Description
The study of colonialism and agrarian labour has been explored from several angles. Marxist literature has considered the role of plantation slavery in kickstarting European capitalism and of settler colonialism in managing the mass displacement of peasants from agriculture. Feminist literature has used concepts like plantation patriarchy to understand the gender roles ascribed within these agrarian labour regimes and their division of workplace-household responsibilities. Black Radical and decolonial literatures have highlighted the racialisation underpinning such processes and the hierarchies of difference they produce, legacies evident in the contemporary treatment of migrant farmworkers and subsistence farmers among others. Drawing on International Political Economy scholarship that has theorised capitalism’s multiple axes of oppression, this paper sets out a framework to bring key insights from these literatures together, and, in so doing, offers two claims of its own. First, that European colonialism/coloniality is not fixed in the past: historicising its effects on and through agrarian labour helps reveal its role shaping contemporary patterns of food production. Second, that a relational analysis of social differentiation shows how people are classed, gendered, and raced through colonial modes of exploitation in ways that are mutually interdependent.
