Keeping capital at arm’s length

Constructing a theoretically informed, historically grounded understanding of capitalist circuits of value and uneven development remains a challenge. Thomas Cowan's ‘Geographies of subsumption’ offers a lucid discussion of subsumption as an analytical framework to cut through this Gordian knot of the abstract–concrete. Of note is Cowan's discussion of formal subsumption in relation to land, as arrangements that variously preserve landed interests both to achieve and to condition capital accumulation and the politics of capitalist development. Attention to historically situated forms of land and labor's subsumption centers the politics of uneven and combined development. This approach can also focus needed attention on a wide range of land-based strategies to keep capital ‘at arm's length’, with the politics of these arrangements up for grabs.