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| Review
of Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy
of Capital |
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| by
C.P. Chandrasekhar. |
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Click to Enlarge
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Mammon
and Mankind
C.P. Chandrasekhar
*
Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind
and the Global Ascendancy of Capital, Oxford University
Press, New Delhi, 2006, pp. xxvi+426. (First published
by Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2005).
Price: Rs. 695.00
The best economic history mines data from the
past to establish |
distinct patterns, impute causal effects
and unravel the mechanisms that drive economic
sub-systems.
But given the demands set by scholarship based
on archival records and atypical sources, the
advance of knowledge often tends to be marginal
and yet controversial. Innovative discussions
on local or sectoral developments are so specialized
in terms of subject matter that they are known
only to researchers in the same or allied fields.
But as the output of such scholarship accumulates
the potential for analyses that provide the big
picture increases. Despite some gaps or inadequacies
of evidence, through such analyses, the larger
story of the dynamic of whole systems can be told.
The best scholars among those who have muddied
their hands analyzing the microcosm, with the
erudition needed to cover the experience of many
continents and examine the process of economic
and social evolution over centuries, can step
back and synthesize the results yielded by the
efforts of many others, besides their own.
When pursuing history writing of this kind, it
is inevitable that the predilections of individual
historians are bound to influence the data filtered,
the patterns read and the causal forces imputed.
Hence, differences in the interpretation of the
dynamic of history and its implications are substantial
and characterized by a high degree of partisanship.
However, for the reader, history of this kind
is most interesting, especially when it validates
and enriches perspectives derived from a reading
of the present.
From the point of view of relevance to the present,
it is the history of capitalism as it evolved
over a period of four centuries that is most fascinating.
But this can also be the most controversial and
partisan of economic histories, given the fact
that different attitudes to the present can be
justified by different readings of that past.
The volume under review is one more contribution
to the synthetic histories of capitalism, sited
clearly in a tradition deriving from Marx. It
shares with some, though not all, of them, the
erudition, the organizational ingenuity and the
power of reasoning needed to make the exercise
worthwhile for the reader.
But it also stands above many such earlier attempts
for a number of other reasons. First, a factor
motivating the exercise is the need to go beyond
conventional economic histories focusing on the
expansion and diversification of capitalist production,
to examine the effect this had on the quality
of life of those who populated the lands that
capitalism encompassed.
Second, in doing so, it challenges the view that
the rise to dominance of Europe and its settlements,
was the result of a long period of evolution starting
around the tenth century that delivered the material
for competitive success and a better quality of
life to its populations. Rather, Bagchi argues,
there is little evidence to support the view that
Europe had any competitive edge over India and
China in the period prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Moreover, despite the Industrial Revolution, the
population of Europe did not enjoy the benefits
of a reasonably long life, decent health, widespread
literacy, sizeable education and adequate individual
freedom before the dawning of the twentieth century.
Thus, for example, the evidence garnered by Bagchi
suggests that, contrary to common perception,
during the 1600s and 1700s the rate of growth
of the populations of India and China was greater
than that in Europe.
Third, the book marshals evidence to establish
that the success of Western capitalism starting
with the Industrial Revolution was the result
not just of newfound competitive capacities, but
of subjugation based on war and occupation epitomized
by the role of the slave trade in lubricating
the capitalist mechanism. This was of course the
starkest of many crude ways through which surplus
was transferred from the periphery to the metropolis
and then on to the regions of recent settlement.
That is, the success of capitalism in the metropolis
was tied to and dependent on the subjugation and
colonization of the periphery. What is more, commodities
such as sugar produced in the slave-run plantations
directly contributed to well being in Europe by
adding significantly to the calorie intake of
European populations.
Finally, the book contests the ideologies that
accompanied the rise to ascendance of capital,
which presented its aggressive and gory expansion
as a civilizing mission that the superior European
races had to undertake in the ultimate good interests
of the inferior populations they subjugated. They
even present the military success of the West
as the outcome of a form of economic Darwinism
in which the economically superior bested the
less capable on whom resources could not be wasted.
This apologetic view does not, of course, take
into account the fact that the benefits of capitalist
success accrued to a miniscule elite even in Europe
through much of its history. The process of capitalist
development right up to the nineteenth century
proved inadequate to substantially transform the
quality of life of most Europeans, let alone the
non-white populations devastated by European conquest.
Bagchi collates wide-ranging evidence to establish
the poor and even declining status of Europeans
as measured by longevity, health, literacy and
education during the seventeenth, eighteenth and
even nineteenth centuries. Often the evidence
cited is based on an unusual range of data sets:
figures on the population of and burials in Aix-en-Provence
in France in 1695; the heights of women convicts
transported from England and Ireland to the penal
colony of New South Wales between 1800 and 1815
and of East India Company recruits in the United
Kingdom between 1815 and 1860; the ability of
Dutch brides and grooms to sign their names in
marriage registers in the 1670s; and so on. All
of them point to the disjunction between the economic
expansion of Europe and the improvement in the
quality of life of its populations.
According to Bagchi, three developments during
the last quarter of the 19th century changed matters
with regard to the quality of life in Europe.
These were: the prophylactic measures resulting
from the development of the germ theory of disease;
the migration of European populations to the United
States, Canada and other regions of recent settlement;
and the emergence of workers' resistance and democratic
movements that forced governments to respond with
improved health and educational provision as well
as measures aimed at protecting workers, which
extended to the 1980s and after, excepting for
breaks during the years of fascist success. These
were the developments that made the last quarter
of the nineteenth century the second "axial
age" after the Industrial Revolution. The
first witnessed the separation of output and productivity
expansion in the developed countries of today
from that in the underdeveloped countries. The
second saw the beginning of a process of divergence
of human development in present day advanced countries
and the rest of the world.
This was obviously because the belated improvement
in human development indicators in Europe did
not spread in adequate measure to the regions
outside the metropolitan centres of capitalism.
One reason for this was the integration into the
empire of capital of the underdeveloped regions
initially as sites of plunder to finance capitalist
accumulation in the metropolis, then as sources
of raw material for metropolitan production and
finally as markets for metropolitan produce. All
of these involved a drain of surpluses that deprived
them of resources that could be used to defray
the costs of public provision and intervention
needed to make a difference to the quality of
life. Another reason was that many of them remained
colonies well into the twentieth century, and
colonial governments, their civilizing rhetoric
notwithstanding, were not interested in improving
the quality of life of native populations, other
than in cases (illustrated by Macaulay's educational
agenda) where it was needed to support the colonial
administration.
The net result was that developments after the
late nineteenth century radically separated the
literacy levels, longevity, educational standards
and overall quality of life of the early industrialisers
that are now the advanced nations from that in
underdeveloped areas of the world today. There
was, of course a period of respite in the three
decades following the Second World War, when many
newly independent underdeveloped countries accelerated
the pace of human development advance through
public action adopted by national governments.
However, progress was limited and inadequate.
And, hopes of a substantial closing of the gaps
in human development achievement in the developed
and underdevelopment countries have been belied
by the outcomes observed during the integrationist
epoch that began in the 1980s. Globalization has
slowed progress on the human development front
and widened global disparities in many areas.
Developments during these years were not chance
events but a part of the logic of capitalist ascendancy.
The era of what is loosely and even euphemistically
termed globalization is in Bagchi's perspective
the result of the challenge to capitalist hegemony
led by the US that came from the strengthened
bargaining power of workers in the developed countries,
the increased clout of the now politically independent
developing countries and the challenge posed by
the socialist, centrally planned economies, especially
the Soviet Union and China. In response capitalism
had to reconstitute itself in ways that can deal
these challenges.
The form the response took involved the rise to
dominance of finance capital, which paved the
way for the accelerated integration of differentially
developed regions of the world by breaking down
barriers to the flow of capital, especially financial
capital. This was the period when developing country
governments were forced or persuaded into adopting
open-door policies of a kind that Bagchi's historical
elaboration establishes the developed countries
never followed at similar levels of development
or even subsequently. The net result was slower
growth in whole continents, such as during the
"lost decades" in Latin America; economic
devastation, as in Africa; greater volatility,
as in emerging markets prone to financial crises;
and a slow down in or reversal of advance on the
human development front even in countries that
managed to perform well in terms of GDP growth,
such as China and India. Capitalism has been successful,
socialism is in retreat, capitalist aggression
has increased led by the sole military super power
the US, and much of the world's population benefits
little in terms of the quality of life resulting
in a widening of global disparities of various
kinds.
Bagchi's effort to track an all-embracing problematic
through a trajectory unfolding over centuries
is convincing because he backs his central arguments
with evidence that spans centuries and straddles
many areas of human life. He is also meticulous
in his use of data, taking account of their inevitable
limitations and their degree of reliability. But
at the end of this apparently discursive but actually
extremely focused exercise, he is able to drive
home his conclusion that behind the rise to ascendancy
of capital is "a compulsive drive for power
and pelf at the cost of virtually all human values".
This is a comprehensive rebuttal of the view that
at all points of time the developed countries
of the day provide the less developed an image
of their own future. That view inadequately comprehended
the crucial role played by the conquest and devastation
of the periphery in the successful development
of the metropolis. It is also a damaging critique
of the view of self-centred elites in the underdeveloped
countries who clamour for a recasting of developing
country economic structures and policies in the
image of what prevails in the Anglo-Saxon metropolis.
That might benefit a small elite in the periphery,
but finally only serves the interest of capital
rooted in the metropolis. A historical reading
of the logic of capitalist expansion makes clear
that it can have a "human face" only
for a few. As Bagchi notes: "One of the defining
characteristics of capitalism has been a contradiction
between its universalist claims (being unlike
feudalism, ancient slavery, o caste-based systems
in this respect) and the delivery of substantive
gains to only segments of the population, leaving
others in privation."
The relevance of these conclusions for a reading
of the present is obvious. Given the dominance
of a discredited neoliberal ideology in the age
of finance, this enormous contribution by Professor
Bagchi is timely. That it comes with the erudition,
research and authority that he brings to the task,
is inspiring.
*
Professor, Centre for Economic
Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi, India. |
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| September 28, 2006. |
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