Economies of Living in Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford

1995 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Mulvihill
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Local Economy ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Household Expenditures ◽  
Small Economies ◽  
Nineteeth Century ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Village Life ◽  
William Cobbett

"ECONOMY." writes William Cobbett in Cottage Economy (1821-22), "means management, and nothing more; and it is generally applied to the affairs of a house and family, which affairs are an object of the greatest importance, whether as relating to individuals or a nation." Due to the influence of the dismal science of political economy, the nineteeth century witnessed a narrowing of this concept to denote a specialized instrumentality rather than the integrated totality formerly encompassed by the term. In the novels of Mrs. Gaskell the standard of "economy" is applied in its older, undissociated sense, encompassing the regulation, rather than the mutually exclusive demarcation, of material and moral life. Throghout Gaskell's fiction the rightness or the wrongness of a household usually finds its objective correlative in the manifest management of that household. In Cranford (1853) everything from managing household expenditures to managing one's life is regualted by considerations of economy. The innumerable "small economies" practiced by Gaskell's characters are among innumerable such arrangements forming the larger social and narrative economy of Cranford/Cranford. Minor though they might seem, the sundry small events of village life are the principal on which Cranford draws for its barely eventful subsistence. In the same way, Cranford's narrative reflects the formal properties of economy. What finally emerges from his management of a slender store of incident is the identity between the local economy of Cranford/Cranford and larger fictional economies underlying Gaskell's narrative.

Mtunya: Famine in Central Tanzania, 1917–20

1990 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Maddox
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Arid Region ◽  
Local Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
Loss Of Autonomy ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
Colonial Government

In the Dodoma Region of central Tanzania the people called Wagogo name a famine that struck between 1917 and 1920 the Mtunya—‘The Scramble’. This famine came after both German and British miliary requisitions had drained the arid region of men, cattle and food. The famine, which killed 30,000 of the region's 150,000 people, is more than just a good example of what John Iliffe has called ‘conjunctural poverty’. The Mtunya and the response to it by both the people of the region and the new colonial government also shaped the form of the interaction between local economy and society and the political economy of colonial Tanganyika. The Gogo, in their own interpretation of the famine, stress the ways in which this famine made them dependent on the colonial economy. For them, this famine represented a terrible loss of autonomy, a loss of the ability to control the reproduction of their own society.

On the Theory and Practice of Compradors: The Role of ʿAbbud Pasha in the Egyptian Political Economy

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Vitalis
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Local Economy ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Theoretical Problem ◽  
Foreign Investors ◽  
Strict Definition

One of the most resilient ideas introduced to the analysis of economic and political change under colonialism and imperialism is the “comprador” and, by extension, the “comprador bourgeoisie.” The comprador in essence embodies or internalizes the basic theoretical problem of the peripheral political economy: economic activity oriented primarily for the benefit of the other.1 By strict definition, compradors are native agents or partners of foreign investors who operate in some form in the local economy. However, in the theoretical context of assessing the possibilities for local industrial development, compradors represent forces that hinder change. As “agents of foreign imperialism,” they act “against the interest of the national economy.”2

Scarcity in the Theories of Value

2021 ◽  
pp. 001946622110172
Author(s):  
Antonella Palumbo
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
General Equilibrium ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Demand And Supply ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Jel Code ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Theoretical Developments

Building on Krishna Bharadwaj’s analysis of the differences between neoclassical economics and classical political economy and her careful historical reconstruction of the process that culminated in the birth of the former, this article focuses on the characterisation of neoclassical theories as ‘scarcity’ theories of value. The article intends, in the first place, to analyse the relation that neoclassical theories bear to earlier theoretical developments, particularly the earlier conception of value based on the demand-and-supply interaction, in which the notion of scarcity played a crucial role, a conception entertained both by pre-classical authors and contemporaries of Ricardo. In the second place, it aims to show that the scarcity conception of value is at the root of some basic inconsistencies of the neoclassical approach. Attention will thus be devoted to a particular expression of the latter, the so-called Walras–Cassel system of general equilibrium, and to the discussions that took place in the 1930s on the properties of such system—afterwards culminating in the Vienna debate over the formal properties of the system—in which the limitations of the scarcity conception of value were clearly addressed. JEL Code: B12, B13, D51

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document