Theory as History

Jairus Banaji spent most of his academic life at Oxford. He has been a Research Associate in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, for the past several years. He is the author of Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2007).

Winner of the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize."Banaji’s seemingly idiosyncratic but in fact highly sophisticated and original approach to historical analysis provides, I think, not only a welcome stimulus and a challenge for scholars today, but also will give them plenty to think about for many years to come" – Marcel van der Linden"Banaji’s Theory as History provides an incisive analysis of pre-capitalist modes of production, demonstrating that no aspect of human history is irrelevant to the present. [...] It is not the Marxist method that has been at fault, but the dominance of non-Marxist theory and method in the minds of Marxists. One final lesson therefore that Banaji may bring the reader is on the profundity of Marx’s observation that the thoughts of the ruling class are ruling thoughts. Banaji’s analysis is an immensely useful signpost on the road away from the dominance of those thoughts in our own minds." – Counterfire [www.counterfire.org]"The great merit of this volume is that it establishes an approach for [the debates about the nature and origin of capitalism] that is deeply theoretical, but at the same time refreshingly unhampered by the kind of doctrinaire attachment to a perceived (and often misread) orthodoxy that plagued so much of “historical materialism” for the past century. It is scholarly, without being purely academic... Banaji’s book deserves to be read and debated as one of the starting points for a new wave of Marxist historiography, still in the process of liberating itself from the ghost of its formalist past." – Pepijn Brandon, International Socialism

• Foreword, Marcel van der LindenAcknowledgements1. Introduction: Themes in Historical Materialism2. Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History3. Historical Arguments for a ‘Logic of Deployment’ in ‘Precapitalist’ Agriculture4. Workers Before Capitalism5. The Fictions of Free Labour: Contract, Coercion and so-called Unfree Labour6. Agrarian History and the Labour-Organisation of Byzantine Large Estates7. Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: What Kind of Transition? (A Discussion of Chris Wickham’s magnum opus)8. Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages9. Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism10. Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century11. Trajectories of Accumulation or ‘Transitions’ to Capitalism?12. Modes of Production: A SynthesisPublications of Jairus BanajiReferencesIndex