Henry Bernstein (9 February 1945) is a British sociologist and Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the University of London: School of Oriental and African Studies. He has worked for several decades on the political economy of agrarian change, social theory, peasant studies, land reform, and the rural economy in South Africa.
Bernstein spent most of his career in the UK. From a working class Jewish communist family in Stoke Newington and the re-housed to a London County Council estate near Reigate, he attended grammar school in Reigate. He then studied history at the University of Cambridge and King's College from 1964, and took a Masters in Sociology at the London School of Economics from 1967-1969. Two sons were born to Renee and him during this time. [1]
He was a research associate at IDS, Sussex University in the late 1960s, a lecturer in interdisciplinary studies at the University of Kent from 1970, with a year at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara in 1972 when Turkey was under military rule. From 1974-78 he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) in Tanzania. He returned to the UK and was a lecturer at the Open University (1980–85) and then Director of the External Programme at Wye College (1985–89) (which focussed on rural development and agricultural extension, among other topics), and then Senior Lecturer in Agricultural and Rural Development, IDPM at the University of Manchester in the early 1990s. He then moved to SOAS as professor, to develop a Development Studies Department, retiring in 2011. He was adjunct professor at China Agricultural University, Beijing. He has also taught and researched in South Africa, China and the USA. [2]
Bernstein's research spans many areas but focusses on the political economy of agrarian change, as well as social theory, and more recently globalisation and labour. He is well known for theories of agrarian society and its change, identifying with class analysis and Marxist approaches. His 'reproduction squeeze' ideas appear in numerous articles and books. His work in peasant studies is detailed, expressed in dozens of articles and books.
From 1985-2000 he was co-editor with Professor Terry Byres of the Journal of Peasant Studies , and then became the founding editor, again with Byres, of the Journal of Agrarian Change from 2001-2008. [3] [4] The establishment of the new journal was in reaction to the editorial policy of the JPS. Today, both co-exist.
Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy that advocates for a return to subsistence agriculture, family farming, widespread property ownership, and political decentralization. Those who adhere to agrarianism tend to value traditional forms of local community over urban modernity. Agrarian political parties sometimes aim to support the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants against the wealthy in society.
A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: non-free slaves, semi-free serfs, and free tenants. Peasants might hold title to land outright, or by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.
Robert Hinrichs Bates is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government in the Departments of Government and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. From 2000–2012, he served as Professeur associé, School of Economics, University of Toulouse.
Benedict John Kerkvliet is Emeritus Professor at the Department of Political and Social Change, School of International, Political & Strategic Studies, Australian National University. He works across the areas of comparative politics, Southeast Asia and Asian studies. Kerkvliet was born and raised in Montana, surrounded by working-class relatives and friends for whom political discussion and debate were part of life. After graduating from the local public high schools, he earned his B.A. at Whitman College and his M.A. and Ph.D. at University of Wisconsin–Madison. He taught at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) for nearly twenty years before joining the Australian National University in 1992 where he was a Professor and Head of the Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. Kerkvliet currently resides in Hawaiʻi with his wife Melinda.
Agrarian reform can refer either, narrowly, to government-initiated or government-backed redistribution of agricultural land or, broadly, to an overall redirection of the agrarian system of the country, which often includes land reform measures. Agrarian reform can include credit measures, training, extension, land consolidations, etc. The World Bank evaluates agrarian reform using five dimensions: (1) stocks and market liberalization, (2) land reform, (3) agro-processing and input supply channels, (4) urban finance, (5) market institutions.
Colin James Bundy is a South African historian, former principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford and former SOAS University of London director. Bundy was an influential member of a generation of historians who substantially revised our understanding of South African history. In particular, he wrote on South Africa's rural past from a predominantly Marxist perspective, but also deploying Africanist and underdevelopment theories. Since the mid-1990s, however, Bundy has held a series of posts in university administration. Bundy is also a trustee of the Canon Collins Educational & Legal Assistance Trust.
Paul Richards is an emeritus professor of technology and agrarian development at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and adjunct professor at Njala University in central Sierra Leone. He was formerly a professor in the Department of Anthropology, University College London for many years, and previously taught anthropology and geography, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Mushtaq Husain Khan is a British-Bangladeshi economist and professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His work focuses on the economics of poor countries; it includes notable contributions to the field of institutional economics and South Asian development. Khan also developed the concept of political settlement, which is a political economy framework that highlights how the distribution of organizational and political power among different classes or groups influences policies and institutions in different countries.
Rural economics is the study of rural economies. Rural economies include both agricultural and non-agricultural industries, so rural economics has broader concerns than agricultural economics which focus more on food systems. Rural development and finance attempt to solve larger challenges within rural economics. These economic issues are often connected to the migration from rural areas due to lack of economic activities and rural poverty. Some interventions have been very successful in some parts of the world, with rural electrification and rural tourism providing anchors for transforming economies in some rural areas. These challenges often create rural-urban income disparities.
The Journal of Peasant Studies, subtitled Critical Perspectives on Rural Politics and Development, is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research into the social structures, institutions, actors, and processes of change in the rural areas of the developing world. It is published by Routledge and the editor-in-chief is Saturnino "Jun" Borras Jr..
The Journal of Agrarian Change is a peer-reviewed academic journal established in 2001 covering agrarian political economy. The journal publishes historical and contemporary studies of the social relations and dynamics of production, power relations in agrarian formations and ownership structures and their processes of change.
Tom Brass is an academic who has written widely on peasant studies. For many years he was at the University of Cambridge as an affiliated lecturer in their Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and at Queens' College, Cambridge as their Director of Studies of the Social and Political Sciences. For many years he was an, and then the, editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies. Murray reports Brass as being "dismissive of the cultural turn in peasant studies" and the rise of post-modern perspectives and his notion that this has been a conservative process and that it has lent support to neoliberalism.
Terence J. Byres is a peasant studies scholar and a professor emeritus of Political Economy at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Byres was a founding editor of the Journal of Development Studies (1964), the Journal of Peasant Studies (1973) and Journal of Agrarian Change (2001).
The Brenner debate was a major debate amongst Marxist historians during the late 1970s and early 1980s, regarding the origins of capitalism. The debate began with Robert Brenner's 1976 journal article "Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe", published in the influential historical journal Past & Present.
Peasant economics is an area of economics in which a wide variety of economic approaches ranging from the neoclassical to the marxist are used to examine the political economy of the peasantry. The defining feature of the peasants are that they are typically seen to be only partly integrated into the market economy -— an economy which, in societies with a significant peasant population, is typically found to have many imperfect, incomplete or missing markets. Peasant economics treats peasants as something different from other farmers as they are not assumed to be simply small profit maximizing farmers; by contrast, peasant economics covers a wide range of different theories of peasant household behavior. These include various assumptions about the maximization of profits, risk aversion, drudgery aversion, and sharecropping. The assumptions, logic, and predictions of these theories are examined and the impact of subsistence is typically found to have important implications in terms of producers decisions about supply, consumption and price. Chayanov was an early proponent of the importance of understanding peasant behaviour arguing that peasants would work as hard as they needed in order to meet their subsistence needs, but had no incentive beyond those needs and therefore would slow and stop working once they were met. This principle, the consumption-labour-balance principle, implies that the peasant household will increase its work until it meets (balances) the needs (consumption) of the household. A possible implication of this view of peasant societies is that they will not develop without some external, added factor. Peasant economics has been seen as being an important area of study by some development economists, agricultural sociologists, and anthropologists.
Agrarian socialism is a political ideology that promotes social ownership of agrarian and agricultural production as opposed to private ownership. Agrarian socialism involves equally distributing agricultural land among collectivized peasant villages. Many agrarian socialist movements have tended to be rural, locally focused, and traditional. Governments and political parties seeking agrarian socialist policies have existed throughout the world, in regions including Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America, and Africa.
Norman Long is a British anthropologist. He has conducted important fieldwork and made significant theoretical contributions through his application of insights from social anthropology in development studies. Anthropology was, in the wake of decolonisation, often seen as tainted by colonialism and not relevant in development discourse. Long offered another perspective that was unbound by time and place. He advocated an actor-oriented perspective on development and thus formulated a critique on centralist biases in development theory.
Stuart Edward Corbridge, FRGS is a British geographer and academic specialising in geopolitics, development studies, and India. From September 2015 to July 2021, he was Vice-Chancellor and Warden of Durham University. From 2013 to 2015, he was Provost and Deputy Director of the London School of Economics. He was also Professor of Development Studies at LSE.
John Charles Harriss is an emeritus professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University, visiting faculty at the London School of Economics and Professorial Associate at SOAS. In 2017, Harris was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Agrarian change is the process by which the political economy of the agrarian sector alters in some way. It involves changes in the social relations and dynamics of production, power relations in agrarian formations and ownership structures in the agricultural sector of an economy. The kind of dimensions covered in the study of this typically include not only technological and institutional forms such as agricultural productivity and farm-size and organisation; land reform; paths of capitalist transition; the politics of transnational agrarian social movements; the environmental contradictions of capitalist agriculture; global value chains and commodity certification schemes; the agrarian roots of violence and conflict; and migration and rural labour markets but also issues around gender, migration and rural labor markets, social differentiation and class formation.