![]() ![]() Examples abound across the globe and throughout history: Chinese in the Philippines and Indonesia, Igbos in Nigeria, Lebanese in Sierra Leone, Muslims in India, Greeks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and Jews in Medieval Western and Modern Eastern Europe.Īn important body of scholarship in political science ( e.g. ![]() This led to ethnic violence, in which the break in the relationship between the majority and Jewish middlemen was the igniting factor.Įthnic minorities that dominate middleman occupations, such as traders and financiers, often become targets of persecution and ethnic violence. In contrast, during political turmoil, debtors could not commit to paying in the future, and consequently, moneylenders and grain traders had to demand immediate (re)payment. When economic shocks occurred in times of political stability, rolling over or forgiving debts was an equilibrium outcome because both sides valued their future relationship. Instead, the evidence is consistent with the politico-economic mechanism, in which Jewish middlemen served as providers of insurance against economic shocks to peasants and urban grain buyers in a relationship based on repeated interactions. This evidence is inconsistent with the scapegoating hypothesis, according to which Jews were blamed for all misfortunes of the majority. When this happened, pogroms primarily occurred in places where Jews dominated middleman occupations, i.e., moneylending and grain trading. The seminar is co-arranged with the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.Using detailed panel data from the Pale of Settlement area between 18, we document that anti-Jewish pogroms-mob violence against the Jewish minority-broke out when economic shocks coincided with political turmoil. His PhD research has centered on the relation between globalization, democracy, and social democracy as it plays out in the small Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, where he has done extensive fieldwork, and lived for many years. His work is part of the ERC-funded research project Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparison, led by professor Bruce Kapferer. Jacob Hjortsberg is currently completing his PhD at the University of Bergen. Specifically, I want to look at how critical social justice relates to the key challange of the MM state, which I argue is the need to remain culturally segregated from the “host society”/the global market while nevertheless integrating into it economically. In my future research, I want to look at the recent introduction of critical social justice discourse – or “wokeness”, as it is also called – into Singaporean public life, which I see as a key challenge to the kind of statecraft that Singapore built its economic success on. By this, I mean a small state that operates in the global market the same way as any middleman minority operates in a “host society”: by inserting itself into an economy over which it has no political control (the global market/“host society”), and making money by entering into mutually beneficial and voluntary business deals with whoever is willing to trade. In my thesis, I coin the term “middleman minority state” (MM state) to describe Singapore’s unique, and highly successful, form of statecraft. The latter term is borrowed from Bonacich and Sowell, who define “middleman minority” as an ethnic minority group living in a host society, in which they occupy the position of middleman – between producers and consumers, and/or between different social groups – and in which they have achieved greater economic success than the majority group/s among whom they live (examples being the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Jews in Europe, and the Parsis in India, to mention just a few). In my PhD thesis, Middleman Minority Nation: Globalization and Social Democracy in Singapore, I pursue two broad arguments: a) that Singapore is best understood as a social democracy adapted to the conditions of global capitalism and b) that this form of social democracy is best understood as a hybrid between traditional social democracy and middleman minority culture. The paper presented suggests some ideas for further research based on my doctoral research about Singapore.
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