In this method retailers (rather than the producers) refuse to buy or sell certain goods.
The 13 English colonies in North America were established and grew during the 17th and 18th centuries. During most of this time, the colonists lived under what historians have termed “salutary neglect,” meaning that the English government mostly left them alone and the colonies prospered under these conditions.
In 2003, the government of South Korea announced a ban on beef imported from the United States. Prior to the ban, South Korea had been the third largest purchaser of U.S. beef product. The decision to ban the product came after an animal in Washington was discovered to suffer from mad-cow disease. All together, more than fifty countries decided to ban U.S. beef imports after the incident, and consequently, the value of U.S. beef exports declined by $2.4 billion dollars over a three-year period.
The Iranian merchant class makes up an important and influential sector of society. It is also one that has a long history of interacting with the government through the merchant class’s attempts to secure economic justice and fairer taxation policies, as well as challenging the status quo more generally. In 1890, merchants organized bazaar strikes in protest of the tobacco laws implemented by Nasir al-Din Shah, granting foreign companies a monopoly over the tobacco industry in the country.
In the late nineteenth century foreign governments were increasingly asserting control, and in some cases Iranian governmental figures adopted a fatalistic attitude about being colonized by Britain or Russia, both of which were competing for power inside Iran. In this atmosphere the shah of Iran signed a secret agreement with a British company in March 1890 granting a concession over all Iranian tobacco.
The Iran bazaar merchant strike represents two similar campaigns, one occurring in October 2008 and one in July 2010. The two strikes drew from the same social group (the Iranian merchant class), had similar objectives, and encompassed the same tactic—a general strike that spread to several cities of Iran. Iran merchants do not have a history of frequent striking—the October 2008 strike was the first large-scale strike since the 1979 Iranian revolution, in which the merchant community also played an important and influential role within the opposition movement.
Indianola, Mississippi is home to the Delta Pride catfish factory. Although Mississippi is among the poorest states in the US, catfish farming accounts for $350 million a year and is the state's largest agricultural industry. Owned by a cooperative of 400-500 white landowners, massive tracts of land in the Mississippi River Delta are artificially flooded to create ponds conducive to farming and processing catfish. While truck drivers and loaders tend to be African American men, most line workers are African American women, often single heads of households.
Cocoa was essential to the economy of the British colony in the Gold Coast, which is now Ghana. Cocoa accounted for over 60% of exports. However, the European-dominated trade and the exploitative patterns of trade they faced often frustrated the many Africans involved in the process. In attempts to achieve more equal relationships Africans held large “holdups” in the Gold Coast in 1924 and 1930-1931, during which they refused to sell their cocoa to European firms, but neither attempt succeeded.
