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This paper examines how Chinese agribusiness firms are engaging with established systems of private governance in the Brazilian soybean sector and how that engagement is variously accommodated, contested, and configured by local realities that reflect the uneven history of transnational agribusiness development across the Brazilian agro‐export region. Using qualitative data collected at three research sites that represent different historical moments in the Brazilian agro‐export region (Mato Grosso, Goiás, and Bahia), the paper argues that the social structures underlying the particular agrarian histories of these three subregions create unique contexts Chinese firms must navigate, which in turn shapes their engagement with the private agribusiness regime across space. Although the private agribusiness regime is often portrayed as a top‐down system of governance that subjugates the polity to the demands of capital, this framing neglects to understand how that system of power is contested, negotiated, and reshaped on the ground. These three cases serve to historicize the uneven penetration of Chinese firms across the Brazilian soybean sector.

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We would like to thank Dr. James Overholt for his help in contacting interview subjects involved in the moonshine trade. Without his enthusiastic support, and without the generous participation of the people of Cocke County, this project would never have been possible. Appalachia is a region richly mythologized in U.S. culture, and in many ways, the moonshiner represents the pinnacle of this imaginary Appalachia. Using Cocke County, Tennessee, as a case study, we explore the ways in which moonshine has historically emerged simultaneously both as a significant cultural referent to the "outside world," and as a vehicle for social integration and cultural reproduction within Appalachia. In particular, we examine the ways in which a strategy of economic livelihood becomes a strategy of cultural reproduction and how the criminalization of the former is inextricably linked to the marginalization of the latter. In the process, we suggest the ways in which moonshining has contributed to the creation of Appalachia as a counterpoint to mainstream U.S. and the modernity that it represents.

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