A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
Africa’s traditional societies and agrarian civilization Africa has seen extraordinary urban growth in the twentieth century and this, rather than the conventional view of the continent as an exporter of raw materials, should form the basis for thinking about development in future. This means exploring ways of linking present forms of urban commerce to the […] →Read more
1. LETS and Me All my life money has been an obsession. When I was 5, I was bewildered by the relationship between rationing coupons and pocket money. When I was 12, I took up betting on the horses. Gambling saw me through university. I even became an entrepreneur in the slums of a West […] →Read more
C.L.R. James is one among many writers who came from Europe to America and subsequently published their commentaries on the society they found there. In American Civilization, he explicitly linked his work to a tradition established by two predecessors—the French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose famous study, Democracy in America, resulted from his travels there […] →Read more
Has been published in a new open source journal created by the Association of Social Anthropologists, ASAOnline. See the original keynote lecture of the Rethinking Economic Anthropology conference held at the LSE on 11th and 12th of January 2008 here as streaming video. World society has been formed as a single interactive network in our […] →Read more
Is informal economy plus information technology a path towards economic democracy? This essay is frankly autobiographical. It is an attempt to excavate the intellectual and political connections between my early and later work in economic anthropology. →Read more
This is an undergraduate lecture on Anthropology and Globalisation (in five parts) that I gave at Goldsmiths College, London in 2006. Filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola. Part 1 The rest of the lecture can be found here: Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Russian comment on YouTube: Not many people even politicians […] →Read more
It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined.…that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities. J.-J. Rousseau Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754) Cosmopolitan Right shall be limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality [the right of […] →Read more
In 1900, about four-fifths of the planet’s land was controlled by people of European origin. Although European expansion was by then four centuries old, this land grab had largely taken place in the previous half-century and for most of Africa in the last two decades. It was manned by the world’s first population explosion, when […] →Read more
In the wake of market fundamentalism We have lived in the last three decades through an explosion of money, markets and communications and are now beginning to experience the consequences. Whatever else this hectic period of ‘globalization’ brings, it represents a rapid extension of society to a more inclusive level than the twentieth-century norm which […] →Read more
One Saturday morning in 1980, I found myself addressing a large, mainly black working class audience in Detroit on the subject of the Atlantic slave trade. I was claiming that, before the industrial revolution, relations between Europeans and Africans on the Guinea Coast were relatively equal. The Africans supplied the slaves and the Europeans bought […] →Read more
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
