Project description
A closer look at capitalism’s hidden impact on rural Middle East
The influence of global capitalism on the Middle East’s modern history is often overlooked by researchers. However, the socio-ecological transformation of rural areas under capitalism remains underexplored. Despite the significant impact of capitalist expansion on agriculture and tribal life, this aspect has received little recognition. A deeper understanding of these changes is crucial. The ERC-funded CAPITALEAST project addresses this gap by examining how global capitalism has affected tribes in the Middle East. By studying the commercialisation of agriculture, livestock, and land ownership, the project reveals the connections between rural communities and broader global forces. The findings will be disseminated through an online database, monographs, and conferences.
Objective
The Middle East is rarely associated with global capitalism. And yet, capitalist expansion had a substantial impact on its modern history. While previous works address issues such as dependency and coloniality, state building, human-environmental interaction and connectivity, there is little recognition of the influence of global capitalism on the socio-ecological transformation of the rural Middle East. CAPITALEAST therefore compares tribes of diverse origins, examining the capitalization of their agriculture and the commercialization of their livestock. It adopts a translocal and global approach to reveal the connectedness of the diverse social entities to the wider world like the nomadic, semi-settled and settled tribes living in cultivable, desert, and mountainous ecologies. The project argues that intertwined processes such as commodification, the scientification of cultivation and animal breeding, mechanization of agriculture, automobilization, and new patterns of land ownerships resulted in an impressive repositioning of tribal agency in the physical environment and a noticeable increase in urban-rural and global-local relations. States, urban elites and tribal leaders, and global capitalists all emerged as active participants in the process. The project proposes an ambitious longitudinal enquiry, combining an analysis of digitized and published sources with extensive work in regional and central archives. This ground-breaking research will create an online database including interactive maps, network graphs, and structured data about spatial locations which offer multiple avenues of interpretation of the sources. In addition, 5 monographs, 2 conferences and 2 edited volumes will constitute the other major project outputs. This project promises to recast the field of the Middle East history, contribute to the extra-European story of capitalism and open new frontiers in studying the history, sociology, economy and anthropology of rural peoples.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
4 DUBLIN
Ireland
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.