Industrialization and Assimilation
Understanding Ethnic Change in the Modern World

This book explains why industrialization is the most important factor driving assimilation and ethnic change in the modern world.

Elliott D. Green (Author)

9781009268370, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 December 2022

225 pages, 31 b/w illus. 5 maps 15 tables
23 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.46 kg

'Green takes on big questions about how the structural transformation of the political economy shapes the nature of ethnic identity. This book is terrifically ambitious in theoretical and empirical scope, engaging with a wide range of distinctive empirical cases in both the Global North and Global South. It makes us reconsider how we study the politics of ethnic change in the social sciences.' Lauren M. MacLean, Arthur F. Bentley Chair of Political Science, Indiana University-Bloomington

Industrialization and Assimilation examines the process of ethnic identity change in a broad historical context. Green explains how and why ethnicity changes across time, showing that, by altering the basis of economic production from land to labour and removing people from the 'idiocy of rural life', industrialization makes societies more ethnically homogenous. More speci?cally, the author argues that industrialization lowers the relative value of rural land, leading people to identify less with narrow rural identities in favour of broader identities that can aid them in navigating the formal urban economy. Using large-scale datasets that span the globe as well as detailed case studies ranging from mid-twentieth-century Turkey to contemporary Botswana, Somalia and Uganda, as well as evidence from Native Americans in the United States and the M?ori in New Zealand, Industrialization and Assimilation provides a new framework to understand the origins of modern ethnic identities.

1. Introduction
2. Understanding ethnicity and industrialization
3. Industrialization and assimilation in historical perspective
4. Cross-national evidence
5. Industrialization and assimilation in mid-20th century Turkey
6. Cases of non-industrialization in Africa: Somalia and Uganda
7. 'Cattle without legs': structural transformation in Botswana
8. Ethic change among Native Americans in the United States
9. Ethnic change among the M?ori in New Zealand
10. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Comparative politics [JPB], Population & demography [JHBD], Ethnic studies [JFSL]