The Making of a Periphery makes three important claims. First, commodity export production does not necessarily result in peripheralization, which is defined as economic stagnation, depressed wages and impoverishment. Second, peripheralization is instead influenced by the specific mode of production of export commodities. Third, the mode of production is crucially determined by demographic growth and patron-client relationships. This essay investigates these claims using a variety of economic and demographic data on Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is shown that specialization in primary commodity exports does lower long-term economic growth rates and that indigenous institutions regarding family systems and property rights play an important role in the patterns of economic development.

In the wake of the Great Depression, in the early 1930s the Turkish state decided to undertake an ambitious project of industrialization. Though state factories were presented and celebrated as model institutions of national modernity, their operations were characterized from the outset by serious and chronic problems of inefficiency and low productivity. To secure technical and managerial know-how on the shop floor, the Turkish state approached knowledgeable German industrial managers to organize its industrial production rationally, hoping to take advantage of the increasingly repressive political climate in Germany, which was driving leading experts into exile. This article analyses the transfer of scientific management from the German industrial context, with its craft control of the labour process and predominance of skilled labour with a strong labour movement, to Turkey, with its army of unskilled, cheap, and unorganized labour and where industrial development was in its infancy.

Over the course of the nineteenth century children increasingly became social, economic and scientific concerns. Their physical and mental well-being was deemed intrinsic to the future development of Britain and its Empire, and thus maintaining healthy youngsters was, by the turn of the twentieth century, considered a national priority. This article explores the interconnectivity between poverty and the child residents of pauper lunatic asylums in England. It draws on a corpus of extant patient case files from four pauper lunatic asylums between 1851 and 1907 and engages with detailed information about the children and their mental conditions. Additionally, there will be a focus on understanding family backgrounds, parental occupations, the correlation between diagnoses and class, and methods of ‘treatment’ designed to equip children for independent working lifestyles. The overarching objective is to consider the socio-economic ramifications of child mental illness for parents and families and better understand how Victorian institutions accommodated this specific class of patient.

This article discusses the received image of free Swedish and Finnish peasants, charting parallels with peasants in the Baltic region. It draws upon the post-Cold War discussion of free and unfree rural labour in early modern Europe. The discussion maintains that the labour service by free Swedish and Finnish peasant landholders and peasant tenants at its heaviest point may have been on a par with the corvée in the early modern Baltic provinces. It is suggested that the Cold War mental map may have led to an overstatement of the East-West distinction between peasants’ circumstances in the Baltic Sea region.

The Marquis of Anglesey on his Dorset estate was an absentee landlord who maintained close relationships with his estate through extensive correspondence with his land agent William Castleman. The surviving letters are a very rich source by which to examine the minutiae of rural life and a way to reconstruct social and working relationships within the nineteenth-century English landed estate. By focusing on a range of customary and unwritten rights, this article will consider issues such as how tenants navigated renegotiation of their leases, sought rent abatements or compensation for damage to their crops from hunting. Working and social relationships on such an estate were closely interlinked, as is widely shown here. The article also raises more contentious estate issues such as who had the rights to fallen and standing timber, the customs affecting courts, the repair of churches, and the responsibilities for building and maintaining schools. Throughout, the issue of ‘social control’ is assessed. Together the range of documented work and social interactions provide a fuller picture of the functioning of a southern English great estate in the early nineteenth century, and allow us to examine this rural community beyond the remit of its agricultural history.