Banaji

Main research interests:

1)  Marx’s Capital, and why the Hegelian “background” is indispensable to any sophisticated grasp of this text;
2) Agrarian history;  this began c.1970 as a proposed book on the fate of the peasantry under capitalism. Over the years, this generated case studies as well as ‘comparativist’ essays, and led to a long spell of work on late antiquity, now published as Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity. 
3)  There were also “theoretical” contributions which tried to do several things: to contest the dominant view of modes of production as entities driven essentially by characteristic forms of exploitation of labour; confront the primitivist/Weberian orthodoxies about the ancient economy which continue to influence Marxist accounts; and underline the vastly more sophisticated and flexible ways in which dominant agrarian classes have structured the management and exploitation of rural labour as part of a calculus driven to a large degree by considerations of profitability. 
4)  Since the early 90s, much of my work has been a “field” study of the contemporary evolution of capital, exploring the impact of global financial markets on domestic business via competition, regulation, and corporate governance. This work is largely based on interviews with representatives of capital and the corporate sector, but relates, “theoretically”, to many of the themes in Vol. 3.
5)  Sartre’s Critique de la Raison Dialectique, esp. the first volume. There is a problem of intelligibility and this book is the single most important attempt to respond to it.

 A basic bibliography would include:

‘From the commodity to capital: Hegel’s dialectic in Marx’s Capital’, in Diane Elson (ed.), Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism (CSE Books, 1979) 14-45
Henryk Grossmann, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System (abridged translation; Pluto Press, 1992)

‘The peasantry in the feudal mode of production: towards an economic model’, Journal of Peasant Studies 3 (1976) 299-320
‘Capitalist domination and the small peasantry: the Deccan districts in the late nineteenth century’, Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay), Special Issue, 1977
‘The metamorphoses of agrarian capitalism (Review essay)’, Journal of Agrarian Change 2(1) (2002) 96-119

‘Summary of selected parts of Kautsky’s Agrarian Question’, Economy and Society 5 (1976), repr. in H. Wolpe (ed.), The Articulation of Modes of Production: Essays from Economy and Society (London, etc., 1980) 45-92
‘Modes of production in a materialist conception of history’, Capital and Class, no. 3 (1977) 1-44
‘Historical arguments for a “logic of deployment” in “precapitalist” agriculture’, Journal of Historical Sociology 5 (1992) 379-91
‘Modernizing the historiography of rural labour: an unwritten agenda’, in Michael Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography (Routledge, 1997) 88-102

‘Lavoratori liberi e residenza coatta: il colonato romano in prospettiva storica’, in Elio Lo Cascio, ed., Terre, proprietari e contadini dell’ impero romano (Rome, 1997) 253-280
‘Agrarian history and the labour organisation of Byzantine large estates’, in Alan Bowman and E. Rogan, eds., Agriculture in Egypt from Pharaonic to Modern Times (Proceedings of the British Academy – 96) (Oxford, 1999) 193-216
‘Estates’, in G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1999) 432-33
Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic Dominance (Oxford, 2001) 

(with Gautam Mody) Corporate Governance and the Indian Private Sector: A Report (QEH Working Paper Series – QEHWPS 73) available at http://www2.qeh.ox.ac.uk/research/qehwp-list2.html

							
	
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