| This dissertation examines Florida sugar through the lens of globalization. Bringing the global and local together highlights the structural and non-local factors implicated in the construction of place. By bringing the global and local together, this analysis necessarily embeds a single commodity into a global food regime and a single place into a world system linked through production and consumption. It shows how Florida sugar producers are affected by international and national structures of accumulation, regulation and demand, and in turn, help to create those structures, as key actors seek to maximize their competitive advantage through the market and the state. Putting the local into tension with the global shows how outcomes produced by globalization are in fact time- and place-contingent, created by a unique alignments of actors representing a diversity of possible interests within capital, the state, and civil society. This conceptualization illustrates how globalization can produce different outcomes in different places, as well as keeping open the possibility for influential roles for elements of civil society and the state. Contrary to some representations of globalization, this dissertation shows how the state plays a complex, and often contradictory, role in its relations to capital and civil society. Also examined are the implications of the agro-food system as a unique form of capitalist production and the tension between spatially fixed and spatially mobile capital. |
