Race & Class review of "Globalizing the Caribbean"

Race & Class has published a review of my new book, by Dr. Jerry Harris, National Secretary of the Global Studies Association of North America.  Read it here. 

Review of 'Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean'

 I have a new book review looking at Marion Werner's "Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean".   It is published in the Journal of World-Systems Research. You can read it here.   

Critical Sociology reviews Asia/Oceania Volume

Alexius A. Pereira, a researcher in Singapore (who received his Ph.D. at LSE), has published an excellent review of my 2016 edited volume.  His review of Globalization and Transnational Capitalism in Asia and Oceania can be read here in Critical Sociology. 

New review of my 2012 book

Matthew Davidson, at the University of Miami, has written an excellent review of my 2012 book. You can read it here, on the website: Haiti: Then and Now.  

Book Reviews of my 2012 book

York University Associate Professor Justin Podur has published a review of my 2012 book in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. Read the review here.  Podur is also the author of the book Haiti's New Dictatorship (Pluto Press, 2012).

Professor Valerie Kaussen (author of Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and U.S. Imperialism) has published a review of my 2012 book in the oldest scholarly journal on the Caribbean: the New West Indian Guide. You can read the entire review here.

Race & Class review by Boaz Anglade

A review of my book Paramilitarism and the assault on democracy in Haiti (2012, Monthly Review Press) has been published by Haitian scholar Boaz Anglade in the journal Race & Class.  The review can be read here.

Book reviewed in Journal of Labor & Society

My book with Monthly Review Press was reviewed by Matthew J. Smith, senior lecturer in the Department of History and Archeology at the University of West Indies, Mona, in Jamaica, author of Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957.  You can read the review here.

New reviews of my book by Hyppolite Pierre and Bruce Poinsette

Read a new review here of my book by Hyppolite Pierre. He is a Political Science Adjunct Faculty at the American Military University and the author of Haiti, Rising Flames from Burning Ashes: Haiti the Phoenix.

Also read a review/interview here on my book by Bruce Poinsette of The Skanner News.

Book reviewed on two websites

These websites have published two versions of a new review of my book, see here and here.

Book reviewed on Counterfire

The UK based website Counterfire has reviewed my book. See the full review here.

Counterpunch review of book

The alternative media outlet Counterpunch (of Jeffrey St. Clair and the late Alexander Cockburn) has published a review of my book. You can read the review by clicking here.

A Review of Sociologist Robyn Magalit Rodriguez's NEW BOOK Migrants For Export

Jeb Sprague
Science & Society

Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World, by Robyn Magalit Rodriguez. Minneapolis, Minnesota/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. $67.00; paper, $19.00. Pp. 208.
 

From government-sponsored nursing classes in Manila to crushed labor strikes at garment factories in southeast Asia, a variety of mechanisms have been developed to manage, promote and coerce Filipino workers as a readily available cheap source of labor around the world. A book of interest for scholars or students of global migration or of the contemporary Filipino/ Filipina experience, Migrants for Export should also be of interest to those studying the state in globalization and in relation to the changing practices and ideologies of state elites.
 

Rodriguez starts by considering some theoretical issues behind the state and its interaction with migrants, and the historical roots of the novel processes of today’s global market and political economy. She explains how the modern Philippine state developed, first tightly bound to the United States as a colony and later as a component within a global system (yet, still closely aligned with the United States). It is in today’s era of global capitalism that Rodriguez seeks to understand, by way of the Philippines, the exploitive and contradictory nature of the state’s role in migration.

The book’s central argument is that the Philippine state has become actively involved in marketing its citizens to companies and labor-receiving governments around the world for low-wage and closely watched temporary jobs. The practices and ideologies of state elites have become rooted in this process — becoming active migration promoters and managers, such that the “orientation of Philippine officials and government agencies toward overseas employment reveals the extent to which Philippine citizens have become reduced to mere commodities to be bartered and traded globally”(27). 

A Review of Peter Dicken's Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy, 5th Edition

Jeb Sprague

Journal of Sociology

Widely cited and read by scholars and students of globalization, Peter Dicken’s Global Shift is best known for its concise examination of structures of the global economy. Now in its 5th edition with over 250 newly designed figures and graphs, few texts are as effective in showing the incontrovertible changes undergone in production, distribution and consumption. Written prior to the crisis of recent years, it remains a useful guide for understanding the truly global nature of today’s world economy. However, where Dicken does a remarkable job in dissecting the structure of the global economy, he has little or nothing to say about how the state and economic structure are grounded in broader class and social relations.

 

Dicken starts, in Parts 1 and 2, by laying out distinct ways in which scholars conceptualize globalization and the importance of technological and networked development, as well as the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) and national states. Part 3 describes shifting economic sectors in the real economy: agriculture, autos, computers, textiles and logistical infrastructure. Included within Part 3 is a chapter on finance, but this is just 29 pages in a 599-page book. This chapter covers the spread of financial services but has little discussion of derivatives (p. 386) and nothing on the role of central banks or stock markets. Most importantly though, for the purposes of this review, how does Global Shift treat the role of social agency?

Book Review of 'The Dialectics of Globalization'

The Dialectics of Globalization: Economic and Political Conflict in a Transnational World
Jerry Harris
Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 2nd edition. 285 pp.
Globalizations

Jerry Harris has provided a wide-ranging yet detailed investigation into the unfolding of global capitalism. The book, Dialectics of Globalization, published (2006, 2008) in the years leading up to the ongoing global financial crisis, illuminates the hyper-intensification of political and economic changes leading us to where we are today. Made up of a collection of updated journal articles, it amasses an impressive body of work conceptually rooted in an understanding of globalization in its entirety.

Key for accepting the approach in his book, Harris argues that class relations in globalization must be reconceptualized beyond the confines of the nation-state. The rapid changes in production, technology, finance/capital accumulation have transformed the international economy into a global economy, creating consensus among corporate elites that barriers to investment and trade must be removed. A transnational capitalist class (TCC), promoting this project and directly involved in the accumulation of global capital, is now the dominant socio-economic group. Harris takes his readers through the maturing of this process, providing fascinating insight on the technological and financial engines propelling its expansion, as well as case studies that examine the process of global capitalism in countries ranging from Germany to Brazil and India.

A Review of Three Recent Books on Haiti

by Jeb Sprague
NACLA


The ProPheT and Power: Jean-BerTrand arisTide, The inTernaTional CommuniTy, and haiTi by Alex Dupuy, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006,
258 pp., $30.95

An unBroken agony: From revoluTion To The kidnaPPing oF a PresidenT by Randal Robinson, Basic Civitas Books, 2007, 304 pp., $16.95

Damming The Flood: haiTi, arisTide, and The PoliTiCs oF ConTainmenT by Peter Hallward, Verso, 2008, 442 pp., $29.95

Four years after the second ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected presi- dent, three books exploring the 2004 coup have appeared, ranging widely in their interpretations of events.