Co-operative economics

Cooperative (or co-operative) economics is a field of economics that incorporates cooperative studies and political economy toward the study and management of cooperatives. History of the cooperative movement Cooperative economics developed as both a theory and a concrete alternative to industrial capitalism in the late 1700s and early 1800s. As such, it was a form of stateless socialism. The term "socialism," in fact, was coined in The Cooperative Magazine in 1827. Such socialisms arose in response to the negative effects of industrialism, where various clergyman, workers, and industrialists in England, such as Robert Owen, experimented with various models of collective farming and community housing with varying degrees of success. This movement was often integrated with other progressive movements of the era such as women's suffrage and abolitionism. "British industrialist Robert Owen (1771–1858) founded a model factory town around his cotton mill and later established a model socialist community, New Harmony, in Indiana. Some proponents of women's rights, such as Emma Martin (1812–1851) in Britain and Flora Tristan (1801–1844) in France, stirred controversy by promoting socialism as the solution to female oppression."While state socialism was growing popular, rising in the early 1900s, followed by collapse in the 20th century, the cooperative movement grew exponentially in all countries affected by socialism and British colonialism, such as Canada, the U.S., South Africa, and across Europe. Jessica-Gordon Nembhard has produced one of the most thorough academic monographs on cooperative economics entitled Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, which looks at how African American communities organized to survive white nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism in the 20th century. The International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) was formed in 1895 and National Cooperative Business Association founded in 1916.