Fraternal Capital

This volume examines class, gender and work in Tirruppir, South India, where export of knitted garments has been led by a networked fraternity of owners as hinging on their "toil". This book asks how these self-made men drew from their agrarian past to turn Gounder toil into capital, and how they continue to make an entire town work for the global economy. In questioning processes of social change alongside the self-presentations of a caste of good entrepeneurs, this book decenters understandings of global capitalism by linking the analysis of agrarian transition with the translation of a singular past in the interests of accumulation. As Tiruppur shifts to global production, this book tracks ways in which gender liinks sexed bodies to processes of diffrentiation, in the tenuous search for consent to an increasingly despotic work politics. Tiruppur demonstrates the importance of gender and geography to the globalization ethnographically and geographically. The book provides a window into a decentralized capitalism that critiques macroeconomic portrayals of globalization by showing how history, geography, gender and work practice shape local sites of global production.