Summer talks series: Connected histories of capitalism

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• Department of History

This paper is an early, speculative intervention into the nascent study of the history of the neoliberal era. I seek to expand our focus on the internal crises of the West in the 1960s and 1970s by looking at parallel developments across the Asia-Pacific region in the post-war period through the 1980s. First, I examine early 1980s experiments with rural, labor-intensive industrialization in Guangdong Province, powering the rise of China’s eventual export-driven industry; second, I connect this local story to broader changes in Hong Kong and east Asia as a whole, simultaneously revisiting older literature on the east Asia miracles and the four small tigers of Asia in preceding periods. Finally, I argue that it is useful to pay greater attention to Asian history as the context for the global rise of flexible accumulation in processes of manufacture, labor, and corporate organization, a story so familiar now to social-scientific literature on late-century globalization.

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