Global Capitalism: Beyond Macro-historical Approaches

As mentioned earlier, the rearticulation of capitalism as a central subject of study has been linked with the so-called “new histories of capitalism” (NHOC), which has proliferated in the United States. Within this field of studies, scholars from a variety of academic disciplines—for example, history, cultural history, law, sociology, and political science—have aimed to redefine our understanding of capitalism in light of the American experience. They do not view the unfolding of capitalism through a narrowly economistic perspective, as for instance Immanuel Wallerstein did when exploring the origin and expansion of “world systems.” Instead, they investigate how a variety of diverse actors, institutions, and materialities contribute to producing and reproducing a market, not least highlighting “the connections between economic change, society, politics, and the state.”Footnote ⁷ In accordance with this ontology, another central aspect is how new histories of capitalism are centered on the lived experiences of people and groups as they shape and reshape the economy—they study “capitalism in action.”Footnote ⁸ Of special interest is the articulation of the connections between slavery and the unfolding of capitalism. From this perspective, slavery does not stand out as an economic and exploitive system of the precapitalist world but as a viable form of capitalism, attesting to the historical coexistence within capitalism of a plurality of economic, labor, and production practices.Footnote ⁹ In doing so, the new histories of capitalism seek to denaturalize capitalism and accentuate its illiberal and coercive roots.

The influence of this tradition is also present in several recent studies of global economic developments that adopt a more global perspective. Such approaches are often to follow a single commodity and explore how human agency, power, and resistance have shaped its commodification, production, and dissemination across the globe and how this historical process in turn has contributed to the making and remaking of global capitalism.Footnote ¹⁰ These studies aim to place the global and local within the same analytical framework but they articulate the nexus between these scales in varying ways. In these accounts, it is worth noting, the firm seldom appears as the centerpiece of the analysis.

On one hand, we have macro-oriented approaches like Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton and Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar. Both describe the genealogy of the global entanglements of the cultivation, production, and commodification of these crops.Footnote ¹¹ They show how a diversity of actors coordinated the division of labor and material conditions that produced and reproduced a market that in turn made these two commodities into drivers of global capitalism. Besides denaturalizing the origin and diffusion of capitalism, the vital contribution of these works is to counter the classic Eurocentric account of the development of capitalism as a purely endogenous or intra-European occurrence, which later spread to and transformed the rest of the world.Footnote ¹² Rather than the product of uniquely European (or English) traits and conditions, Europe’s meteoric rise to economic and world dominance in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was in large part premised, it is now argued, on the already ongoing, coercive, and violent exploitation of the Global South. Beckert, notably, employs the term “war capitalism”—that is, a system which at its core had “slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs”—to denote this specific stage in capitalism’s history preceding the formation of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism.Footnote ¹³

Incidentally, however, these and other recent ways of re-thinking the global origins and transformations of the larger system of global capitalist accumulation have left precious little room for local histories, dynamics, and contingencies. Instead of exploring the complex processual making of capitalist practices on the ground, individual people, places, and economic forces in the Global South are studied from a macro-historical perspective, in which agents primarily figure as placeholders for more abstract categories that are given in advance (such as “capitalists” and “laborers”) and in which agency and change is viewed as rational, necessary, and therefore predictable.Footnote ¹⁴ To a degree, this is perhaps an unavoidable outcome of the extensive geographical and chronological scope of such macro-oriented approaches. But as noted by critics, it is also the effect of the overly totalizing and therefore conceptually impoverished conceptualization of capitalism which is involved in much recent work on the Global South, as for instance in Beckert’s Empire of Cotton. In the words of one of Beckert’s critics, his book conceives of capitalism as an “extensive, all-encompassing machine, imbued with a singular logic.” It therefore presents all forms of agency and change as the predictable effects of this determining logic, which is, in turn, understood rather narrowly, and ideationally, as little else than the “trader’s mentality” of subjecting “all aspects of life […] to a rigorous analysis of their profit potential.”Footnote ¹⁵ As others have noted, a similarly totalizing and therefore analytically restrictive tendency is also found in many recent studies of “racial capitalism”—a body of work aiming to correct the prevailing lack of focus on the historical co-constitution of racism and capitalism.Footnote ¹⁶ Here, again, individual places and people often only figure as subordinate parts of a larger, and often planetary, story of how “capitalism” feeds on and reinforces racial ideologies and subjugation in order to pursue “its” unsatiable desire for profits.Footnote ¹⁷

In response to these criticisms of these various macro-histories of global capitalism—at once both too totalizing and too limiting in their conception of capitalism—a number of scholars have in recent years begun to explore bottom-up perspectives on the production, processing, or consumption of commodities in ways that highlight local contingencies and variations in the constitution and reconstitution of global capitalism. One promising intervention in this regard is the Commodity Frontier Initiative (CFI), which is led by Beckert and Bosma themselves, among others. By shifting the analytical point of departure from economic “cores” in the West (top-down) to their so-called “commodity frontiers” in the Global South (bottom-up), one of the declared aims of the CFI is to place local variation, agents, and struggles center stage. In their words, they thereby mean to explore “how the global, including global commodity frontiers, has emerged from local configurations of social space and social power.”Footnote ¹⁸ Involved here, furthermore, is also a more comprehensive and, in our view, more useful conception of capitalism than found, for instance, in Beckert’s previous work. Rather than a logic that mirrors some supposedly natural human trait (i.e., the predominance of greed or profit-seeking over all other human motivations), capitalism is here understood as a historically distinctive system with its own structuring dynamic: in their words, it is “a historical process of commodification of labour and nature through private property and one driven by the intrinsic need to permanently open up new opportunities for accumulation.”Footnote ¹⁹

Another interesting way of working from the bottom up is found in Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire, which explores the making of global capitalism through an “intimate” or “close-range analysis” of the production, marketing, and consumption of tea within the British Empire. Zooming in on key moments of collaboration and conflict between a diversity of agents placed around the empire—producers, trading companies, marketing agencies, and consumers not least—Rappaport moves “between micro- and macrolevel of analysis” and shows the making of global capitalism, and the formation of its underlying ideologies, cultural norms, institutions, and networks, to have been a highly contingent process.Footnote ²⁰ Doing so, Rappaport often places global firms center stage, while wisely insisting that we view these, not as isolated agents, but as parts of “a web of interconnected transnational and local relationships.”Footnote ²¹ However, while rich in micro-historical detail, Rappaport’s account is less instructive in regard to the macro-level. Relying on Beckert’s Empire of Cotton as well as Joyce Appleby’s equally influential The Relentless Revolution, Rappaport defines capitalism as “a historical creation shaped by coercion, culture, and contingency,” but refrains from the question of the historical or ontological specificity of capitalism or how it might, by itself, have shaped events at the microlevel.Footnote ²²

For a more comprehensive understanding of the connection and indeed co-constitution of the global and local in the history of capitalism, it is instructive to turn to Andrew Liu’s Tea War, which tells the story of the changes within, and rivalries between, the tea industries in China and India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike the macro-oriented works mentioned above, Liu’s analysis proceeds from concrete spaces of capitalist production, in this case the Chinese regions of Huizhou and the Wuyi Mountains and the Assam district in British India, and moves from a detailed consideration of their respective labor regimes and socio-political contexts to the regional and global markets to which they were tied. In line with the insights of NHOC, Liu dismisses the prevailing understanding of the Chinese and Indian tea industries as “precapitalist”—the former because it was supposedly stuck in the timelessness of tradition, the latter because its colonial, indentured labor regime were neither capital-intensive or based on free wage labor—and instead argues that both places were profoundly transformed by capitalism’s structuring dynamics or “immanent drive.” More precisely, Liu finds that the intensifying and partly empire-driven competition in global tea markets led to a reorganization of tea production on lines that fit with Marx’ account of “abstract labor”: that is, having reduced individual laborers to commodities obtained and valued on market terms as perfectly quantifiable and exchangeable units of production, capitalism exerted a systemic and, in a sense, homogenous pressure on producers to raise productivity and cut labor costs as much as possible.Footnote ²³ This global capitalist pressure, however, did not lead to similar or even predictable effects on the local level. Rather, Liu contends, the challenges and opportunities arising from this global connectivity was met through two distinct reorganizations of production: in the Chinese tea districts, accumulation was secured through labor-intensive production patterns that reappropriated preexisting cultural forms—such as incense sticks and myths—to measure, discipline, and manipulate labor performance; in Assam, a state-sponsored and racialized regime of indenture sought the same effects by using legal coercion, crooked time-measurement, and task-based wages to force an ever-increasing amount of labor out of formally speaking “free” migrant coolies.Footnote ²⁴

In our opinion, Liu provides an exemplary way to combine the local and the global in histories of capitalism. In his view, to repeat, global capitalism is a universalizing force which allows for local contingencies, variations, and agency. Something similar, though with even greater emphasis on the processes through which the global is “translated” into the local, is found in Tariq Omar Ali’s A Local History of Global Capitalism. In this account of jute production and peasant life in turn of the twentieth-century colonial Bengal, Ali shows how jute farmers’ growing entanglement in, and dependence on, the vicissitudes of global markets of commodity exchange led to profound transformations in their modes of life and labor, but he also insists that farming communities themselves exercised considerable “initiative and creativity” in the ways they adapted to global capitalism. In his words: “Even as global capital conjured a universal world of abstract commodities out of peasant land and labor, peasant communities fashioned distinctive and particular agrarian ecologies, material and intellectual lives, and political programs.”Footnote ²⁵

To explore this making of “heterogeneity and particularity […] out of global capital’s universalizing drive,”Footnote ²⁶ Ali mobilizes Dipesh Chakrabarty’s useful distinction between History 1 and History 2. For Chakrabarty, History 1 refers to the universal tendencies of capitalist accumulation as identified by Marx: chiefly, to obliterate or “abstract” what hinders, or is superfluous to, the circulation and augmentation of capital. History 2, on the other hand, refers to all that do not stem from this capitalist dynamic—“an antecedent which do not belong to its life process”—and which may or may not interrupt its unfolding.Footnote ²⁷ In the words of Charles Taylor, History 2 therefore involves, among other things and relationships, “institutional forms, regimes of value, and alternative temporalities that have their lineage in other histories and modes of being.”Footnote ²⁸ As in Ali’s case, this may involve the distinctive forms of consumption, self-fashioning, and politics of belonging that Bengali jute farmers crafted by themselves and out of global connections and available cultural resources, not necessarily to resist or interrupt capitalism, but merely to live meaningful, rather than “abstract,” lives under capitalism.

In our view, the conceptual distinction between History 1 and 2, together with the other bottom-up perspectives introduced above, offer valuable theoretical tools to write locally-grounded histories of global capitalism: that is, histories that do not subscribe to the totalizing and homogenizing account of capitalism as articulated by macro-oriented approaches, but explore the contingent and multi-agential making of capitalist forms of labor and life in concrete contexts in a way that elucidates the complex and largely unpredictable relationship of the local and the global. To further this agenda, to recall, we propose that scholars should pay greater attention to global business and firms as a methodological lens. In the available historical accounts mentioned above, businesses and firms often figure as elements in the narrative, but rarely as the analytical centerpiece or point of departure. Much the opposite, however, is true of recent work within business history, which will be introduced in the section below. In this discipline, however, available accounts of capitalism’s history in the Global South are often too centered around the firms themselves (and not least their leaders) to interrogate the complex and contingent processes involved in the local and the global making of capitalism.

Capitalism, Business History, and the Global Firm

From our point of view, the globally active firm provides an ideal prism for writing locally-grounded global histories of capitalism, in particular during the so-called “first global economy” (c. 1870–1929) when expansive areas and populations of the Global South to an unprecedented degree became part of capitalist markets due to the activities of global and local commercial agents. Such an endeavor naturally builds on the vast historical literature on individual firms and global enterprise in general which has been produced in area studies, in colonial and imperial historiographies,Footnote ²⁹ and of course, above all, in the discipline of business history. It is in the latter discipline of business history, moreover, that the relationship between global firms and capitalism seems to have acquired the greatest urgency. In recent decades, business historians have made “global capitalism” one of their keywords and presented global companies as privileged vantage points for studying “the creation of global capitalism.”Footnote ³⁰

A distinguishing feature of much of this literature, it seems, is its focus on the agency of firms. Thus, instead of envisioning capitalism as a self-propelled, anonymous, and quasi-natural engine of history, business historians view it, at least in part, as the creation of concrete capitalist agents—a perspective they share, as argued above, with proponents of NHOC. Unlike NHOC, however, the focus of business historians has been to understand why and how some firms and certain forms of organization, trade, investment, and production came to dominate and shape economic, political, social, and environmental realities in various parts of the Global South in the singular ways they did. By looking at concrete firms in this way, business historians have for instance deepened our understanding of the mechanisms that drove firms to vertical integration and thereby to invest in and control overseas production,Footnote ³¹ firms’ embeddedness in local and global economic, social, and political contexts,Footnote ³² cross-industry networks of knowledge sharing,Footnote ³³ and their use of violence and fictions to exploit indigenous and colonized populations.Footnote ³⁴ Also, a number of studies have explored the important role played by non-European agents—such as brokers, mercantile communities, and national and regional firms—in the integration and development of capitalist markets, showing them to have been more than simply middlemen or “compradors” awaiting the arrival of supposedly more advanced economic players.Footnote ³⁵ Clearly, the discipline of business history has produced rich studies of capitalist agents in action on both the local and global scales.

From our point of view, however, current approaches to global companies also share a number of limitations, which a firm-based history of global capitalism must seek to overcome. For one thing, there is a need for clearer and broader conceptualizations of what capitalism is and what studies of global firms may encompass. As of now, though historical accounts of global business rarely define what they mean by the term “capitalism”—with or without the “global”—they generally conceive of it as little more than an economic system of market competition.Footnote ³⁶ In line with this conceptualization, what scholars of global business aim to explore is the expansion or globalization of market-driven economies and, in particular, the role of firms in this regard, but not the litany of subjects and questions that increasingly preoccupy the historical approaches to global capitalism introduced above. As we saw above, this would involve themes such as the relationship between History 1 and 2; the concrete configurations of power and subject formation organized by, or in response to, global firms; conflicting regimes and conceptions of time and temporality; or the intersection of business and imperialism.

In our view, there is no reason why a firm-based history of global capitalism should not make these broader concerns essential parts of the investigation. Furthermore, to provide locally grounded, firm-based histories of global capitalism with greater analytical clarity, we believe it is vital to make conceptualizations of capitalism’s being and dynamics essential to the analysis, just as it is in Chakrabarty’s, Ali’s, and Liu’s works presented above. Thus, rather than treating global capitalism, as histories of global business currently do, as the largely unexplored backdrop to what companies do or contribute to, it would be more rewarding, we propose, to make a reflective conceptualization of capitalism both the starting and end point of the analysis. In our view, moreover, such an approach to capitalism, to be presented in greater detail in section three below, should be able to encompass both capitalism’s abstract dynamics (what makes something “capitalist”) and its concrete instantiations (what capitalism has looked like in actual life worlds).

Another, but related, issue is the field’s tendency towards methodological individualism. According to business historian Kenneth Lipartito, methodological individualism, which he finds to be hard-wired into most work within business and economic history in general, means grasping social entities as if they only consist of individuals (ontological individualism) and as if social outcomes are purely caused by individuals (explanatory individualism). In Lipartito’s view, this favoring of ontological and explanatory individualism means ignoring a number of higher-order and nonperson phenomena—such as networks, material realities, and ingrained ways of thinking and acting—which, he finds, are often key to understanding how and why individuals, or clusters of individuals like firms, are as they are and act as they do.Footnote ³⁷

One concrete expression of methodological individualism, which applies to many recent historical accounts of business in the Global South, is a reliance on agent-based models that presume individuals or firms to be essentially rational economic agents. A widespread model of this kind is found in so-called “transaction cost economics” (TCE). According to TCE, a firm’s way of undertaking or organizing transactions is determined, and predictably so, by the nature of the transactions themselves.Footnote ³⁸ For instance, if the market for a particular commodity has high risk of fraud and large flux in price and quality, a firm in need of steady and high-quality supply will have a strong incentive to reduce transaction costs by internalizing and controlling the production of the commodity rather than acquiring it through the volatile and insecure marketplace. According to Michael Aldous’ recent analysis of the Anglo-Indian indigo traders in nineteenth-century India, for instance, it was precisely this incentive that led mid-century British trading companies, supported by Britain’s rising colonial power in the subcontinent, to invest and involve themselves more directly in the production of indigo, which had until then remained largely in indigenous hands.Footnote ³⁹ Of course, to say that such an analysis is methodologically individualist is not to claim that it is wrong, but merely to point out that it works through a kind of ahistorical abstraction: it explains social outcomes without recourse to the historicity of its protagonists. Thus, rather than exploring the role and constitution of their distinctive subjectivities and desires, agents (which in effect usually means firm directors) instead figure merely as rational and therefore transhistorical agents of business.

The same view of firms as driven by individuals governed by universal or natural drives is also reflected in the field’s widespread emphasis on firms’ “embeddedness” in the wider context in which they operate. This focus on embeddedness—both political, economic, cultural, and social—is a reaction to a long-prevailing focus within business scholarship on intrafirm dynamics and capabilities.Footnote ⁴⁰ In particular, historians of global business now emphasize the relationship between multinationals and governments in home and host economies, the legal, administrative, and infrastructural framework furnished by empires and colonial or autonomous states, as well as the global networks and local industry clusters that provided multinationals access to necessary capital, innovation, knowledge, or news about possible investment opportunities.Footnote ⁴¹ As a part of this, one of the key questions has also been how global businesses have navigated and impacted the different “varieties of capitalism” they encounter in different, and usually nationally defined, contexts.Footnote ⁴² All in all, the valuable point raised by these studies is to acknowledge how the activities of global firms were shaped by, or themselves shaped, the contexts in which they found themselves.

Like the field’s use of TCE mentioned above, however, its way of analyzing embeddedness in practice often entails methodological individualism because it relies on a binary division between individuals and structures, in which purportedly self-contained individuals are portrayed as reacting to, rather than being positively constituted through, outside stimuli.Footnote ⁴³ As argued by Lipartito, the problem of such a presumption of “stable, constituted subjects” is that it ignores the vital ways in which people are “constantly in formation” and thus how such things as their “internal” preferences, sense of self, and ways of grasping and acting on the world are actually constituted in time and space through their engagement with “external” surroundings.Footnote ⁴⁴

One way of thinking of individuals, and thus of those who shaped the practices of global firms, as positively constituted by their surroundings is of course to explore, as noted above, the historical specificity of their subjectivities and desires, which has emerged through social experiences, belongings, and struggles. One instructive example worth citing is David Arnold’s analysis of the American sewing-machine producer Singer as it entered the Indian market during the later decades of the nineteenth century. Informed by entrenched discourses on gender and race, Singer’s Western sales strategists originally, Arnold argues, only targeted the relatively small population of European women in the subcontinent. Presuming sowing to be domestic female work and viewing the native population, and not least its women, as generally lacking in civilization and technical skill, the firm’s directors did not envision that their advanced machinery would be in much demand in India for the foreseeable future. Gradually, however, Singer revised its strategy to target the traditional Indian tailors, the so-called darzis. This change and almost reversal in strategy—from European women working at home to Indian men working in public—was primarily spurred, Arnold shows, by one of the company’s Indian agents, Nasarvanji Mervantji Patell, whose local knowledge made him aware of how a growing number of darzis, in spite of expectations, had in fact been quick to adopt the machines produced by Singer and competing firms.Footnote ⁴⁵

However, in realizing this broader market potential, neither Patell nor his Western superiors were merely “reacting” to the “external” surroundings in which they were embedded. Following Lipartito, we should instead see their distinct and changing reactions as relying on historically specific ways of thinking, being, and acting that had been made, re-made, and had acquired authority and self-evidence over time. In Patell’s case, this was reflected in his gendered and caste-based understanding of the Indian market. In Arnold’s words, for Patell, “selling sowing machines in India was essentially about selling them to men, particular to those who by custom and trade were tailors. The darzi’s wife was as absent from his correspondence as she was from his commercial strategy.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In this way, Arnold’s example urges scholars to take more seriously the narratives and meaning-making practices through which businesses make sense of their situation and perceive the world.Footnote ⁴⁷

In seeking to be beyond a methodologically individualist notion of individuals and firms as governed by universal or natural drives, another promising strategy is to explore the ways companies relate to and imagine the future. According to Jonathan Levy, this is a strategy that many business historians neglect. In his view, they tend to write what he calls “retrospective” histories of capitalism in the sense that they primarily address “the results and broad consequences” of capitalist accumulation. But as he argues, it is also necessary to write so-called “prospective” histories that take seriously how capitalism in reality unfolds through “forward-looking” practices of essentially uncertain investment and sometimes manic expectations and fantasies of future profits.Footnote ⁴⁸

In a similar vein, Jens Beckert has shown how future imaginaries—what he calls “fictional expectations”—constitute a fundamental force fueling the dynamism of modern capitalist economies. He argues that the capitalist economy institutionalizes systemic pressures that enforce a temporal orientation toward future economic opportunities and risks. Beckert thus calls for attention to the narratives that actors form and follow as they “consider future states of the world, the way they visualize casual relations, and the ways they perceive their actions influencing outcomes. The term also refers to the symbolic qualities that actors ascribe to goods and that transcend the goods’ material features.”Footnote ⁴⁹ These imaginaries serve as interpretative frames for decision-making despite the incalculability of outcomes. They create confidence and make actors act as if the imagined future were already present, operating through what Beckert terms “instruments of imagination”—such as theories, models, plans, marketing instruments, and forecasts.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the same vein, Anna Tsing uses the term “economy of appearances” to describe the theatricality of capitalism, highlighting how performance and narratives are deeply embedded in the imagination of economic futures and serve as crucial tools for attracting capital investment.Footnote ⁵¹

This attention to the prospective and highly contingent processes of global capitalist accumulation has recently been taken up by business historians R. Daniel Wadhwani and Christina Lubinski. On the basis of a survey of the field of entrepreneurship studies, they now encourage business scholarship to take more notice of, among other things, the historically distinct and contingent ways firm executives made sense of their situation, the diversity of their motives, as well as the role of emotions and fictional narratives in eying and seizing future opportunities.Footnote ⁵²

For the writing of localized histories of global capitalism, such accounts of the “forward-looking” work by concrete firms and entrepreneurs would greatly add to our knowledge of the historicity of individual capitalists and the processual unfolding of capitalist accumulation in the Global South. As of yet, however, such prospective accounts of individual entrepreneurs are not only rare but would also need to be subsumed, we propose, within a more multi-agential and materialist analytical framework. Indeed, as we will now argue, we believe that accounts of the sense-making of individual capitalists must be integrated into a more expansive analysis of what we call “capitalist assemblages.”

Capitalist Assemblages

To write firm-based and locally grounded histories of global capitalism, it is valuable, we believe, to take Chakrabarty’s distinction of History 1 and 2 as a theoretical point of departure. From this follows a commitment to grasp the unpredictable interrelation between what capitalism is in the abstract (meaning its inner dynamics, for instance, how competitive markets reduce individuals and things to “labor” or “commodities”) and the distinct forms of labor and life it encounters, produces, shapes, or co-exists with within concrete localities. To do so in a novel and, we believe, promising way, we propose taking the global firm as a starting point by treating it as a prism for exploring the processual interrelation of History 1 and 2. For this purpose, we propose the concept of “capitalist assemblages.”

Essentially, an “assemblage” is what Manual DeLanda calls an “emergent whole,” one that possesses certain “emergent properties.” As such, an assemblage is the effect of the processual assembling or coming-together of individual elements as a result of which the whole has come to embody and produce certain ways of thinking, being, and acting that are more than the sum of its component parts. An example might be how the interaction and organization of private individuals within a certain area of a city bring into being a “neighborhood community” that enforces norms and forms of conduct, which no individual person has invented, and which are enforced not so much by individuals as by stand-ins for the community. While emphasizing in this way how wholes are irreducible to their component parts, thinking about wholes as assemblages also implies, DeLanda adds, that the parts are not understood as stable, determined, or organic parts of the whole. On the contrary, individual parts might seek to change the properties of the whole or choose to link up with other wholes, such as when an individual within a community challenges established norms or decides to move away.Footnote ⁵³

In a similar way, one may think about a global or multinational firm (or indeed any kind of firm) as an assemblage and, more importantly, as a “capitalist assemblage.” What we mean by this term is strongly inspired by Kenneth Lipartito’s larger call to study the “assembling” of “the economic.” In his view, economic processes should not be framed as the work of either individual agents or of abstract and universal processes (say the “market” or “capitalism”) but rather should be studied by tending to the unpredictable and singular ways “men and things,” as well as cultural and material facts, become intermixed or assembled through the interactions of agents and structures at concrete times and sites. In his words:

In a similar fashion, we propose to place center-stage the processual coming-together of the heterogenous “actants” that give rise to the “capabilities, routines, and strategies” through which global firms organized business, labor, and life at concrete times and places.Footnote ⁵⁵ Following Lipartito, we thereby wish to underscore how firm practices arise through “a lineage of many parts”—parts, which may be both individual agents and higher-order phenomena (such as networks, institutions, discourses, material realities), all of which have, as he adds, “their own histories.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Hence, this approach offers a conceptual and methodological decentering of the firm—it is not a self-contained entity with preset boundaries, it is much more than the firm’s people, namely a fluid entity engaged in an ever-occurring process of “becoming” or being “assembled” out of heterogeneous and constitutive elements and connections.

To reach greater conceptual clarity about these processes of “assembling” and about why more exactly an “assemblage” may qualify as “capitalist,” we believe it is useful to adopt Chakrabarty’s above-mentioned distinction between History 1 and 2. In conceptualizing the processual making of firm practices, one may thereby distinguish between elements that issue from capitalism’s universal dynamics (History 1) and those that issue from other lineages or genealogies (History 2). To the former belong, among other universal dynamics, the logic of “abstract labor” and capitalism’s in-built need for self-expansion; to the latter, the practices or arrangements, which historians and sociologists commonly associate with capitalism, but which must also rightly be viewed, not as natural or universal, but as historical phenomena with distinct genealogies and conditions of possibility. As exemplified in the literature introduced above, this would include such things as tools or fictions to predict future revenue and persuade investors to provide capital; ways of “capitalizing” or ascribing monetary value to legal assets in expectations of profit; techniques to control and measure labor output; institutions of credit and money; habits of industry; desires of future gain; or a forward-looking orientation in general.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet, as a part of those practices belonging to History 2, we also refer to practices and circumstances that were either intended to or had the effect of interrupting or limiting a firm’s capitalist accumulation, giving it occasion to rethink and reorganize established practices. This might involve overt or covert resistance to exploitation on the part of laborers, but also forms of life and self-fashioning which allowed firm employees and laborers to make capitalism’s demands secondary to other and more primary forms of being.

To explore the processual making of global firms as capitalist assemblages, it is also useful to distinguish between intra and extrafirm elements and connections. From “the first global economy” (c. 1870–1929), but arguably also during earlier times of intensifying global economic integration, global firms—such as those engaged in “commodity frontiers”—were made up of spatially dispersed nodes of people, matter, and expertise, each consisting of a collection of employees, workers, factories, and so forth together with their various subjectivities, technologies, discourses, ecologies, etc. On the one hand, these nodes were connected to each other through such things as organizational hierarchies, exchange of personnel, written dispatches, telegrams, and oral communication (i.e., intrafirm connection); on the other, they were part of larger constellations beyond the boundaries of the firm, among which should be counted scientific networks, local government agencies, national or international laws, and, of course, regional or global capitalist markets for commodities and labor (i.e., extrafirm connections). Analyzing a firm, and the individual nodes or parts of a firm, as a “capitalist assemblage” then means exploring over time the process through which these various elements have become interrelated and, in so doing, how their interrelationship has produced distinct and perhaps conflicting modes of organizing business, labor, and life under capitalism.

To exemplify how to analyze global firms as capitalist assemblages, one may usefully look beyond the field of History to that of Social Anthropology. Here, many recent works explore global phenomena—like bureaucracy, state-building, and indeed, capitalism—through thick descriptions of the processual making of local practices in a way that challenges the abstract categories and ingrained narratives of macro-oriented approaches.Footnote ⁵⁸ One instructive example from this body of scholarship is Marina Welker’s Enacting the Corporation (2014), which focuses on the American company Newmont and its mining operations on the island of Sumbawa in early twenty-first-century Indonesia. Through field-work analysis, she documents how various agents inside and outside of the company—executives, employees, villagers, government officials, etc.—put forward distinct, and often conflicting, ideals and demands about how the company ought to relate to its surroundings. Should the company, for instance, assume responsibility for creating jobs and provide developmental and welfare schemes in village communities, or should it rather work towards facilitating a self-sustainable civil society based on indigenous entrepreneurship? By exploring such struggles over different models for corporate responsibility and how they shaped company policies, Welker’s analysis insightfully argues that a multinational company like Newmont should not be seen as a monolithic or “metaphysical” subject, whose practices are rationally and predictably calibrated by leading executives in home or host economies in order to maximize profits.Footnote ⁵⁹ Instead, making a case for approaching “corporations as inherently unstable and indeterminate, multiply authored, always in flux, and comprising both material and immaterial parts,”Footnote ⁶⁰ Welker argues that what actually governs the elaboration of company practices in local contexts are the materially conditioned power struggles between individuals and groups who creatively follow and employ their respective epistemologies, interests, and strategies. In her analysis, the global firm thereby offers “a window” through which to “dissect the uneven and contingent ways in which capitalism is promoted and contested in particular places and among particular people.”Footnote ⁶¹ Or to put it in our terms, it allows one to trace the processual emergence of capitalist assemblages.Footnote ⁶²

While tracing the processual emergence of local firm practices, it is also vital, however, not to give too much attention to the local at the expense of the global. For instance, there is the risk of ignoring translocal connections or the question of whether and how local ways of organizing labor, life, and business were shaped and driven by the sort of structural capitalist dynamics referred to here as History 1. One recent account that offers insights into this and into the changing and contingent nature of the interrelation of History 1 and 2 is Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy, which explores, among other things, how the colonial Japanese company Mantetsu governed the extraction of fossil fuels in the highly carbon-rich Fushun mine during the Japanese involvement in and later occupation of Manchuria from 1904 to 1945.

Though not explicitly a story about capitalism, Seow’s book demonstrates how Mantetsu’s owners and executives, under conditions of increasing market competition, aimed to profit off the surging Japanese and global demand for coal in a way that resembles the notion of “abstract labor” (History 1), namely by conceptualizing and treating laborers as “human energy” and thus as reducible to commodities whose value may be purchased, measured, and exploited on the basis of market principles or, whenever profitable, replaced with actual machines. At the same time, however, Seow also shows how Mantetsu’s changing ways of governing labor, life, and business were shaped, and sometimes resisted, by arrangements and practices belonging to History 2. Among these, it is worth mentioning the “fictional expectations” held by Japanese state and commercial agents about Fushun’s allegedly “inexhaustible” fossil fuel deposits; the use of policing, fingerprint identification, and other technologies of control; racial hierarchies and segregation between white-collar Japanese and migrant Chinese “coolies;” as well as the very material realities of coal and its effects on mining technologies and the possibilities of labor resistance. For instance, when working in underground shafts, miners initially had much greater opportunities to assemble and devise plans for collective action than they had after the 1910s, once the introduction of open-pit mining increasingly exposed them to a more panoptic managerial gaze.Footnote ⁶³

Finally, from our point of view, Seow’s book also exemplifies how a capitalist assemblage may become less “capitalist” or even “anticapitalist” over time. In the history of Mantetsu’s fossil fuel extraction in Fushun, this began with the full-scale Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, after which the company’s operations increasingly fell under the “managed economy” of an imperial Japanese state eager to replace free market dynamics with fixed prices, predetermined output goals, and a labor force acquired by force. Thus, cut off from global market mechanisms, incentives, and pressures, the company and its mine, employees, and laborers became part of a very different kind of assemblage, one that was less obviously “capitalist.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Though none of the two works mentioned above are explicitly studies of capitalist assemblages as conceptualized in this article, what we see exemplified in both is a sustained interest in the kind of assemblage approach suggested by Kenneth Lipartito: namely one that explores economic processes not as the work of individual agents or abstract and universal processes, but as singular processes in which multiple “actants”—human or otherwise—come together to shape practices. What they also show, we believe, is the value of using global firms as lenses to explore global capitalism in the Global South in new and productive ways. By decentering global firms and grasping them as assemblages, dissolving them into their various constituent elements that played a role in shaping its various localized properties and practices, this framework hence encourages scholars to avoid the two conceptual pitfalls highlighted in this article: first, the problem of methodological individualism and, second, that of seeing global capitalism in totalizing terms that leave little room for in-depth and locally grounded analyses of how labor, life, and business were governed under capitalism.