From Production to Consumption in the Assembled Countryside

This chapter critically interrogates the shift from the productive countryside to economies based on consumption, to consider how peripheries shape and are shaped by global social, political, and economic processes. Using an analytical perspective drawn from assemblage thinking, the chapter decentres European Studies into co-evolutionary socio-economic, cultural, and historical global networks. It shows how peripheries are heavily connected to flows of matter, people, and ideas, drawing links between the settler colonialisms of past epochs and the neo-colonialisms of the contemporary global economy. In so doing, the chapter highlights how far from being peripheral, peripheries are at the heart of global processes.