The Class Structure of Pakistan

The Class Structure of Pakistan PDF Author: Taimur Rahman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199400126
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This study makes three propositions. First, the mode of production of pre-colonial South Asia was qualitatively distinct from European feudalism. Instead, Marx's notion of the Asiatic mode of production is more consistent with the historical evidence. Second, the colonial path of capitalist development of South Asia resulted in a socio-economic formation that combined features of the Asiatic and capitalist modes of production, which this study terms Asiatic capitalism. Empirical analysis of agrarian relations in Pakistan reveals the relative absence of wage labour and the continuing existence of various forms of pre-capitalist economic relations within the overall framework of a capitalist economy. Third, the vast majority of the non-agricultural working population of Pakistan today is engaged in handicraft and manufacture. However, manufacturing and services are dominated by petty commodity production and small-scale capitalism. Hence, while being significant in terms of output, the formal large-scale industrial sector, which was developed along the model of state-corporate capitalism, remains relatively small in terms of employment. In sum, the class structure of Pakistan is characterized by this study as Asiatic capitalism.

New Perspectives on Pakistan's Political Economy

New Perspectives on Pakistan's Political Economy PDF Author: Matthew McCartney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110876309X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This volume makes a major intervention in the debates around the nature of the political economy of Pakistan, focusing on its contemporary social dynamics. This is the first comprehensive academic analysis of Pakistan's political economy after thirty-five years, and addresses issues of state, class and society, examining gender, the middle classes, the media, the bazaar economy, urban spaces and the new elite. The book goes beyond the contemporary obsession with terrorism and extremism, political Islam, and simple 'civilian–military relations', and looks at modern-day Pakistan through the lens of varied academic disciplines. It not only brings together new work by some emerging scholars but also formulates a new political economy for the country, reflecting the contemporary reality and diversification in the social sciences in Pakistan. The chapters dynamically and dialectically capture emergent processes and trends in framing Pakistan's political economy and invite scholars to engage with and move beyond these concerns and issues.

Class Structure and Economic Growth

Class Structure and Economic Growth PDF Author: Angus Maddison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134561636
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The purpose of this study is to analyse the relationship between social structure and economic performance in India and Pakistan. It seeks to establish whether the social system had a significant dysfunctional role in hindering growth in the past, and whether the situation has changed since independence. It analyses the extent to which governments in office really tried to change the social structure and the degree to which their rhetorical commitments were constrained by the inertia of tradition and by the vested interests which inherited economic and social power.

The New Pakistani Middle Class

The New Pakistani Middle Class PDF Author: Ammara Maqsood
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674981510
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Pakistan’s presence in the outside world is dominated by images of religious extremism and violence. These images—and the narratives that interpret them—inform events in the international realm, but they also twist back around to shape local class politics. In The New Pakistani Middle Class, Ammara Maqsood focuses on life in contemporary Lahore, where she unravels these narratives to show how central they are for understanding competition and the quest for identity among middle-class groups. Lahore’s traditional middle class has asserted its position in the socioeconomic hierarchy by wielding significant social capital and dominating the politics and economics of urban life. For this traditional middle class, a Muslim identity is about being modern, global, and on the same footing as the West. Recently, however, a more visibly religious, upwardly mobile social group has struggled to distinguish itself against this backdrop of conventional middle-class modernity, by embracing Islamic culture and values. The religious sensibilities of this new middle-class group are often portrayed as Saudi-inspired and Wahhabi. Through a focus on religious study gatherings and also on consumption in middle-class circles—ranging from the choice of religious music and home décor to debit cards and the cut of a woman’s burkha—The New Pakistani Middle Class untangles current trends in piety that both aspire toward, and contest, prevailing ideas of modernity. Maqsood probes how the politics of modernity meets the practices of piety in the struggle among different middle-class groups for social recognition and legitimacy.

The Struggle for Pakistan

The Struggle for Pakistan PDF Author: Ayesha Jalal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674744993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Established as a homeland for India’s Muslims in 1947, Pakistan has had a tumultuous history. Beset by assassinations, coups, ethnic strife, and the breakaway of Bangladesh in 1971, the country has found itself too often contending with religious extremism and military authoritarianism. Now, in a probing biography of her native land amid the throes of global change, Ayesha Jalal provides an insider’s assessment of how this nuclear-armed Muslim nation evolved as it did and explains why its dilemmas weigh so heavily on prospects for peace in the region. “[An] important book...Ayesha Jalal has been one of the first and most reliable [Pakistani] political historians [on Pakistan]...The Struggle for Pakistan [is] her most accessible work to date...She is especially telling when she points to the lack of serious academic or political debate in Pakistan about the role of the military.” —Ahmed Rashid, New York Review of Books “[Jalal] shows that Pakistan never went off the rails; it was, moreover, never a democracy in any meaningful sense. For its entire history, a military caste and its supporters in the ruling class have formed an ‘establishment’ that defined their narrow interests as the nation’s.” —Isaac Chotiner, Wall Street Journal

The Politics of Common Sense

The Politics of Common Sense PDF Author: Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108226078
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This work offers a refreshingly different perspective on Pakistan - it documents the evolution of Pakistan's structure of power over the past four decades. In particular, how the military dictatorship headed by General Zia ul Haq (1977–1988) - whose rule has been almost exclusively associated with a narrow agenda of Islamisation - transformed the political field through a combination of coercion and consent-production. The Zia regime inculcated within the society at large a 'common sense' privileging the cultivation of patronage ties and the concurrent demeaning of counter-hegemonic political practices which had threatened the structure of power in the decade before the military coup in 1977. The book meticulously demonstrates how the politics of common sense has been consolidated in the past three decades through the agency of emergent social forces such as traders and merchants as well as the religio-political organisations that gained in influence during the 1980s.

Big Capital in an Unequal World

Big Capital in an Unequal World PDF Author: Rosita Armytage
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789206170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Inside the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of Pakistan’s elite. Benefitting from rare access and keen analytical insight, Rosita Armytage’s rich study reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterizes the modern world. Operating in a rapidly developing economic environment, the experience of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most powerful members contradicts widely held assumptions that economic growth is leading to increasingly impersonalized and globally standardized economic and political structures.

The Class Matrix

The Class Matrix PDF Author: Vivek Chibber
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067424513X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Class structure -- Class formation -- Consent, coercion, and resignation -- Agency, contingency, and all that -- How capitalism endures.

The Duel

The Duel PDF Author: Tariq Ali
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471105881
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
Pakistan stands on the front line of the war against terror. Yet this long-time ally of the West, whose links with the US have caused enormous friction within the country, is in deepening crisis. As President Pervez Musharraf struggles to cling to power through states of emergency, press curbs and imprisonment of his opponents, a range of forces threaten to destroy him and tip the country into a full-blown civil war. Drawing on extensive first-hand research and personal knowledge, Tariq Ali investigates both the causes and the consequences of Pakistan's rapid spiral into political chaos. Shedding new light on controversial questions (did the US greenlight the execution of President Zufikar Ali Bhutto in 1979? Is NATO negotiating to grant the Taliban a role in Afghanistan? Are those now jockeying for power any less corrupt than Musharraf's current cronies?) he examines the various disparate elements and each of the key individuals whose conflicts are tearing Pakistan apart

Migration and Small Towns in Pakistan

Migration and Small Towns in Pakistan PDF Author: Arif Hasan
Publisher: IIED
ISBN: 1843697343
Category : Migration, Internal
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description