We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This chapter goes in search of the gambling habits and propensities of the bulk of the population, but does so by focusing in the first place on the gambling of the lower orders and many among the middling sorts in the giant British capital. Through examination of a range of activities, including cricket and lottery insurance, and different gambling locales, it seeks to map the sheer extent and diversity of gambling at this level of society in eighteenth-century London. If London in this period was a ‘gambler’s paradise’, as one historian has claimed, then this was about much more than its exclusive gambling clubs. The final section of the chapter focuses on one activity which became very closely identified with betting in the later Georgian era, and across Britain – pedestrianism, or foot-racing. Through exploring the development and appeal of this sport, it seeks to plot a path forwards from the eighteenth century into the world of early to mid nineteenth century popular sport and betting, in which the centre of gravity moved decisively away from London and to the rapidly growing industrial regions and towns of north and midlands, as well as the manufacturing regions of lowland Scotland.
In this dossier, Marx's concept of primitive accumulation is applied to socialist development in the Soviet Union, China, and Romania, three countries in which socialist revolution occurred before the full development of capitalism. The introduction profiles the ideas of Evgenii Preobrazhensky, the Soviet theorist and left oppositionist, who first applied Marx's concept to the problems of socialist development, and was executed under Stalin in 1937. Preobrazhensky advanced the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation”, a process that would fund industrialization by extracting surplus through planned, non-coercive transfers from market-based and state sectors. Preobrazhensky's ideas sparked debates within communist parties over collectivization and the tempo of development. The introduction and articles in the dossier point the way towards future comparative research, suggesting that the processes of primitive capitalist and socialist accumulation shared painful similarities.
This article provides a reinterpretation of Stalinism through the lens of Marx's concept of primitive accumulation. It connects a series of defining events that are usually viewed separately – the debates and oppositional movements of the 1920s, industrialization, collectivization, and the “Great Terror” – to the state's need to accumulate capital for development. Using the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation”, first introduced by the Soviet theorist and left oppositionist Evgeny Preobrazhensky, it examines the challenges of building socialism in an underdeveloped, overwhelmingly peasant country. It argues that the emergence of the left and right oppositions in the 1920s and the grain crisis in 1927–1928 resulted from the state's struggle to create a stable balance between rural and urban exchange. The hastily implemented move to collectivize resulted in a cascade of unintended consequences, including a disastrous famine, decrease in food supplies, and a precipitous fall in real wages that impelled record numbers of women into the labor force. Against a background of social instability and discontent, the Kirov murder proved a fearful trigger, igniting fears among Party leaders that ultimately resulted in mass political and social repression. The article is part of a dossier, comprising an introduction and three articles, which offers a new approach to our understanding of socialism in the Soviet Union, China, and Romania.
Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) challenges Islamic Studies scholars, (art) historians, and anthropologists to reconsider theoretical frameworks underpinning historical and ethnographic research. This article addresses Ahmed’s concerns that studies of Islam often conceptually privilege orthodoxy, by including drinking and intoxication as worthy of close attention in examining the history and the anthropology of Islam. The case of Wine Shop the Philosopher, run by a former Afghan refugee in The Hague and Amsterdam, is presented after establishing the comparative and interdisciplinary relevance of alcohol consumption in studies of Islam and Muslims. Ahmed’s conceptual framework is used and assessed in comparison with the wine shops’ contemporary pluralist reality by exploring the idealized boundaries of Persianate culture and Islam in dialogues between Persian-speaking interlocutors. It is argued that alcoholic drinks lend themselves to competing gastro-nationalisms and prompt ethnolinguistic tensions between and within groups with Turkish, Moroccan, Iranian, and Afghan backgrounds in the Netherlands. The focus on diverse, coexisting and clashing drink regimes, in conclusion, allows us to deconstruct dichotomies between sober Muslims and European drinkers, African and Asian believers and European unbelievers, and refugees and citizens.