More than 50 years ago, Immanuel Wallerstein published one of the most influential analyses of the "modern capitalist world-system." In this paper, Iwill discuss some of his theoretical, methodological, conceptual and empirical limitations regarding the treatment of sixteenth-to nineteenth-century India and its role in the world economy as well as the underlying definition and periodization of capitalism. Such inadequacies include the "dispensable luxuries" thesis and mechanisms of bullion exchange; the misrepresentation of regional specificities and their impact; the disregard for Indian agency; the downplaying of Mughal and post-Mughal socio-economic development; and the problematic historical class and state analysis. That said, Wallerstein made a significant and lasting contribution to the subject of world history by emphasizing the centrality of the world economy and core-semi-periphery-periphery relations spanning the sixteenth through twenty-first centuries.
The incorporation of sub-Saharan Africa into the capitalist world economy has been analysed from various theoretical perspectives. This article explores how a commodity frontier perspective can contribute to our understanding of this multifaceted process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A commodity frontiers perspective departs from related approaches, such as Wallerstein's world-systems analysis and global commodity/value chain analysis, by combining a systematic angle with a bottom-up perspective that focuses on transformative processes at the frontiers. Building on the examples of major cash crops, most notably cocoa and coffee, this article reveals how diverse these commodity frontiers were, both diachronically and synchronically, in the ways that land, nature, labour, capital and knowledge were used to produce commodities for global markets and in how Africans contributed to shaping these frontiers. The article also suggests that the focus on world-leading commodity production sites and global export markets obfuscates our view of broader processes of capitalist transformation beyond such "islands." Looking through the lens of cattle commodities, it argues that taking into account smaller, short-lived and failed frontiers as well as regionally oriented ones gives us a more nuanced view of how capitalist expansion reshaped sub-Saharan Africa's economies.
The 1950s in West Germany are generally considered to have been a reactionary period in terms of gender relations. At the same time, however, family law underwent reform as a result of the 'Gleichberechtigungsgrundsatz' being included in the German 'Grundgesetz'. This meant abolishing patriarchal privileges, particularly the right of the husband and father to make decisions within the family unit. This article examines women's participation in, and positioning on, the reform, both inside and outside parliament. It also explores the ideas of equality, marriage and family that shaped the reform debate.
Multinational corporations have increasingly eluded the taxation aim of modern nation states. Especially in the last decades, enterprises seemed to have found manifold ways to avoid and circumvent national taxation. Also, the most recent OECD-initiative for a minimum tax-rate and complementing regulation seems not to have successfully solved the issue. While historical research extensively dealt with income taxation especially through the lens of inequality research, corporate taxation received more attention only recently. The article will sum up the recent literature in the field of business history, going back to the period of World War I, when increased tax rates fuelled corporations' interest in tax evasion strategies. Asking why nation states failed to regulate corporate tax evasion, the article is structured around the different initiatives by international organizations to agree on "model conventions" for double taxation treaties and the role of multinational corporations to intervene into or obstruct them between the 1920s and the 1970s.
Geneva's Environment and the League of Nations This article uses the League of Nations and the city of Geneva to unpack the dialogical relationship between placemaking and the twentieth century fashioning of international order. Even as historians have challenged liberal internationalism's universality, many still present it as unplaced, with actors moving and communicating freely across empty space. But from 1919 through 1946, Geneva's environment was one of the League's most persistent problems, delimiting the aims and abilities of an organization which, in turn, acted to transform the city physically and conceptually. Only as it recast difficulties in internationalist terms did Geneva become a globally pertinent symbol of peace.
The marriage prohibitions introduced through the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 influenced legal practice internationally. Historiography has so far suggested that Swiss authorities reacted in a liberal fashion and driven by principles of non-racism. However, when reassessing bilateral agreements as well as administrative decisions regarding German exiles and binational couples, we arrive at a different conclusion. The Registrar General implemented a Swiss certificate of non-Jewish ancestry, and he advised all registry offices to adhere to German rules. This had a particularly severe impact on foreign women since intermarriage with Swiss nationals was targeted by the restrictive immigration policy. Thus, couples circumvented Swiss authorities and married abroad.
This article situates the migration of East Europeans in broader discourses on migration and race in the Federal Republic of Germany during the pivotal decades of the 1980s and 1990s until EU eastern enlargement in 2004. So far, migration from Eastern Europe has hardly been considered as part of Germany's postwar migration history. Given the importance of the imagination of "inferior" East Europeans for German colonialism and racism before 1945, as well as its relevance after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, this omission is rather surprising. Analyzing articles of the leading German news magazine Der Spiegel, we argue that East European migration was subject to racialization, even without explicit invocations of the category of race.
