Special economic zones

Patrick Neveling

Chapter 4 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology, 2025, pp 67-70 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Special economic zones (SEZs) have been key ethnographic locations for an economic anthropology of the past, present, and future capitalist world system. This entry reviews anthropology's research on SEZs over the past five decades. Starting in the 1980s, zone ethnographies studied the impact of “traditional” postcolonial development via export-oriented manufacturing globalisation in textiles, garments, and electronics. 21st century ethnographies on China's cross-border zones in Asia, new African zones, US foreign trade zones, and post-Brexit Freeports in the UK critically analyse nationalism, sovereignty rhetoric, and notions of borders. Drawing also on my ethnographic research on the Mauritian SEZ, a second project on the spread of SEZs since the 1940s, and a new project on UK Freeports, the entry shows pathways for an anthropology of SEZs that combine earlier ethnographic foci on rapid export-oriented industrialisation's impact on village-lives, kinship, and class relations with contemporary studies on migration, criminal enterprise, and statecraft in SEZs.

Keywords: Capitalism; Historical anthropology; Industrialisation; Globalisation; Neoliberalism; Uneven and combined development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035312566
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