At the Margins of the Global Market: Making Commodities, Workers, and Crisis in Rural Colombia (Development Trajectories in Global Value Chains)

By: Phillip A. Hough

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Synopsis: Contemporary scholars debate the factors driving despotic labour conditions across the world economy. Some emphasize the dominance of global market imperatives and others highlight the market's reliance upon extra-economic coercion and state violence. At the Margins of the Global Market engages in this debate through a comparative and world-historical analysis of the labour regimes of three global commodity-producing subregions of rural Colombia: the coffee region of Viejo Caldas, the banana region of Urabá, and the coca/cocaine region of the Caguán. By drawing upon insights from labour regimes, global commodity chains, and world historical sociology, this book offers a novel understanding of the broad range of factors - local, national, global, and interregional - that shape labour conditions on the ground in Colombia. In doing so, it offers a critical new framework for analysing labour and development dynamics that exist at the margins of the global market.