Foreword

Summary

This book provides an extremely valuable resource to all those interested in a joined-up analysis of key issues in feminist political economy. It is a very useful as well as a very timely book that lays out the basic contours of a feminist political economy from a global perspective. A political economy approach, as the authors explain, is concerned with how the structures of power in global, national and local contexts shape the operation and outcomes of economic forces. The book combines feminist concerns with gender and its intersection with other forms of inequality with this political economy approach. The authors examine how the intersectional nature of inequalities is an essential frame for understanding the different manifestations of power as they operate through the domains of production and reproduction across the world, reconstituting, modifying or transforming the institutions of states, markets and households. The book sets out a macro-level analysis of how the global division of labour between men and women, between paid and unpaid work and between households and markets emerged through the interplay of global forces, initially as an aspect of the colonial world order and then, in contemporary times, through the workings of the neocolonial order that took its place.

The timeliness of the book lies in the global scope of the analysis. As the authors argue, the need for a global perspective does not lie simply in the increasing visibility of unequal global interconnections as economies open up (or are opened up) to global competition but also in uncovering the roots of these unequal interconnections in an earlier era of primitive accumulation, when the capitalist expansion of the West proceeded through the expropriation of land and the extraction of resources and labour in territories inhabited by those constructed as “uncivilized, unproductive and, in essence, inferior to the colonizers”. A feminist approach to questions of political economy is cognizant of the long history of exploitation that produced the intersectional inequalities of today: class inequalities, yes, but also their intersection with the subordinations associated with gender, caste, ethnicity, race and national identity.

The book also addresses the interconnected relationships between labour markets and households, and hence between paid work that is recognized and counted and the shadow economy of unpaid work.