ENFORCING ECONOMIC ORDER:

Discipline and Dispossession in Developing Democracies​

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Enforcing Economic Order examines how the carceral state supports not only social and political order, but also economic order. Common explanations center social order as the driving predictor of policing, repression, and abuse: police manage crime, quell political dissent, and target minoritized groups. While these explanations account for variation in levels of policing, they fall short of explaining the equilibrium of policing and the carceral state as institutional fixtures of the state. In this book, I argue that police do not only manage social order, but also enforce economic order in developing economies. They do this, primarily, by reifying the inequalities necessary for production.​

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The first part of the book argues that labor makes the state, and that the coercive state maintains economic order. I study the plantation economy in India to trace the long-run effects of indenture on the creation and uses of carceral institutions. In colonial Assam, jails emerged primarily as tools of labor discipline rather than crime control: as districts became more dependent on indentured labor for tea plantations, incarceration rates rose. Today, on the same plantations, where descendants of indentured laborers still provide the industry’s labor, policing increases sharply wherever workers reside beyond employers’ direct control. Labor repression has long been associated with non-democratic regimes. Yet when there is state support for extractive conditions, labor repression persists, even within democracies.

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The second half of the book asks: why doesn't democratization ameliorate these early and enduring inequalities​? To do so, this part of the book studies emergent democratic institutions and studies how these institutions change relationships between the state and markets, and the state and workers. In so doing, it revives long-standing questions about coercion and capital as twin pillars of modern states.