Several obituaries of Amiya Kumar Bagchi have appeared since his death on November 28, covering his remarkable achievements. More surveys and assessments of his work will no doubt appear in the coming days. For he left behind, not merely a set of writings, but a coherent, powerful body of work that constitutes a major challenge to the ‘received version’ of economic history issued from the centres of western academia. What follows is only a brief comment.
By a strange irony, two months before Bagchi’s death, Sweden’s central bank awarded its “Nobel prize for economics” to three economists, Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (AJR), for their explanation of why some countries have long been, and continue to be, much richer than others. This sustained divergence between the rich and the poor contradicted standard economic growth theory, which posits that market forces automatically wipe out such gaps and bring about ‘convergence’. According to Nobel committee, AJR’s contribution is that they explain the gap by looking at the “colonial origins of comparative development”, and the social institutions generated by that colonial rule.
On the face of it, these were the very concerns at the core of Bagchi’s lifework. However, unlike Bagchi, the three winners of the prize have put out a breathtakingly banal (and implicitly or unwittingly racist) explanation. As they tell it, certain lands conquered by the European colonialists were less encumbered by pre-existing developed, populous societies and tropical infections; there the Europeans could migrate in sizeable numbers and institute secure property rights and western-style political institutions (“Neo-Europes”) for themselves. In other, less hospitable, colonies, swarming with natives and infection, the colonisers were constrained to come in smaller numbers and therefore instituted only extractive institutions.1 As a result of this ‘natural experiment’, as AJR termed it, the first type of colonies (the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand) wound up winners, gaining the prize of lasting prosperity; the second type lost, and were consigned to poverty. The title of Acemoglu and Robinson’s recent best-seller was Why Nations Fail.
However, Bagchi’s work revealed something very different: that transfers of income from the colonies played a critical part in the rise of industrial capitalism itself in western Europe and in the U.S./Canada, and in crippling the economies of the colonies. Thus the ‘natural experiment’ had no scientific validity.2 And far from planting ‘inclusive’ political institutions, the rise of capitalism in the colonising mother countries gave rise to the largest slave trade in history. Moreover, Bagchi showed, with simultaneous sweep of coverage and wealth of detail, the ways in which the colonies and semi-colonies were crippled. In his first major work, Private Investment in India 1900-39 (1972), he showed the impact of British colonial rule on India’s overall economic development, sector by sector. Ten years later, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (1982) extended his analysis from colonialism to neo-colonialism, and across the Third World. It says that these societies are ‘underdeveloped’ “because their capacity for exerting themselves to realize this potential is impaired by their internal social and political structure, and by the dominating effect of the advanced capitalist countries which limit their choices all the time.”3 In doing so, it indicates the ways the people of the countries under neocolonial rule can undo this crippling and take their destiny into their own hands; namely, by changing their internal social and political structures, and thus developing their capacity to resist the domination of the advanced capitalist countries. We find this work to be particularly important, providing much guidance on how to recognise and analyse these internal structures. Despite much having changed in the last five decades, the essence of the argument there remains highly relevant today.
His last major work, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (2005), is a unique survey of the entire career of capitalism. It is an economic history, but one which, in the tradition of Karl Marx, ignores the artificial divisions between economics, history, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Thus it integrates the story of the ascendancy of capital with capital’s resort to ‘unlimited combat’, including fascism and war. The wide range of this account, passing from, say, Europe in the late 15th century to India under the Mughals in the 17th century to Japan in the 19th century, and from financial flows to demographic change to cultural influences, enabled Bagchi to debunk many dominant theories. In line with his earlier works, it sharply brings out the role of imperialist exploitation in the divergent fates of the ‘winners’ and the ‘losers’. Finally, it centres its account on what happened to the human beings that came under the sway of capitalism, both in the imperialist countries and the oppressed lands. In this, it shows how the struggles of the toilers played a role in mitigating the sufferings of their class, and finally places its hopes in the struggles of people for a better world.
Nowadays it is very difficult to find economists who talk in such terms. At one time, there were several economists who talked in terms of the political economy; and even if they were not in direct political activity, they looked at that political economy not merely from the angle of analysing it, but changing it. Such thinking rarely happens in isolation from broader political events, and indeed in those days, fundamental change was afoot, at home and abroad.
At a personal level, the loss of Bagchi brings to one’s mind two other losses, of Krishna Bharadwaj, who died in 1992, and Nirmal Chandra, who died in 2014. Their styles of written expression were very different: Bharadwaj in the (at times difficult) language of theory, behind which there was actually profound empathy and humility; Chandra in a dry, sharp, understated style; Bagchi with sweep and at times with “savage indignation”4. Even if one differed with them, their writings are of political economy in the true sense of the phrase. All three had grown up in in a world in which people had waged revolutions and set up new social systems; and they saw before them the terrible effects of the social system prevailing in India, which had just emerged from colonial rule. In different ways, they sought out the reasons for that crippling of human capabilities and what needed to be done to undo it. One hopes their writings will continue to be read, considered, questioned, and taken forward by a new generation, not for purely academic purposes, but as part of analysing the world to change it.
Notes:
- ↩ “[I]n places where the disease environment was not favorable to European settlement, the cards were stacked against the creation of Neo-Europes, and the formation of the extractive state was more likely.” Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation”, Working Paper 7771, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2000.
- ↩ “Changes in economic structure cannot thus be regarded as entirely indigenous processes. The very processes that led to rapid industrialisation in these advanced capitalist countries and their overseas offshoots led to the stagnation or worse of the underdeveloped countries.”–A.K. Bagchi, “Some International Foundations of Capitalist Growth and Underdevelopment”, Economic and Political Weekly, Special Number, August 1972.
- ↩ He notes that this usage was advocated earlier by Paul Baran, in his Political Economy of Growth (1962), and indeed the title of Bagchi’s work recalls Baran’s, as do its themes.
- ↩ From Jonathan Swift’s epitaph, translated by Yeats: “Swift has sailed into his rest;/ Savage indignation there/ Cannot lacerate his Breast./ Imitate him if you dare,/ World-Besotted Traveler; he/ Served human liberty.”