Ravi Arvind Palat

Ravi Arvind Palat [http://sociology.binghamton.edu/people/faculty/palat.htm] works on historical sociology and contemporary political economy at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Ravi Arvind Palat, son of Sankaran and Malyni Palat, was educated at the Lawrence School, Lovedale. He obtained a BA in Economics at the Madras Christian College; an MA and an MPhil in History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University; and a Ph.D. in Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

He has taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; the University of Auckland; Johns Hopkins University; and at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

In historical sociology, he has argued that societies based on wet-rice economies (peninsular India, South China, and Tokugawa Japan) exhibited a distinct trajectory of socio-historical change that did not confer any economic advantages to the accumulation of capital. Instead, it promoted the development of highly-skilled, labor-intensive agriculture and craft production and small-scale trade over long-distances. [Ravi Arvind Palat, "Historical Transformations in Agrarian Systems Based on Wet-Rice Cultivation: Toward an Alternative Model of Social Change," in P. McMichael, "Food and Agrarian Orders in the World-Economy", Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995, 55-77.]

In his "Capitalist Restructuring and the Pacific Rim" [Routledge, 2004] he traced the development of the economies of East and Southeast Asia since 1945 and argued that the Asian financial crisis of 1997 was the result of enterprises borrowing heavily for day to day operations, a practice that had stood them in good stead while elite government planning agencies guided national economic strategies. But with as enterprises from these 'miracle economies' developed gilt-edged security ratings, expanded the production and procurement operations across national borders, and the regulatory capacity of state planning agencies declined, the continuation of these policies undermined their business practices and led to overproduction.

He has also published several critical articles on area studies, especially his "Fragmented Visions: Excavating the Future of Asian Studies in a Post-American World," ["Review"XIX, 2, 1996, 269-315.] and "Is India a Part of Asia" ["Environment and Planning, D, Society and Space", XX, 6, November 2002, 669-691] . He is the editor of "Pacific-Asia and the Future of the World-System." [Greenwood, 1993.]

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