Stories of Globalization

Few industries are as thoroughly globalised as the agro-food sector, and Alessandro Bonanno and Douglas Constance use it to ask what globalisation actually is. Their argument begins with the time-space compression that grew out of mid-twentieth-century Fordist capitalism, as distance mattered less and time moved differently. The result, they contend, is a new capitalism, qualitatively different from the patterns of international relations set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

At the centre are eight case studies, set against a wide and original review of existing scholarship. Each traces the dealings between transnational corporations, the groups that resist them and the state, showing globalisation as contested ground where corporate power meets mounting opposition and its own internal contradictions. A rigorous, evidence-led study for students and researchers in sociology, political economy and the politics of food.