WHERE MATERIALITY MEETS SUBJECTIVITY: Locating the Political in the Contested Fiction of Urban Land in Camden, New Jersey

On May 6, 1795, as Polanyi relates, the justices of Berkshire, England, meeting “in Speenhamland, near Newbury,” enacted the Speenhamland scale, providing a subsidy to wages to be paid from the local rates (i.e., taxes), “so that a minimum income should be assured to the poor irrespective of their earnings” (Polanyi 2001 [1944], 82, emphasis in original). Speenhamland, on Polanyi’s account, established a “right to live” for the increasing numbers of dispossessed laborers who, evicted from feudal estates through the widespread enclosure of land, sought employment for wages in the rapidly forming labor markets of the industrial revolution. If the