Making a global commodity: The production of markets and cotton in Egypt, Turkey, and the United States.

摘要

What is a global market? To explore this question, the dissertation examines how the world cotton market is produced and maintained. It presents a detailed analysis of the arrangements, calculative devices, power relations, and forces on which the production and circulation of cotton depend. It starts with the question of prices, examining the mechanisms and calculations that make it possible to produce global, regional, and local prices. It then traces the circulation of cotton, exploring how cotton crosses various borders as it moves from fields via traders to final users. Lastly the project looks at how cotton is grown, studying struggles of humans and non-humans to control the massive power of a little plant, the cotton. The research draws on two years of field work in three cotton growing villages in Egypt and Turkey and four merchant cities---Izmir, Alexandria, Memphis (TN), and New York City---following the circulation of the crop in two consecutive marketing and growing seasons.; The dissertation rejects the prevailing understanding of markets in both Political Economy and Economic Sociology. Markets do not just emerge as a relationship among self-interested buyers and sellers, governed by appropriate economic institutions. Nor are they to be understood as networks embedded in wider social structures. They are relations of power maintained everyday by constant interventions, the production of mercantile tools such as prosthetic, associate, and rehearsal prices, and the waging of various forms of struggles among market actors.; The thesis argues that it is on the specific practices of market making and maintenance that researchers and policy makers must focus in order to understand the conditions of the vast majority of world's population, whose survival is pegged to the working of global markets. Drawing upon methods from the social study of science and technology, and the studies of markets developed in political science, economic sociology, and anthropology, the dissertation presents an analysis of how a multitude of market agents, with different capacities to shape each others' possible fields of action negotiate, accept, reject, resist and reproduce a global market field that connects social positions to power.