Series
Volume 29
Dislocations
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Big Capital in an Unequal World
The Micropolitics of Wealth in Pakistan
Rosita Armytage
206 pages, 2 illus., bilbiog., index
ISBN 978-1-78920-616-6 $120.00/£89.00 Hb Published (January 2020)
eISBN 978-1-78920-617-3 eBook
Reviews
“A rich, very insightful and highly engaging biography of Pakistan’s business and industrial elite.” • Nafisa Shah, Member of the National Assembly of Pakistan.
“An entertaining, surprising, and lively account of the secret life of the global elite in their particular parochial Pakistani setting. Scholars of Pakistan, of economic and political anthropology, and of development, will all surely look forward to this book with eager anticipation.” • Caroline Schuster, Australian National University
Description
Following the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of the elite in Pakistan. In doing so, it reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterizes the modern world. Operating in a rapidly developing economic environment, the experience of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most powerful members contradicts widely held assumptions that economic growth is leading to increasingly impersonalized and globally standardized economic and political structures.
Rosita Armytage is an anthropologist specialising in elites, social class, capitalism, and global development. Her recent publications include ‘Elite ethnography in an insecure place: The methodological implications of “studying up” in Pakistan’, Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (2018).
Subject: Political Economy General Anthropology
Area: Asia
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on Anonymity
Introduction: Making Money in an Unequal and Unstable World
Chapter 1. Middle Class Woman in an Elite Man’s World
Chapter 2. Creating and Protecting an Elite Class
Chapter 3. Old Money, New Money
Chapter 4. Making an Elite Family
Chapter 5. The Elite Network
Chapter 6. The Culture of Exemptions
Conclusion: What Pakistan’s Elite Reveals About Global Capitalism
References
Index