Industrialization and Assimilation: Understanding Ethnic Change in the Modern World - Hardcover

Green, Elliott D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009268368 ISBN 13: 9781009268363

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2022

Synopsis

Industrialization and Assimilation examines the process of ethnic identity change in a broad historical context. Green explains how and why ethnicity changes across time, showing that, by altering the basis of economic production from land to labour and removing people from the 'idiocy of rural life', industrialization makes societies more ethnically homogenous. More specifically, the author argues that industrialization lowers the relative value of rural land, leading people to identify less with narrow rural identities in favour of broader identities that can aid them in navigating the formal urban economy. Using large-scale datasets that span the globe as well as detailed case studies ranging from mid-twentieth-century Turkey to contemporary Botswana, Somalia and Uganda, as well as evidence from Native Americans in the United States and the Māori in New Zealand, Industrialization and Assimilation provides a new framework to understand the origins of modern ethnic identities.

About this title

About the Author

Elliott D. Green is Associate Professor of Development Studies in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics. His research focusses on the origins of ethnic and national identification and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009268368
• ISBN 13: 9781009268363
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 298