Labor and merchant capitalism in myanmar and thailand

Invoking an older disciplinary interest in radical difference, contemporary anthropologists have sought to document spaces of independence and moral autonomy, on the one hand, and exclusion and abandonment, on the other. For the anthropology of labor, this conceptual move has found expression in efforts to identify non-capitalist economic forms operating within the “ruins” or interstices of capitalism. Research along such lines has productively trained anthropological attention on the heterogeneity of non-normative labor forms in the present. But such an approach risks obscuring the relations of exploitation and rule by which seemingly independent labor forms remain not only embedded in “the dull compulsion of economic relations,” but also subordinated to particular capitalist actors. As a corrective, anthropologists can productively map such non-normative relations of exploitation and rule ethnographically. Useful to this end, I argue, is the notion of merchant capitalism and the related literature on the capitalist incorporation of smallholder peasants, both of which I consider at length in this chapter. As empirical support for my argument, I consider cases of putting-out work and debt-bound petty production drawn from my fieldwork in Myanmar and Thailand.