WORKERSTRUGGLES IN THE AGRARIANCITY

The chapters thus far have examined the deep entanglements of the agrarian world and global capital that have shaped Gurgaon's spectacular development from agricultural hinterland to global city. In this chapter I want to think with and from the everyday struggles of migrant workers in Gurgaon, questioning what kinds of solidarities and struggles emerge from conditions of marginality and flexibility described in previous chapters, and what these solidarities reveal about subaltern urban politics in the contemporary moment. Where the previous chapter examined tenement-labour regimes, how everyday relations of the worker tenement patterned the mobility and working conditions of Gurgaon's migrant working classes, this chapter is interested in how these conditions shape attendant demands and claims for a place in the city. As I will show, the everyday struggles traced across this chapter are not made to housing, belonging or urban services – the typical registers of subaltern urban politics detailed in urban scholarship – but rather reflective of lives dominated by flux, mobility and precarity, the struggles coalesce around tentative demands for a dignified life. If contemporary scholarship on subaltern urban politics has centred on the territorial warfare waged between global capital and subaltern actors over access and use of urban land, the political struggles traced in the chapter align with the more expansive urban political agenda set out by Henri Lefebvre, as faltering calls for a transformed and renewed right to urban life. Borrowing from work elsewhere on subaltern cosmopolitanism, the chapter understands these disparate political struggles as informed by conditions of labour exploitation both in the home and workplace, migrations between the city and countryside, and ad hoc support networks that characterise the everyday lives of migrant workers in urban India. Attention to the workers’ subaltern cosmopolitanisms provides a way of getting at not only the gendered conditions that inform the workers’ willingness to engage in political action but also the strikingly tentative and speculative character of the demands being made. How have conditions in Gurgaon's tenements and workplaces, described in the previous chapter, shaped particular kinds of politics and agency among migrant workers that exceed claims to freedom?

In Chapter 7 I move onto the case study of Botswana, which in contrast to Somalia and Uganda has experienced structural transformation due in large part to its diamond industry. Industrialization in Botswana has led to a sectoral shift out of agriculture as workers have left rural areas to move to cities and join the modern workforce, thereby leading to a decline in the relative value of rural land. I employ both qualitative and quantitative evidence to show that ethnic fractionalization has declined in Botswana since the mid-twentieth-century and examine parliamentary debates around ethnic identity. Moreover, I show that this shift has happened not because of but largely despite efforts of the Botswanan state, which has both discouraged rural-urban migration and failed to alleviate institutional ethnic inequalities that persist to the present day. Finally, I consider alternative explanations for ethnic homogenization in Botswana and find them all wanting.

I begin the book by providing an overview of recent political economy literature on ethnicity, which largely assumes that ethnicity is fixed and unchanging despite decades of evidence to the contrary. I then introduce my argument as an attempt to explain ethnic change. I first argue that people hold multiple ethnic identities simultaneously, and that individuals emphasize the one that brings them the most benefits. I then build upon earlier theories from Marx and Gellner to claim that industrialization is the most powerful factor that leads people to re-identify with larger ethnic groups, and that this process of assimilation is induced by the decline in the relative value of land. Inasmuch as the process of industrialization is inherently uneven, however, I suggest that assimliation should proceed unevenly as well. Finally I claim that the major role played by states in my theory is in their ability to promote or inhibit industrialization, not through assimilationist policies. I then go on to establish the scope conditions of my argument, namely the way I focus on ethnic change in non-violent contexts while also limiting myself to non-immigrant communities.

This is the first of two chapters on indigenous peoples in settler states. Here I focus on the case of Native Americans in the United States and show that urbanization and the demographic shift out of reservations in the late twentieth century led to widespread re-identification from more narrow tribal identities to a broader Native American identity. Census data from the 1980 US census shows a robust negative correlation at the tribal level between levels of urbanization and speaking tribal languages at home – but not between high school education and tribal language ability – which adds further evidence that it is not literacy or education that is driving assimilation. However, due to the legalization of Native American casinos from the 1980s, tribal land suddenly became economically valuable and altered the incentives for ethnic homogenization. As expected, I find evidence for an increased salience in tribal identities among Native Americans, which has in some cases led to claims for new tribal land and even new tribal identities.

Finally, in Chapter 10 I close the book by discussing some broader conclusions about the study of ethnicity and ethnic change, while also speculating about future prospects for the relationship between industrialization and assimilation. In the former case I focus on such topics as future quantitative work using data on ethnicity, our understanding of individuals who change their ethnic identities, the role of the state in enforcing or promoting ethnic identification and policy implications as regards promoting industrialization. In the latter case I return to my original dataset of country censuses from Chapter 4 to see if the relationship between industrialization and ethnic diversity changes over time. Upon introducing an interaction effect, I find evidence for a declining effect over time, although it appears that the interaction effect is driven by observations from the Americas, a result for which I find evidence in the secondary literature as well.

This is the first of two chapters to take a closer look at Sub-Saharan Africa, which is both the world’s least-industrialized and ethnically most-diverse continent. I start here with an examination of Somalia and Uganda, which are both states which have seen low levels of industrialization and an increase in ethnic fractionalization in recent decades. In Somalia the lack of formal sector job creation in the 1970s and 1980s contributed both to the collapse of the state along clan lines and a shift by which Somalia has gone from being considered one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in Africa to one of the most diverse, as the salience of clan identity has risen in order to allow citizens to gain access to land and livelihoods. In Uganda a failure to create structural transformation has led to increased competition for land, leading individuals to utilize their often newly formed ethnic identities to claim ownership and title over rural land. I provide evidence from a variety of local land conflicts that revolve around ethnicity, as well as ongoing debates around both the listing of ’indigenous communities’ in Uganda’s constitution and the creation of new districts.

In this chapter I examine the statistical effect of industrialization on ethnic change. I first take Soviet-era cross-national data measuring ethnic diversity by country in 1961 and 1985 and regress the change in ethnic diversity across these twenty-four years on change in carbon emissions per capita over the same time period. The results demonstrate a strong relationship between decreasing ethnic diversity and increasing levels of industrialization, a result which is robust to the inclusion of several control variables and the use of various sub-samples, as well as alternative measures of industrialization such as cement production and urbanization. I also show that carbon emissions are robustly correlated with change in the percentage identifying with the largest ethnic group per state. I then use an alternative original dataset consisting of individual country censuses between 1960 and 2019, and show that the same effect holds, both as regards the effect of carbon emissions on ethnic fractionalization as well as robustness checks and multiple alternative measures such as electricity consumption and the share of labour in both agriculture and industry.

Here I examine the case of the Māori in New Zealand, which provides me with a second case study of how processes of declining and then increasing values for tribal land has affected ethnic identity. As in the USA, population growth and subsequent urbanization in the mid-twentieth-century led to a rise in pan-Māori nationalism, with evidence that native language loss in cities did not halt the rise of Māoritanga (Māori-ness). However, judicial rulings that attempted to compensate the Māori for their historical loss of land and livelihoods gave resources to individual iwi (tribes) rather than the Māori community as a whole, which has had led to a renewed emphasis on iwi identity above and beyond a common Māori identity. In particular I focus on fisheries policy that has allocated money to iwis according to their coastline length and show that those iwi with longer coastlines have seen higher population growth in recent censuses. I conclude the chapter with a brief examination of indigenous peoples in both Australia and Canada, where I show that industrialization has induced assimilation into pan-tribal identities.