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This chapter shows how James lacked a secure social position within the Northeastern bourgeoisie because his rentier father effectively spent his inheritance, forcing him carve out a career as a writer in the mass market. It shows how James was obsessed with preserving the relatively small hoard of capital jealously supervised by his parents, going on to explore the imprint of class and economics on James’s evolving realist aesthetic, through readings of the early magazine stories and the novels Roderick Hudson (1875) and Washington Square (1881). In these texts, a realist drive to anchor an inchoate and continually dissolving reality in sharp mimetic particulars is matched by an anxious hoarding of Paterian “impressions,” which are consistently imaged in financial terms.

In contrast to cases such as Chile and Mexico, which have undergone substantial economic liberalization and labor flexibilization, labor reform under the Chávez regime’s twenty-first-century socialism promised greater protection for workers from market forces and the development of a strong, autonomous labor movement capable of advocating effectively for workers’ rights and interests. However, this chapter argues that such potential was not realized under Chávez and will not likely be realized under his chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro. Indeed, while in rhetoric the regime vehemently rejected neoliberalism, in practice it promoted de facto flexibilized labor relations through the creation of worker cooperatives, which serve as sources of subcontracted labor, particularly for state-owned industries. In addition to exploiting vulnerable workers in cooperatives, the Chávez regime’s “rentier populism” employed divisive institutional practices that encouraged the fragmentation and weakening of organized labor, impeded the labor movement’s autonomy, contravened essential labor rights such as free union elections, collective bargaining, and the right to strike and engaged in reprisals against unions and workers it perceived as threats. These key features of labor organization in contemporary Venezuela indicate a pronounced contradiction between the Chávez regime’s avowed commitment to socialist principles of worker solidarity and equality and its political economy in practice.

The famous dictum that “war makes states” has received renewed interest in recent years with the experience of state collapse and state failure in many parts of the world. Historical studies have shown that war and state making were closely linked in early modern Europe. Getting ready for war and waging war required power holders to get involved in actions that were also conducive to state making, including the effective extraction of resources for waging wars. Extraction presupposed state control, which in turn required an efficient bureaucracy. In cases where there was little or nothing to extract from society, war making also required the promotion of capital accumulation. Through all this, the activity of war making required the growing strength of a centralized bureaucracy and the emergence of states. In the Middle East, unlike in Europe, wars did not make states—they destroyed them.

As authoritarian regimes do not rest only on repression, the Mubarak's one had to rely on ideology and money. Mubarak's fall should be explained by the weakening of his mechanisms of control in these two fields. The objective of this chapter is to explain the transformation of the Egyptian political economy and how it brought the demise of the Egyptian regime. This transformation should not be reduced to a certain ‘economic crisis’ and a rising social discontent, although it certainly includes such a variable. In fact, under Mubarak the state has lost much of easy public revenues or rent coming from foreign aid, oil and Suez Canal revenues. Taxing the population has become a necessity. The State has been in the process of change from a semi-rentier state to a tax state[i]. This structural change helped transforming Egyptians from subjects to citizens. In addition, the contraction of public revenues limited the ‘political purchasing power’ of the regime, hence reducing the number of its dependents and supporters and created a process of fragmentation of political power. For more than two decades, Mubarak maneuvered in order to lessen the political outcomes of this transformation in the political economy of the country. But finally, structural factors imposed their outcome on Egyptian politics and they helped the fall of Mubarak. [i] The analysis of the end of the semi rentier state in Egypt is based on our earlier work: Samer Soliman. The Autumn of Dictatorship. Fiscal Crisis and Political Change in Egypt under Mubarak. (Stanford: Stanford university press, 2011).

This chapter argues that in each of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the ruling bargain has evolved but has not radically changed since the Arab Spring. It analyzes why GCC countries have had fewer and less severe protests than the rest of the Arab world. While the challenges facing the Persian Gulf monarchies are not fundamentally different than those facing other Arab governments, they faced different degrees of popular protest. The chapter also notes that just as the degree and severity of protests has varied in the GCC, the reactions of their monarchs have also differed—and not always in ways proportional to the nature of the protests. Finally, it examines how citizens in the GCC states view the evolution of their countries’ ruling bargains. While there is growing dissatisfaction with the Persian Gulf monarchies, the discontent is contained. The economic safety net from petroleum wealth has kept the floor from falling out on Gulf citizens. This classic “rentier trade-off” of economic wellbeing in return for political quiescence seems to still hold. On the other hand, marginalized groups in the Gulf are sustaining political activity because of new technologies and greater international interest in Arab activism.

This essay analyzes scenes from Ulysses alongside the legal regimes governing tenancy in 1904 Ireland. Summarizing the historical conflict between Brehon law and colonial versions of tenancy, Gibson shows James Joyce's ambivalence about both, and argues that Ulysses exposes the social and class disaster that was rentier culture in early 1900s Dublin.

This chapter provides a theoretical and strategic overview of the U.S. military basing presence in the Gulf from the Second World War to the present. It lays a framework for examining the history of the U.S. military in the Gulf by placing the book within the larger base politics literature, in addition to providing a broad overview on the global evolution of U.S. military basing following the Second World War. Base politics and basing access for military forces is one of the oldest enduring features of international relations among nations and empires. The central question posed here is when and why did base politicization occur in Gulf Arab host nations. External and internal security dynamics linked to a host regime’s survival are the main drivers influencing Gulf Cooperation Council nations either to accept or expel the U.S. military from local bases.

This chapter uses case studies from Ancient Greece and Rome and from early- and late-medieval Europe to examine the history of public debt and in particular of a rentier class. It analyses the push and pull factors that gave rise to the notion and practice of public debt, in particular the role of new technologies in making wider spatial control possible, institutional and professional innovations like the development of accountancy, changing social forces, and shifts in economic structures and cycles. The chapter provides a critique of dominant Anglo-centric narratives of the history of public debt, stressing the Dutch and North Italians as pace-setters. Particular attention is given to the role of continental European cities in pioneering annuity financing and its long-term legacy. The economy, war, and social connections emerge as key factors in conditioning debt financing.

Chapter 1 shows how the Gulf countries have been affected by the global food crisis of 2008 and how they have reacted to it. Basic challenges of Gulf food security are outlined such as population growth, lack of water, economic diversification, and vulnerability of poor migrant workers. The role of subsidies and price controls in the ruling bargain of the region’s rentier states is highlighted. Causes and consequences of the global food crisis are given. After a discussion of major factors like productivity development, biofuels, or dietary change, the chapter posits that there is reasonable indication for a paradigm shift towards higher food prices. It is then shown how the Gulf countries currently operate in global food trade and what items they import from which countries of origin.

This chapter examines the social mechanisms that contribute to the construction of representations guiding public action in Algeria, which continue to place the hydrocarbons sector at the heart of economic and social development. This leads to excessive state interventionism, the chapter argues. By delving into the concept of rentier states and “resource curses”, the chapter seeks to explain the inner workings of the patronage networks and interrelationships between dominant actors defending their interests, seeking to uphold the status quo in Algeria’s political and economic spheres. The chapter argues that the economic policies of Abdelaziz Bouteflika reflect an inability to reshape Algeria’s economic foundations, defined by an urge to maintain an essentialist reading of Algerian state identity and the energy sector forming the basis for the entire social structure.

This chapter examines the re-emergence of nonviolent contentious politics under president Bouteflika’s rule. Arising with the exhausting of violent rebel politics of the late 1990s, non-violent contentious politics has evolved into an important channel for citizens to present specific policy claims relating directly to the redistributive nature of Algeria’s rentier-based political economy. The government’s lenient and often accommodating responses to certain socio-economic and welfare-related demands has made this an effective means for achieving quick political results. While revolutionary contention exists on the margins, the majority of contentious events that Algeria has witnessed over the past decade have shied away from challenging the existing political order. Instead the civil society has demanded that the state performed better within the broad policy areas of welfare and identity. The chapter argues that a long-term drop in financial revenue from the petro-export sector, which finances the perpetuation of the current political order, could trigger a transformation of the well-established repertoire of contention from its current system-sustaining nature to a more transgressive or revolutionary one.

The chapter starts with some general comments on population policy: the fiscal-economic distinction, the national security argument regarding population size, life cycle analysis of policy, and the false allure of Ponzi-style population growth. It continues with a systematic examination of coping strategies: boosting fertility (pro-natal policies such as incentives for child rearing); increasing productivity (labor-market participation, human capital); compensatory immigration (which cannot be done simultaneously by all); achieving rentier status, and the “de-growth” option of accepting somewhat slower economic growth and concentrating on more equitable distribution. A few are clear winners (better day care, removing artificial incentives for early retirement and so forth), but most are intricate combinations of benefits and costs, such as immigration, and institutional vs. home care of the very old.

This chapter provides an extended literature review, bringing together for the first time the strands of scholarship related to rentier state theory and to political Islam in the Middle East. In so doing, it sheds light on gaps in the scholarship, in particular the denial in rentier state theory scholarship of the political role played by Islamist groups in such states and the lack of study of the Gulf states by scholars of political Islam. The chapter then gives a brief background on definitional aspects of Islamism, as well as a description and brief history of the Muslim Brotherhood itself, as the region’s most powerful Islamist political group.

This chapter provides a critical background on the country cases by examining their brief political histories as independent states. It also gives critical information about the legal frameworks of such states to highlight where and how Islamist groups can act in these states. By providing such descriptions, this chapter demonstrates the extent to which these states, in regime or popular politics, either adhere or fail to adhere to the government type and political environment normally associated with the rentier state. The chapter also reveals critical commonalities among the super-rentier states—they are governed by powerful ruling families; institutionalized political life is hampered; and civil society and political life remain largely informal—while also indicating their differences, which arose in light of their differing sociocultural and economic backgrounds.

This chapter comprises an extended, substantive conclusion to take into account individual country experiences and to compare these countries along common themes. In this final chapter, a new model is elucidated for understanding how Muslim Brotherhood movements influence government policies in the super-rentier states, which is called rentier Islamism. The chapter reprises the book’s critique of rentier state theory for its failure to appreciate the resiliency of ideological opposition to oil-wealthy regimes, who have tried various tactics to contain and suppress Islamism. The chapter concludes by predicting the lasting influence of the Muslim Brotherhood as exercising both political and cultural influence within the Gulf.

Food security is crucial for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries operating a distributive social contract predicated on citizen wellbeing and prosperity in return for political acquiescence. This rentier bargain was threatened by the surge in food prices in 2008, leading some Gulf countries to invest in agricultural projects in developing countries. This study identifies the risks that such foreign land investments pose to the investor as well as to this chapter’s case study countries of Ethiopia and Cambodia. Criticisms of overseas agricultural investment centre on corruption; expropriation of land from local populations who are often subject to forcible eviction with minimal compensation; and a lack of provision for local people’s livelihoods or even access to food after they have been evicted. Yet, GCC states could reshape foreign investment policies as a means of improving productivity as well as bolstering economic development in impoverished rural areas of less-developed countries.