Historical Materialism and Agrarian History

Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, by Jairus Banaji. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. Historical Materialism Book Series Volume 25. Pp. xix+406. Euro101 (hb). ISBN 978-90-04-18368-1 The collection provides an opportunity to assess Jairus Banaji's original and provocative contributions over more than three decades. This review tries to chart a path across the range of the essays as a whole, marked by three themes and their connections and possible disconnections: what constitutes modes of production; modes of production before capitalism and their histories; and characterizing and periodizing capitalism. Banaji's emphatic arguments for long histories/trajectories of commodity production, exchange and accumulation across different times and places, especially in estate agriculture and the circuits of merchant capital, traverse these three themes.