politics in liberalism. Ute Tellmann traces the shifting ontologies for defining economic necessity. She argues that our understanding of the malleability of economic relations has been displaced by colonial hierarchies of civilization and the biopolitics of the nation. Bringing economics into conversation with political theory, cultural economy, postcolonial thought, and history, Tellmann gives a radically novel interpretation of scarcity and money in terms of materiality, temporality, and affect. The book investigates the conceptual shifts regarding economic order during two moments of profound crisis in the history of liberalism. In the wake of the French Revolution, Thomas Robert Malthus’s notion of population linked liberalism to a sense of economic necessity that stands counter to political promises of equality. During the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’s writings on money proved crucial for the invention of macroeconomic theory and signaled the birth of the managed economy. Both periods, Tellmann shows, entail a displacement of the malleability of the economic. By tracing this conceptual history, Life and Money opens up liberalism, including our neoliberal present, to a new sense of economic and political possibility.

This interdisciplinary volume explores and engages the key thinkers and ideas of the Austrian School of political economy to better understand aspects of the market process and its implications for everything from disaster recovery and political development to morality and monetary policy.