Table Of ContentHistories of Global
Inequality
New Perspectives
Edited by
Christian Olaf Christiansen
Steven L. B. Jensen
Histories of Global Inequality
Christian Olaf Christiansen
Steven L. B. Jensen
Editors
Histories of Global
Inequality
New Perspectives
Editors
Christian Olaf Christiansen Steven L. B. Jensen
School of Culture and Society The Danish Institute for Human
University of Aarhus Rights
Aarhus, Denmark Copenhagen, Denmark
ISBN 978-3-030-19162-7 ISBN 978-3-030-19163-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19163-4
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C
ontents
Histories of Global Inequality: Introduction 1
Christian Olaf Christiansen and Steven L. B. Jensen
Inequality in the History of Economic and Political Thought 33
Historicizing Piketty: The Fall and Rise of Inequality
Economics 35
Eli Cook
The Demise of the Radical Critique of Economic Inequality in
Western Political Thought 59
Michael J. Thompson
Products Before People: How Inequality Was Sidelined by
Gross National Product 83
Philipp Lepenies
Inequality by Numbers: The Making of a Global Political
Issue? 107
Pedro Ramos Pinto
v
vi CONTENTS
Inequality, Discrimination and Human Rights 129
Inequality and Post-War International Organization:
Discrimination, the World Social Situation and the United
Nations, 1948–1957 131
Steven L. B. Jensen
“A Pragmatic Compromise between the Ideal and the
Realistic”: Debates over Human Rights, Global Distributive
Justice and Minimum Core Obligations in the 1980s 157
Julia Dehm
Inequality in Global Disability Policies since the 1970s 187
Paul van Trigt
Protection and Abuse: The Conundrum of Global Gender
Inequality 207
Sally L. Kitch
Inequality in an Age of Global Capitalism 231
Brewing Inequalities: Kenya’s Smallholder Tea Farmers and
the Developmentalist State in the Late-Colonial and Early-
Independence Era 233
Muey C. Saeteurn
Challenging Global Inequality in Streets and Supermarkets:
Fair Trade Activism since the 1960s 255
Peter van Dam
Partnerships Against Global Poverty: When “Inclusive
Capitalism” Entered the United Nations 277
Christian Olaf Christiansen
CONTENTS vii
Third World Inc.: Notes from the Frontiers of Global Capital 301
Ravinder Kaur
Index 327
n C
otes on ontributors
Christian Olaf Christiansen is an Associate Professor at the School
of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. He is an intellectual historian
working with twentieth-century economic and political thought in an
American and global context. He is currently working on a comparative
intellectual history of two approaches to reducing inequality and poverty
during post-war globalization: socio-economic human rights and market/
business-based ideas for poverty reduction. Starting in September 2019,
he will be the research leader on a project on the intellectual history of
global inequality, 1960–2015, investigating the relationship between
geography and inequality thinking. Earlier publications include Progressive
Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in Society (2015). In
2015 he was awarded the Sapere Aude: DFF Young Research Talent grant
by the Danish Council for Independent Research, and in 2018 he was
awarded the Sapere Aude: DFF Research Leader by the Independent
Research Fund Denmark.
Eli Cook is a historian of American capitalism and an Assistant Professor
(Lecturer) in the General History Department at University of Haifa
in Israel. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2013 and
was also a Mellon and Fulbright postdoctoral scholar. His book on
the history of social quantification, entitled The Pricing of Progress:
Economic Indicators and the Values of American Capitalism, was pub-
lished in the fall of 2017. His research interests include the cultural,
social and intellectual history of capitalism as well as the history of eco-
nomic thought.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Julia Dehm is a Lecturer in the School of Law at La Trobe University.
She was previously a resident fellow at the Institute for Global Law and
Policy at Harvard Law School, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Rapoport
Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin.
She has published widely in Journal of Human Rights and the Environment,
London Review of International Law and Macquarie Journal of
International and Comparative Environmental Law and special climate
justice-themed editions of Journal of Australian Political Economy and
Local-Global Journal. She holds a PhD and an LLB (Hons) from
Melbourne Law School.
Steven L. B. Jensen is a Senior Researcher at The Danish Institute for
Human Rights. He is the author of The Making of International Human
Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization and the Reconstruction of Global Values
(2016) which won the International Studies Association’s 2016 Human
Rights Best Book Award and the 2016 Chadwick Alger Award for Best
Book on International Organization. Before joining The Danish Institute
for Human Rights in 2007, he held positions with the United Nations
and the Danish Foreign Ministry. In 2011, he was visiting researcher
at Yale Law School, and during the fall of 2016, he was visiting
researcher at Oxford. He is working on a research project focusing on
the history of economic and social rights after 1945. A co-edited volume
(with Charles Walton) “Social Rights in History” is currently under review.
Ravinder Kaur is an Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies
at University of Copenhagen where she directs the Centre of Global South
Asian Studies. She holds a visiting professorship at the Centre of India
Studies in Africa, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg. She is
engaged in two research projects. The first focuses on post-reform
India’s transition into an attractive ‘emerging market’ in the global
political economy. The second explores the unfolding connections
between Asia and Africa via a study of new business connections
among India, China and Ghana. Her previous research focused on
forced migration, refugee resettlement, social class and caste, and the
making of modern citizenship during India’s Partition. Her publica-
tions include Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants
of Delhi (2007). Her next book Brand New India is under publication
with Stanford University Press.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Sally L. Kitch is University and Regents’ Professor in the School of
Social Transformation at Arizona State University (ASU), USA. Her
research foci include cultural theories of gender and race, feminist
theory, and humanities and interdisciplinary epistemology. Before
coming to ASU, she was a distinguished humanities professor and
chair of the Department of Women’s Studies at the Ohio State
University. At ASU, she is the founding director of the Institute for
Humanities Research and of the Humanities Lab and a distinguished
sustainability scientist at ASU’s Global Institute for Sustainability.
In addition to her work on the environment, her research foci include the
history of gender and racial ideology in the USA and cross- culturally, US
and transnational feminist theory, and humanities and interdisciplinary
epistemology. She is the author of seven books, three of which have won
national prizes. Her most recent book Contested Terrain: Reflections with
Afghan Women Leaders was published in 2014.
Philipp Lepenies is a Visiting Professor of Comparative Politics and
Director of the Environmental Policy Research Institute at Freie Universität
in Berlin. He has ample practical work experience in development coop-
eration and his research focuses on the question of how ideas (and
metrics) enter, influence and dominate politics. Among his recent
publications is The Power of a Single Number: A Political History of GDP
(2016). He is also the author of Art, Politics and Development: How Linear
Perspective Shaped Policies in the Western World (2013).
Pedro Ramos Pinto is a Lecturer in International Economic History at
University of Cambridge, and Director of the Inequality and History
Network. His interests include the history and implications of different
ways of measuring inequality. His works include The Impact of History?
Histories at the Beginning of the 21st Century (2015, co-edited with
Bertrand Taithe) and Lisbon Rising: Urban Social Movements in the
Portuguese Revolution, 1974–1975 (2013).
Muey C. Saeteurn is an Assistant Professor of History at University of
California, Merced. She is a social historian of twentieth-century Africa
specializing in East Africa, agricultural development and decolonization.
In her research, she focuses on how rural women and men experienced,
interpreted and complicated the project of ‘agrarianism’ during the
first decade of the development era of the late 1950s and 1960s. She
is working on a book examining rural communities and their central
