Institutional Diversity and Capitalist Transformation in Rural Arunachal Pradesh

Deepak Mishra

QEH Working Papers from Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford

Abstract: This paper contributes a preliminary analysis of the process of capitalist transformation in Arunachal Pradesh, one of the least studied regions of India. Primarily based on information collected through a field survey in eleven villages, the paper seeks to explain the nature and implications of institutional unevenness in the development of capitalism. Institutional diversity is not simply mapped across space; it is also manifested in the simultaneous existence of market and non-market institutions across the means of production within the same village or spatial context. In addition there is a continuous and complex interaction among these institutions which both shapes and is shaped by this incipient capitalist transformation. Against the near universal consensus of social theorists that non-market institutional forms and processes would decline with the expansion and consolidation of the capitalist economy, the evidence presented here suggests that institutional adaptation, continuity and hybridity are as much integral to the emergence of the market economy as are the processes of creation of new institutions and demise of others. There is no necessary correspondence between the emerging commercialisation of the different productive dimensions of the agrarian economy. These uneven processes of institutional diversity, hybridity and interdependence are deeply influenced by existing and emerging power relations. Primitive accumulation, which was thought to be an archaic feature of early capitalism, emerges as a continuing characteristic of the on-going agrarian and non-agrarian capitalist transformation.

References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://workingpapers.qeh.ox.ac.uk/RePEc/qeh/qehwps/qehwps179.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to workingpapers.qeh.ox.ac.uk:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qeh:qehwps:qehwps179

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in QEH Working Papers from Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford Queen Elizabeth House 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB United Kingdom. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by IT Support ().