A jute and peasant life in the Bengal Delta jute & peasant life in the Bengal Delta Ali, Tariq Omar creator author. text bibliography History. nju Princeton Oxford Princeton University Press c2018 2018 2019 monographic eng

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xii, 244 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital.Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century.A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation. Introduction -- Cultivating jute: peasant choice, labor, and hunger -- Consumption and self-fashioning: the politics of peasant consumerism -- The spaces of jute: metropolis, hinterland, and Mofussil -- Immiseration -- Agrarian forms of Islam: the politics of peasant immiseration -- Peasant populism: electoral politics and the "rural Muhammadan" -- Pakistan and partition: peasant utopia and disillusion -- Conclusion. Tariq Omar Ali. Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-231) and index. GenEd Jute industry Bengal Basin History Commodity exchanges Commodity exchanges Economic history Jute industry Social conditions Juteanbau Regionalwirtschaft Welthandel Bengal Basin Economic conditions History Bengal Basin Social conditions History India Bengal Basin Ganges-Brahmaputra-Mündungsdelta HF3786.5 .A665 2018 382.0954 9780691170237 9780691202570 9780691195506 2017963398 Ayesha Abed Library YDX 240121 20230403104331.0 37422 eng