Stephen G. Bunker - Böcker

Stephen Bunker challenges the image of peasants as passive victims and argues that coffee growers in the Bugisu District of Uganda, because they own land and may choose which crops to produce, maintain an unusual degree of economic and political independence. Focusing on peasant struggles for market control over coffee exports in Bugisu from colonial times through the reign and overthrow of Idi Amin, Bunker shows that these freeholding peasants acted collectively and used the state's dependence on coffee export revenues to effectively influence and veto government programs inimical to their interests. Bunker's work vividly portrays the small victories and great trials of ordinary people struggling to control their own economic destiny while resisting the power of the world economy.

Underdeveloping the Amazon shows how different extractive economies have periodically enriched various dominant classes but progressively impoverished the entire region by disrupting both the Amazon Basin's ecology and human communities. Contending that traditional models of development based almost exclusively on the European and American experience of industrial production cannot apply to a regional economy founded on extraction, Stephen G. Bunker proposes a new model based on the use and depletion of energy values in natural resources as the key to understanding the disruptive forces at work in the Basin.

Key metaphors in world-system analysis are profoundly spatial, but there have been few attempts to understand how space, location, and topography affect world-system organization and process. To fill this gap, this book examines case studies of the restructuring of space and transport in core, semiperipheral, and peripheral economies. It addresses such topics as the role of ocean transport in linking terrestrially based units of the capitalist world economy, the role of land transport systems in the construction and restructuring of relationships between raw materials peripheries and core economies, and the role of the airplane in transforming and representing changing spatial, economic, and social relations in the capitalist world economy.World-systems theory and many other perspectives on the world economy, including international political economy and analysis of globalization, typically pay only limited attention to issues of space, location, and the role of transportation in the world economy. This book identifies key theoretical and empirical issues and provides the basis for formulating research strategies to address this gap in our understanding.

The Snake With Golden Braids seeks to understand how local inhabitants of the extraordinarily rugged Andean topography of Huanoquite, Peru came to understand their landscape and then build and maintain a system of irrigation ditches across it. The Huanoquiteno's original solution, a conceptually and architecturally complex irrigation system, was abandoned after the Spanish conquest of Peru, and replaced by a simpler, yet still complex, system, which is still in place today. Stephen G. Bunker combines a history of these systems with a rethinking of the local myths, legends, and environment to help make sense of the land and its uses. This book follows his intellectual and spiritual journey to learn not just about building and managing irrigation ditches, but about the very different ways of knowing the environment and the spirits of the earth that informed and empowered the original builders. Bunker's first-hand experience and research will prove an invaluable asset to sociologists, anthropologists, and environmentalists.

Globalization and the Race for Resources explores how five nations-Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, the United States, and Japan-achieved trade dominance by devising technologies, social and financial institutions, and markets to enhance their access to raw materials. Through ecological and economic explanation of resource extraction and production, Stephen G. Bunker and Paul S. Ciccantell reveal globalization as the result of the progressive extension of systematically integrated material processes across cumulatively greater space. Drawing from extensive historical research into how economic and environmental dynamics interacted in the extraction of different materials in the Amazon, especially in the development of the iron mine of Carajas, the authors also illustrate the profound connection between global dominance and control of natural resources.