The Political Economy of Reading

William St Clair

Last year, some of us were privileged to hear the first John Coffin Memorial Lecture given by Robert Darnton entitled ‘The Devil in the Holy Water.’ In that talk, by offering a  close textual and historical study of just one pamphlet, Darnton showed how much could  be learned about Paris day by day when the French Revolution was actually occurring. In terms of ‘the history of the book’, that talk was at the micro end of the spectrum. This year I propose to move to the other extreme, the macro, looking at books and reading as a whole and over a long time span.

I begin by suggesting some of the big questions that ‘the history of the book’ shouldaddress. What were the conditions within which books came into existence in the form thatthey did, and not in others? How were those books that did come into existence produced, sold, distributed, and read, in what numbers, by which constituencies of readers, and over which time scales? – again asking why these events happened in the ways they did and not in others? And what were the consequences of the reading of the texts that were inscribed in, and that were carried by, the books? What were the effects on the minds of their readers, and on the mentalities of the wider society within which the reading took place. By mentalities, a word adopted from the French, I mean the beliefs, feelings, values, and dispositions to act in certain ways that are prevalent in a society at a particular historical and cultural conjuncture, including not only states of mind that are explicitly acknowledged but others that are unarticulated or regarded as fixed or natural. And although I say ‘books’ for convenience, I include journals, newspapers, and other media.

These questions are, of course, not new. However, although there has always been much interest in what certain texts mean, how they came to be written, and in the lives of their authors, less attention has been paid to the processes by which the texts reached the hands, and therefore potentially the minds, of different constituencies of readers. I draw many of my findings from the print era in the English-speaking world, roughly the four hundred years from 1500 to 1900, a long sweep of history with many changes.

But, in one respect, that era forms a unity. For, during that time, paper imprinted with words or pictures was the  only medium by which complex texts, and therefore complex ideas, could be carried in  quantity across time and place. I choose 1900, incidentally, not as the end of the print era,  but as a way of conventionally marking the moment when, with the arrival of radio and film, printed paper lost its uniqueness. During those four centuries, almost everyone whose opinions on the matter are recorded believed that the reading of books affected the minds of readers, the mentalities of the people, and the fate of the nation. Whether engaged in politics, education, religion, literature, scholarship, science, propaganda, advertising, or censorship, many of the leading men and women of the past tried to use print to spread their ideas and to advance their aims. This was particularly true during the period from the 1790s to the 1830s, that I have studied in detail, an extraordinary rich and innovative time as contemporaries knew. But, we should ask, were they right to regard books and reading as having power over minds? How can we investigate the validity of the assumption? Literary and intellectual history, two of the disciplines that have traditionally attempted to retrieve historic mentalities, have mainly been written in accordance with what I call the ’parade of authors’ convention.

The writings of the past are presented as a march-past of great names described from a commentator’s box set high above the column. In literature, we see Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. In philosophy Hume is followed by Adam Smith, Rousseau, or whichever names the writer wishes to include. According to the parade convention, those texts of an age which have later been judged to be the best, or the most innovative, in a wide sense, are believed to catch the essence, or some of the essence, of the historical situation from which they emanated. It is a convention centred on newly written works that, for the most part, denies an active role to readers. Another convention that has come in more recently, I call the ‘parliament of texts’. This presents the writings of a particular historical period as debating and negotiating with one another in a kind of open parliament with all the members participating and listening. Thus, when news of the French Revolution reached this country, there was an outpouring of books and pamphlets that discussed the implications, and took the debate from questions of immediate policy to philosophical issues about the nature of human society, the role of the state, the justifications for political, social, and gender hierarchies, and much else.

Under both of these conventions, the historian chooses the texts that march in the parade or sit in the parliament. Both approaches can be linked with critical and hermeneutic analyses of the texts which are not time specific, seeking to understand their rhetorical stance and ideological assumptions, and employing, for example, theories of myth to explain the enduring appeal of certain types of narrative. Some scholars attempt to test the truth of what the texts assert, although, sadly, that is out of fashion. And the texts can be situated in specific contexts. However, as ways of understanding how mentalities may have been historically formed by the historic reading of books, neither approach seems to me to be complete or satisfactory. For one thing, any study of the consequences of the reading of the past ought to consider the books that were actually read, not some modern selection. Nor, in describing the reading of a particular period of the past, can it be enough to draw solely on the texts written during that period, specially significant though these may have been. Much of the reading that took place in the past in the English-speaking world, probably most, was of texts written or compiled long ago and far away.

In both parade and parliament conventions, newly written printed texts succeed their predecessors, engage with them, and in some cases defeat or supersede them, and it can be convincingly shown that this happened in certain cases. As far as readers were concerned, however, chronological linearity was not the norm. No historical reader, whatever his or her socio-economic or educational status, read texts in the order in which they were first published. In nineteenth century Britain, for example, many readers read the texts of the Enlightenment only after they had been subjected to an intensive school education in the texts of the Counter-Enlightenment, and many others, including many women, read the Counter-Enlightenment without having read the Enlightenment at all. In the debates on the implications of the French Revolution, Paine’s Rights of Man was quickly suppressed, and only a few of the other pamphlets were produced in cumulative print runs of more than 500 or 750 copies. But, for Burke’s Reflexions on the French Revolution, there are records of over twenty thousand copies being produced and circulated in the early 1790s alone.

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Pamphlets were of course often read by more than one reader and circulated through book clubs, and information and ideas can travel by word of mouth. But, of the many men and women who tried to understand the implications of the French Revolution by reading the printed discussions, most must have come to their conclusions on the basis of Burke alone. When we read a book or essay called, say, ‘The Age of Wordsworth’, should we not be concerned that, in his lifetime, most of Wordsworth’s books were produced in editions of  about 500 to 1,000 copies of which many were remaindered or wasted several years after publication?

Could that amount of reading have shaped the minds of ten to fifteen million people? Especially when Wordsworth was, on the whole, reinforcing ideas that were mainstream in the culture of his day? How do we deal with the fact that over two million copies of Scott’s verse and prose romances had been sold in Britain alone by the middle of the nineteenth century, maybe a million more than all other authors put together? And Scott was regarded by the best critics as the equal of Homer, a great teacher and model, not a  predecessor of Jeffrey Archer or airport pulp fiction?

Furthermore, readers have never been the inert recipients of meanings carried by texts. They had freedom, within their circumstances, to choose which texts to read and which passages to give most attention to, to skip, to argue, to resist, and to read against the grain. As far as children were concerned, if my experience of real children is any guide, their responses were even less constrained. Exclusively text-based approaches, which are caught in a closed circle, cannot ever, without information from outside the texts, take us to impacts and consequences.So what should we do? Part of the answer is to conceive of a past culture not as a parade or as a parliament but as a dynamic system with many interacting agents, into which the writing, publication, and subsequent reading of a text were interventions that had consequences. Since, according to this approach, the engagement between competing texts occurred mainly in the minds of readers, we must expect the trajectories of development to be different from those of the first writings, or of the first printings, of texts. Which takes me to the ‘political economy of reading.’

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If that phrase has an eighteenth century ring about it, that is part of my point. The classical political economists of the Enlightenment investigated the observable consequences of different types of governing arrangements on commodities, trade, prices, employment, incomes, and the physical well-being of people. They believed that, by understanding  economic systems, they could improve the political management of such systems to bring about improvements in the lives of participants, and for the most part they were successful and the subjects they founded have become well-established disciplines with many achievements. I want to carry that tradition forward into cultural systems, tracing the effects of the governing structures on texts, books, access, readerships, and consequential mentalities. If I had been living in the eighteenth century, I would have called my book, ‘An Inquiry into the Political Economy of Knowledge.’

How can we set about developing such a political economy of reading? I begin with the economic aspect of political economy. The ‘history of the book’ is, among much else, the history of an industry, and there is nothing inappropriate about adopting the conceptual tools that are successfully employed in understanding the behaviour of industries with similar characteristics. There are, for example, parallels with pharmaceuticals and information technology, in which intellectual property is central. And we have a body of well-established, empirically-tested, theory about the consequences of different types of economic and business structures. Table 1 is a simple diagram that illustrates the observed economic behaviour of a publisher of a newly written text in the romantic period. On the vertical column we chart price, on the horizontal, quantity. Within constraints not shown here, the publisher chose where to position his intended book on the demand curve, either selling a small number at a high price or a larger number at a lower price. A publisher who  holds the exclusive right to copy and sell a particular text, that is the copyright-holder, will maximise his financial returns if he moves down the demand curve in a series of discrete tranches over time. That is the classic behaviour of a monopolist.

One reason why I have shown an ideal demand curve is that, in its shape, it neatly matches the actual books of the romantic period. I take two of the most praised and most demanded literary works of the time. Scott’s Lady of the Lake, moving down the demand curve from quarto, to octavo, and then to duodecimo, and then stopping. And Byron’s Don Juan, on which, for reasons I need not go into here, intellectual property rights turned out not to be enforceable.Don Juan was tranched down far further—indeed to the lowest point on the curve obtainable with the technology of the day, tiny books, crammed pages, tiny print, scarcely readable with the naked eye.

I have the actual numbers for the three main variables, price, quantity, and time. For The  Lady of the Lake, the prices are, in shillings, 42, 12, 9, a drastic reduction, and the sales rose from about one thousand to tens of thousands. It took fifteen years to move from the large expensive quarto to the smaller less expensive duodecimo. In the case of Don Juan, the price fell from 57 to 5 shillings, less than a tenth of the initial price. Sales rose from a few to several hundred thousand. And that move down the demand curve took place in less than two years from the time Don Juan was first published as a completed work. The Lady of the Lake did eventually follow Don Juan down the demand curve but not until the 1840s when the copyright expired, prices fell, and access widened even more dramatically. We can relate the book prices to the incomes of different constituencies of potential buyers and readers. The quarto volumes, for example, would have cost about a third of the weekly income of a gentleman, say a retired senior captain of Nelson’s Royal Navy whose income was about 100 shillings a week. The tiny editions of Don Juan by contrast became affordable by clerks, artisans, and others hitherto excluded from modern reading. During the romantic period, incidentally, there were no free public schooling or free public libraries, no railways or rapid communication between people. My simple demand curve, therefore brings out the relationships between the governing regime of intellectual property, price, access, and the timing of access, in all its starkness.

For most of the print era in England, the Lady of the Lake pattern was the norm, although of course not all texts conform so neatly, and only a small number were ever reprinted at all. Until 1774 English publishers practised perpetual intellectual property and stayed high on the curve. Indeed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they crept higher up, selling smaller numbers at higher prices, and abandoning the lower tranches. And when perpetual monopoly was ended by the courts after a long period in which the statute law was ignored by the industry, and the lower tranches were opened up, we see that prices tumbled, production soared, and access widened. In the case of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a best seller from the moment it was published in 1719, the archives show that, within about five years, it sold more copies than in the seventy years since it first appeared. With Shakespeare, within twenty five years of 1774, more copies were sold than in the one hundred and fifty years since the first collected edition of 1623. And, if you are thinking that the fall in price was due to mechanisation of book manufacturing, as is often asserted, thatwas not the case. The books that poured from the English presses in rising numbers at falling prices after 1774 were manufactured by traditional hand-craft methods largely unchanged since Gutenberg.

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On the lower part of my demand curve diagram, I have mentioned anthologies, abridgements, and adaptations. They are part of the means by which ideas were, and are, diffused, in economic terms ‘trickle down’. They enabled longer texts to be made available to wider readerships, including young people, to the-less-well educated, and to the economically disadvantaged. They help to bind a society together, uniting the reading experiences of one generation with that of others, introducing children to texts which they may later read in more sophisticated versions, and maintaining a shared memory across time, place, and social situation. One pattern that I noticed in my scrutiny of the archival record is that, quite suddenly, in about 1600, the English book industry stopped producing texts of this kind that drew on copyrighted material. There were, for example, no abridgements of the eighteenth century novels, of Adam Smith, of Gibbon, of the English translations of Homer or Virgil, long works that cry out for abridgement. The judicial decision of 1774 not only enabled innumerable complete texts to be read by millions who had previously been excluded but resulted in a flood of anthologies, abridgements, and adaptations that drew on the same body of older texts and carried the ideas to even larger constituencies including children.

The patterns relating to abridgements, anthologies, and adaptations, Alps on the landscape of book history, were not brought to light either by traditional descriptive bibliography or by narrative history. But, as with tranching down, once noticed, the explanation jumps from the page. The business purpose was to prevent the high price market in the complete texts from being undermined. Since the clampdown was notretroactive, the older texts, that is those for which an intellectual property ownership claimhad been made before 1600, continued to be reprinted. This resulted in the build up of vested commercial interests in prolonging the existence of the older texts that had been first printed before the clampdown.

A political economy approach helps to explain why after  1774 the reading nation grew rapidly until near universality was reached by the end of the  nineteenth. It explains why Shakespeare disappeared from popular reading, from 1594 to  1808, and why a body of texts of mediaeval romance that had been continuously favoured  for many centuries should suddenly lose all appeal around 1800.

The time lags in access that resulted from these governing economic structures and business practices were not trivial. For example, in the romantic period, a large constituency of middle class readers were caught in the print of texts produced in an England of two or more generations before, texts that became more out of line with their real life experience every passing year. The poor were caught in texts first printed several hundred years earlier, English language bibles, almanacs, chapbook abridgements of mediaeval and Renaissance romance such as Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, and the Seven Champions of Christendom. Those at the top of the demand curve could of course buy the less expensive books and many did. Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, for example, loved the old abridged chapbooks and made collections. But those at the lower tranches could not regularly buy access to the books in which more modern texts were inscribed.

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Although I have given literary examples, the same broad patterns are discernible across the whole range of printed texts, science, medicine, philosophy, history, and so on. Those at the top had modern knowledge, those at the bottom had superseded knowledge, those at the top had clinical medicine, others had folklore and unwanted children. Those at the top had science, the rest had astrology. And the effects on minds were cumulative, affecting the horizons of expectations of succeeding generations.

What this simple diagram shows is a reading nation in which different layers of readers interacted with texts of differing degrees  of modernity and obsolescence within their economic circumstances and cultural horizons.  Some may query my use of the word ‘obsolescence’ in this context. I do not wish to imply that the longer the time that has passed since a text was first produced or made available in print, the less truthful, valuable, or useful it must necessarily be. By the same argument, ‘long-lived’ texts do not become admirable just because they were first produced long ago. Readers have often been able to draw contemporary, maybe even universal, meanings from texts that are not contemporary, sometimes from unpromising material, and there are innumerable examples of men, women, and young people successfully surmounting the obstacles to access to knowledge and education brought about by high prices. But, for an understanding of the political economy of reading, we should beware of putting too much weight on anecdotal evidence whose representative quality is uncertain. George Craik’s The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: illustrated by anecdotes was a Victorian favourite, but occasional exceptions, reassuring though they may be in some ways, also confirm that the norm was the norm.

What determined the shape of the demand curve? Many factors we can think of —literacy, incomes, horizons, censorship, appeal to readers, none of which are static, and all of which have to be investigated and factored in. The curve for books as a whole, for example, looks very steep in the century before the romantic period, in the sense that the number of additional copies which were sold if the price was reduced was modest. By 1900, as a result of a virtuous circle of cheaper books leading to more reading, it had become much flatter as more and more men, women, and children joined the reading nation.

I mention one other factor, the effects of the changing technology. To my initial surprise, I found that the figures for edition sizes, that is print runs per edition, for British books in the early nineteenth century were not all that different from those found in the previous centuries of the print era, when the population, the economy, and the market for books were only a fraction of what they had become. The normal range, from about 500 to 3,000 copies per edition, with a few outliers on either side, is similar in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy for which there are sixteenth century figures. It seems to be constant across Europe and North America. Only in the mid nineteenth century, with the introduction of printing by stereotype plates do we see much of a change and some print runs become longer. Why, we should ask, did the coming of print in fifteenth century Europe result in more texts? Surely the political and ecclesiastical leaders of the time, who claimed a monopoly of truth, should have preferred more copies of the existing body of texts? There is a simple economic explanation relating to the marginal costs of producing extra copies. With moveable type, after about 3,000 copies, the producer of a book maximises his returns relative to his costs and risks by putting the type back in the case, and starting again with a new edition if demand exceeds 3,000.

The political economy point is this. In the past, the differing technological and  economic limitations on manufacturing of copies of texts changed the balance of  production, and therefore of reading, between old and new texts. Some technologies  encouraged the production of more copies of the existing body of texts. Moveable type  encouraged the production of more newly composed texts.

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I turn now to the last link in the chain of the analysis. When we have retrieved historic reading patterns, can we perceive an overlap with subsequent historic mentalities? Can we confirm that the universal assumption that reading had consequences for mentalities was valid? Obviously there is more scope for judgement and interpretation in answering this question than in the others noted so far, some of which are largely factual. And, in order to avoid circularity, we need to use manifestations of mentalities that are external to the texts. For myself, having done the political economy work in considerable detail for a particular historical period, I do discern a recognisable correspondence between historic reading patterns and consequent mentalities. The correlation is far from exact, but over the whole print era, the links, both general and particular, between texts, books, reading, and wider consequences appear to be secure. For example the persistence of rural religious pre-Enlightenment constructions of essential Englishness into the industrialised urban world, the emergence of a distinctively working class sceptical urban reformist culture, and the persistence in belief in astrology and other ancient supernaturals despite the efforts of church and state — in all these cases, the overlap is with books and readers not with authors and texts. We also have the astonishingly neat overlap between the immersion of the English-speaking reading nation for over a century in the neo-chivalric romances of Walter Scott, the values of Victorian Britain, and the states of mind that we detect in the American Civil War and the First World War, connexions that had been remarked upon by Mark Twain, Paul Fussell, and others.

If I am right, and it is accepted that reading has been shown to have historically shaped mentalities, then the implications are immense. For, having disconnected outcomes from traditional text- and author-centred approaches, we have connected them to other ways of understanding complexity. One striking conclusion is the extent to which simple, well understood, and empirically well-tested economic models, such as price and quantity,  monopoly and competition, have been able to account for the behaviour of the printed book  industry, and therefore also the patterns of readerly access, during all the centuries when  print was the paramount medium. The study has shown that the tendency of monopolistic  industries to pay most attention to the topmost tranches of the market, to move slowly  down the demand curve, to ration supply to the market in order to protect the market value  of their properties, to neglect large constituencies of the market altogether or to supply them  with obsolete and often shoddy goods, can be observed in the monopolies and cartels  operated by the printed book industry through the institutions of private intellectual. Basic economic theory can, therefore, help to explain how the reading nation came to be divided into overlapping layers of readers, differentiated not only by income, by socio-economic class, and by educational attainment, but by the degree of obsolescence of the  print to which each layer had access. To have linked mentalities to historical reading is, therefore, to have linked them to the economics of the production and marketing of texts in the age of print.

I now turn to the politically-decided component of the political economy of reading.  I offer worked examples of the effects of different types of governing regime ranging from private monopoly ownership of all texts in perpetuity, as in England until 1774, total absence of intellectual property as in eighteenth century Ireland, and various forms of mixed, protectionist, and offshore regimes. Again you may wish to dispute my data or my inferences from them, although nobody has yet done so –nor indeed do I know of any alternative data having been collected. What I emphasise is that, in every one of these regimes, we can trace the effects of the politically-decided regime on the behaviour of the book industry, the shape of the demand curve, and trace the consequences for prices, access, timing of access, horizons, and readerships, and therefore on the constituting of knowledge among different constituencies.

In general, it emerges that the development of virtually all aspects of texts, books, and reading, including the English-language Bible and Shakespeare, have been influenced by the three main governing structures of the print era, private intellectual property in the hands of the text-copying industry, cartelisation within the industry, and a close alliance between the state and the industry in which the industry delivers textual policing and self-censorship in exchange for economic privileges. It emerges too that the governing structures of private intellectual property enforced and guaranteed by the state, which, in England, were first put in place in the early sixteenth century and, although constantly undermined by manuscript, pirate, and offshore publication, had a large measure of success in achieving their aims. If the findings of my inquiry are confirmed, then it follows that these governing structures helped to determine society itself, affecting every stage of cultural formation from textual production, through the choice, production, and distribution of print, to readerly access, readerly horizons, choice of reading, reception, and consequent mentalities. And these conclusions and findings about the consequences of different types of regime hold true irrespective of the actual texts that are being turned into books, throughout the print era. We have here, I suggest, the framework within which the role of particular texts can be traced. We have useable models for the political economy of reading.

The fierce debates about intellectual property that occur today are mainly conducted not in terms of political economy but in absolutist language that ignores consequences. One is the language of property and of theft. Bill Gates, the President of Microsoft, recently described those who challenged the politically-decided regime within which the firm makes its monopoly profits as ‘communists’. The absolutist language obscures the main point. For intellectual property is essentially different from real property, One is physical and visible. The other is immaterial and invisible. The custom and practice of real property have existed throughout recorded human history, in essentials unchanged at any rate in the Western tradition. Intellectual property is a European invention of the fifteenth century which has subsequently been subject to many changes in law and in practice. With a piece of real property, say a house, the owner can make drastic alterations and the result will still be recognisably the same house. But the owner of a house cannot make a second house by making an abridgement of the first house. If the house is divided among a number of people, each can only enjoy a share, and the more the property is divided the smaller the share that each one gets. With intellectual property, on the other hand, division need not lead to any diminution of utility. My experience of reading Shakespeare is not diminished if you read Shakespeare.

In addition to ‘property’, the present arguments about intellectual property are permeated with another absolutist language, the author as unique ‘creator’, who has the right to own and defend his creation. But we know historically that even the most creative writers, such as Shakespeare, did not start with nothing, but adapted what already existed. No one, whether author or intellectual property owner can reasonably claim that any substantial text has been compiled solely from privately owned materials. By its use of language, which is essentially social, by its appeal to memory and readerly notions of genre, and by its repetition of recognised old as well as new sentiments, all texts inescapably draw on knowledge which they share with their readers. Indeed, without the shared public element, texts would have had little or no appeal to readers. The intellectual property in every newly printed text is, in effect, the asserting of a private ownership claim over part of a language and intellectual domain which has previously been both open to the public and free. However, in the English book industry by the seventeenth century, the whole discourse of property as it applied to real property, including the penalties for stealing it, damaging it, and trespassing on it, the political rights and privileges attached to the possession of it, and the legal protections against confiscation, was being applied to this recently invented form of private wealth.

Today the texts over which a private property right is being asserted, and payment demanded for its use, are becoming ever shorter and the degree of creativity required is minimal. When Warner Brothers learned that Groucho Marx was making a parody of their film Casablanca, their lawyers sent him a stern warning. Groucho replied that the Marx Brothers existed long before the Warner Brothers and he claimed rights over Brothers.Today he might not have been able to laugh his way out. Just a few months ago Lady Thatcher made a successful claim against the BBC for breaching what she said were her property rights in a phrase of her creation used in her memoirs ‘Treachery with a smile, this. Emily Dickinson firmly believed that we cannot fully comprehend life unless we also understand death.’ In making this banal remark, I have committed an offence. For I have not acknowledged that this thought was allegedly created by Wendy Martin in 1988 in an article in The Columbia History of American Literature. This example comes not from some extremist booksellers’ trade association but from the professional guidance to academic researchers published by the Modern Language Association of America. The MLA notes that ‘a starving person who steals a loaf of bread can be rehabilitated . . . but sadly, almost always, the course of a professional writer’s career is permanently affected by a single act of plagiarism.’ So, before the police arrive, can I confess that I have made use of ideas ‘created’ in 2003 in the Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

I wonder what the political economists and jurists of the Enlightenment would have made of this? If spoken language is the main faculty which holds human beings together in society, they asked, why should written words be private property? Following their lead, we can describe private intellectual property for what it is, a state-guaranteed monopoly right to copy and to sell a text, a restrictive business practice which, if it is to be permitted, has to be justified by the public policy benefits that it may bring to the society that grants the privilege. And that argument about benefits can only be conducted rationally if it is informed by a developing understanding of the likely consequences of different regimes, for readers as well as authors, in other words by a political economy. Such a discussion should, of course, consider the incentives that some types of regime may provide to useful innovation as was agreed in the eighteenth century. But, to avoid abuse, whenever there is monopoly, there should also be regulation.

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So, returning to the ‘history of the book’, what is needed if we are to develop a political economy of reading? For a start, if we want to do political economy, we have to have economic information. It would be a fairly simple task, with modern technology with many hands contributing, world wide, to place alongside the plentiful information we already have about texts, such scattered information as survives about production, prices, access, and readerships, over time. From such information we will perceive patterns and develop provisional explanatory models. Emerging results can be challenged and either replicated or amended. Emerging results in one reading nation may be transferable, with adaptations, to the experience of others. Such a project would fit well with the other projects at present underway, such as putting texts on line or the collecting examples of recorded historic reading. Having information of this kind would enable us to built a fuller and more theoretical understanding of texts, books, reading, and consequences. And, since such information is unlikely to be found for periods after 1900 when there are just too many  media and too many transactions, we should improve our understanding not just of ‘then history of the book’ but of cultural production and consumption of all kinds into our own time.

One last point. Contrary to what Wordsworth believed and wrote about in The Excursion, his mind was not formed by experiencing Nature direct in the mountains of the Lake District. He was participating in a tradition that went back many centuries. Nor was the mind of Byron’s Bonnivard chainless and free in the dungeon of Chillon, although his heroic story may have provided encouragement to innumerable readers and listeners. The more complex aspects of our minds — I leave aside the lessons we learn from putting our hand in boiling water — may be, to a larger extent than we understand or care to acknowledge, temporary outcomes of the consumption of the texts to which we and our predecessors have been exposed, texts produced by political and economic processes involving property, and therefore power. If we wish to improve our understanding of why, as societies, we have come to think the way we do, and to give ourselves, if we choose, a greater degree of freedom, we need a political economy of reading.

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William St Clair is a founding member of Open Book Publishers, based in Cambridge (UK), and an active supporter of the Open Access movement. This lecture was delivered at the School of Advanced Study, University of London (where he is a Senior Research Fellow) as The John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book 2005.

Explaining Neo-Malthusianism?

Mohan Rao

Introduction

Politically correct, influential people in policy making circles in the First World do not, any more, talk of the yellow peril, or use phrases such as population explosion, or metaphors like the population bomb. Nevertheless, neo-Malthusian thinking frames other policy discourses, those on welfare, immigration and the environment being prominent ones.  Soon after the London riots last year, commentators were talking of the undeserving poor, whose council housing should be razed if their children had participated in the riots. The children themselves were referred to as vermin, who needed to be dealt with firmly, with real bullets. At the same time, partly due to the very reach and influence of such doomsday demographic discourses emanating from the West in the past, and the modified ones today, the elites and the middle classes in much of the Third World remain convinced that the cause of social and economic problems in their countries stem primarily, if not only, from population growth.

It is also clear that there is an anxiety among elites in our country about population growth, the belief that this lies at heart of a range of social and economic problems that we face. This belief enjoys widespread appeal in the media and among middle class professionals, including of course doctors. What explains the enormous appeal of this argument? Is it propaganda over the last 50 years, initially stemming from the West, but now deeply internalized in our country?[i]

Many of these beliefs are sanitised in public pronouncements, made acceptable, and yet it is undeniable they represent powerful undercurrents of thinking in an astonishingly wide range of areas. This paper, preliminary and tentative in nature, attempts to explain what seems to be inexplicable. Do these ideas stem from other atavistic anxieties, about tribe and race? This too was evident after the London riots when commentators spoke of a Caribbean culture of violence and laziness taking over the streets of London. Do they arise from their evident simplicity in explaining a deeply fractured world?  Why are they such overwhelming tropes in the discourse of fundamentalisms of various sorts? Does neo-liberalism provide them with impetus?  Why are they entangled with other anti-feminist discourses? How do issues of identity, currently au courant, get imbricated in this?

I begin, then, with the almost irrelevant, if achingly tantalizing, question: what explains this abiding and widespread belief in neo-Malthusianism?  This question, though terribly moot, is difficult to answer with any certainty, since it involves feelings, opinions and prejudices that are not always easily explicable. How does one, for example, explain racism? Or, in India, the profound hold of casteism, the hatred and distaste for the lower castes, especially dalits? Or, the recent growth of suspicion, anxiety, and indeed, hatred and fear, for anything to do with Islam? There are many and complex reasons, some inter-linked. Is it primarily about with economic factors?  It is obviously not only to do with economic factors, although these are no doubt contributory. There are many more reasons, and population arguments also feed into this: the creation and hardening of prejudices, and of fear. In neo-imperial times, creation of fear is a growth industry (Lipschutz and Turcotte 2005)[ii] with sometimes utterly transparent political ends.

II

I begin this paper attempting to explain the neo Malthusian appeal by examining the astonishing case of Anders Behring Breveik. On the 22^nd of July 2011, following the setting off of bombs in central Oslo, this young white man cold bloodedly killed 69 young men and women attending a youth camp organized by the ruling Labour Party at the island of Utoya, not far from Oslo. He wanted to draw attention to the dystopia that awaited Norway because of the appeasement of Muslims by what he called, with utterly no irony, “multi-cultural Marxists”.

When the bombs went off in Oslo, the New York Times reported, and everyone assumed, that this was the handiwork of Muslim terrorists. When the terrorist was identified as a White supremacist, the explanations quickly proffered were the familiar: while not all Muslims were terrorists, most terrorists were Muslim. But of course this is equally untrue. In 2007, two out of a total of 581 terrorist attacks in Europe were carried out by Muslims; in 2008, not one of the 441 documented terrorist attacks was by a Muslim. In 2009, there were 294 terrorist attacks, out of which one was committed by a Muslim. The vast majority of terrorist attacks (237 out of 297) were perpetrated by White, non-Muslim separatist groups mainly in Spain and France ( Europol 2010).[iii]

What is interesting is that Breveik, a Right wing Christian fundamentalist, has left a 1500 page manifesto entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, an event he was attempting to usher in by his barbaric act. The year 2083 that he chose is also symbolically interesting: it represents the 400^th anniversary of the Battle of Vienna in 1683 where the invading troops of the Ottoman empire suffered a defeat, ensuring that most parts of Europe did not come under Islamic rule. It is equally interesting that a Polish king took part in that holy battle. Today of course Poland, ruled by extreme Right wing twins, is seen as the heart of pro-family values, a Catholic nation besieged in a Europe that is awash with feminists, pro-abortion and gay- rights people, together emasculating Christianity as much as the Christian male. Poland, it is believed, is the last bastion of pro-family values that will rescue Europe from demographic doom that awaits it if women refuse to breed. The 2008 World Congress of Families was held in Warsaw, where the film Demographic Winter was screened (Posner 2011).[iv] The film, echoing Mark Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, predicts the death of European civilizations and the extinctions of her races “too self absorbed to breed” as they are engulfed by tides of Muslim immigrants, leading to the transformation of Europe into Eurabia. This will, it is argued, lead to the paradoxical situation in the future when European feminists will be ruled by Islamic patriarchy, robbing them of reproductive choice that they now exercise to weaken the family, the nation and the race. One other bestselling book is Leon J.Podle’s Church Impotent: The Feminisation of Christianity. Breivik has a solution to the problem posed by Podle. The issue of the hyper-masculine Muslim male and over-fertile oppressed Muslim female is of course familiar to us, immured to long years of saffron demography. I will come back to this later.

Breveik believed that Norway would be a Muslim majority country by the year 2050 since her spineless elites had, in a multi-cultural fit, succumbed to permit endless Muslim immigration.  The fact of the matter is that on the basis of the current population growth rates, Norway will have a Muslim population of seven per cent in 2050, but mad imaginations are not based on facts and reasoning.

Like many White supremacists and Christian fundamentalists, Breveik was a staunch supporter of Zionist Israel, which he saw as an island of Western values in a dark sea of Muslim barbarism. Christian Zionists, said to number 45 million in the USA, of course believe that a Second Coming is only possible if Jerusalem is ruled by Jews. But for Breveik, Israel needed to be supported for another reason: demographic war being waged on it by Muslims, even as Israel goes out to undo the Oslo accord through illegal settlements. The connection to Oslo, again.  Breveik is a new anti-Semite, pro-Zionist and fiercely anti-Arab. This position too entwines with that of the Hindu right in India, of which he was a great admirer. In a curious case of replay of old tropes, Israel is now considered the land of the free and tolerant – to gays, in marked contrast to supposedly homophobic Muslims, even as Israel in a far-reaching PR exercise starts funding various gay pride marches ( Puar 2010).[v]

It is not surprising that each year the VHP organizes summer camps both in Norway and Denmark where Islamophobic speakers of Indian origin hold forth (Kaur 2011).[vi] Breviek’s manifesto devotes a special chapter to India and what he calls the “Hindu Holocaust”. This was the Hindu Kush mountains where Hindus were apparently slaughtered during the medieval “Islamisation” of the subcontinent. This is based on the claims of a Belgian supporter of Hindutva, Koenraad Elst, who is also known for the advice to the West on making life for Muslim minorities so difficult that they will either give up Islam or go back to where they came from! “ If the name Hindu Kush relates such a horrible genocide of Hindus, why are Hindus ignorant about it?”, asks Breveik. He attributes it to the Muslim appeasement policies of the government of India and the rewriting of history under its behest. “The victimization of Hindus, thus not only took place historically at the hands of Muslim aggressors, but now they are doubly victimized by “cultural Marxists” as well who control government” (cited in Kaur 2011:28).[vii] His admiration for the RSS, the BJP and the VHP, is clearly related to their anti-Muslim violence: “the only positive thing about the Hindu right wing is that they dominate the streets. They do not tolerate the current injustice and often riot and attack Muslims when things go out of control, usually after the Muslims disrespect and degrade Hinduism too much” (ibid). What he does not remark upon is saffron demography that so fits in with his own demographic anxieties. Not surprisingly BJP MP B.P.Singhal endorsed Breveik’s ideas (ENS 2011).[viii]

Here we have then the coming together of the extreme Right-wing Christian fundamentalism, anti-feminisms, racisms and demographic anxieties about the dying European race. Early twenty-first century echoing early twentieth century fears, tied now to Islamophobia and global politics of oil.

III

Racism is of course linked with neo-malthusianism, and not just because they emerged together. But we must begin, then, with a brief genealogy of neo-Malthusianism. Genealogies are fundamentally about accepted, legal, marriages and births. The late nineteenth century marriage of colonial anthropology with craniometry and the “science” of “race” produced the “science” of eugenics. Framing these disciplines, it must be noted, was the reality of colonialism that mid-wifed and nurtured these disciplines. Eugenics, of course, is a parent of neo-Malthusianism and of socio-biology. The American anthropologist D.G. Brinton argued, in praise of anthropometry:

The adult who retains the more numerous fetal, infantile or simian traits is unquestionably inferior to him whose development has progressed beyond them. Measured by these criteria, the European or white race stands at the head of the list, the African or Negro at its foot. (Brinton, 1890 cited in Gould 1981: 116).[ix]

Thus anthropology taught us, and anthropometry and craniometry quantified, the following: natives and savages were child-like, effeminate, instinctive, sensual, unreflexive, irrational, less intelligent, and in thrall of customs and traditions. Strangely, they were also hyper-sexual and thus tended to breed too much. In Kipling’s words, half-devil and half-child, these sullen new-caught people.[x] They were of course to be The White Man’s Burden, incapable of self-rule. This was of course evident from the position of women in these societies.

At the same time psychology also showed us that “the metaphysical character of women was very similar in nature to those which men exhibit at an early stage of development. The gentler sex is characterized by a greater impressibility, warmth of emotion, submission to its influence rather than that of logic” (Gould 1981: 117).[xi] Blandly stated, racism, anti-feminisms and colonialism come promiscuously together, with the colonizer to send forth the best he breeds to quell the sullen natives.[xii]

Armed with these insights, eugenics set out to improve the human race through two policy prescriptions: decreasing unwanted populations through negative eugenics, i.e. not permitting populations that exhibited undesirable characteristics to breed; and providing incentives to the best and brightest to breed through positive eugenics. The victims of negative eugenics have been the “feeble minded”, the tubercular, the alcoholic, the “indigent”, the “congenital criminal”, the mentally retarded, the insane, lepers, epileptics, the “feeble minded”, the “degenerate”, immigrants and of course the poor, who apparently bred all these characteristics especially if they were black or coloured. All this, with the supreme imprimatur of science, like theology, unquestionable, since this was truth. Benjamin Franklin noted, “I could wish their numbers were increased. Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red?” (cited in ibid: 32).[xiii],[xiv]

According to Francis Galton, eugenics would breed out the vestigial barbarism of the human race, manipulating evolution to bring the biological reality of man into consonance with his lofty moral ideas of what mankind could, and indeed should be. He thus argued, “what nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly” (Galton, cited in Kevles 1995: 12)[xv] Eugenics was thus a scientific substitute for the orthodoxies of the church, a secular religious faith. Eugenics was also tied to the destiny of the imperial nation. Such a nation, it was felt, required much more than merely economic and military power. It also demanded an efficient way of ensuring that its population was kept fresh, energetic, efficient and productive by ensuring that its fresh flow of population is mainly recruited from the “better stock” ( Rao 2004).[xvi] Indeed, this was one strong impetus to introduce maternal health programmes in many countries (Oakley 1986).[xvii]

A prominent eugenist in Germany wrote:

Because the inferior are always numerically superior to the better, the former would multiply so much faster—if they have the same possibility to survive and reproduce—that the better necessarily would be placed in the background.  Therefore a correction has to be made to the advantage of the better.  The nature (sic) offers such a correction by exposing the inferior to difficult living conditions which reduce their number.  Concerning the rest the nature (sic) does not allow them to reproduce indiscriminately, but makes a relentless selection according to their strength and health conditions ( Hilter, cited in Bondestam 1980: 16).[xviii]

The “correction” he offered to nature’s lethal ways was called the Final Solution.  Adolf Hitler included, among others, Jews, communists, gays and gypsies in his grand design. What is not well known is that the Holocaust would not have taken the ghastly toll it did had the US immigration laws not been changed earlier to keep out certain races not Nordic. Jews seeking to immigrate were of course excluded ( Brunius 2006).[xix] Indeed, that the eugenic laws in Nazi Germany were framed along laws in the USA.

It was this, the Final Solution, that discredited eugenics, although the ideas underlying it were widely shared. Indeed, the liberal US Supreme Court Justice Holmes found eugenic sterilisation constitutionally valid for the general good of the population. Further, as Brunius shows us, eugenic laws, framed by racism, were widely welcomed by the medical profession, the media, and by law-makers. But similar attitudes, similar feelings come to surface in many new avatars, all too distressingly frequently. In other words, it is the current political context that this idea appears to address, as it waxes and wanes, sometimes shrill, sometimes subdued, but at all times invariably, inextricably, linked to contemporary politics. Numbers of the Other, provide the frisson.

As the eminent German poet Enzenberger notes, the proportion of foreigners in Germany at the end of the twentieth century – when vicious anti-immigrant ideologies came to the fore, often accompanied by brutal attacks on “foreigners”– was well below that in the Germany before the First World War, when there was no such xenophobia. In Germany, itself a country of migrants, of many “races”, “The Aryan was never more than a risible construct” (Enzenberger 1992:38 ).[xx] Enzenberger adds:

It is of course no accident that the image of the life-boat recurs in the political discourse about immigration, usually in the form of the assertion, ‘The boat is full’. That this sentence is inaccurate is the least that can be said about it. A look around is enough to disprove it, as those who use it know. But they are not interested in its truthfulness; they like the fears it conjures up (ibid: 24) (emphasis mine).

Yet, Germany is one of only two modern states that allow its “lost tribes” a right to return. Israel is of course the only other. Two nations tied by a complex history of brutal bloodshed, both believing that nationality is in blood, both riding the tiger of fascism at various times, Germany in the past, and Israel, today.  Tying in with this idea, or sometimes even a metaphor of nationality, is the essentialism of numbers. This essentialism of numbers, is in a potent stew with the urge for the authentic and unsullied, the politics of identity, creating fears about the numbers of the Other. Again, these have a heritage in romantic Germany that so influenced the romance of a nation-in-being in India in the RSS (Nussbaum 2007)[xxi], with the military organization being borrowed from Mussolini’s brown-shirts ( Casolari 2000 ).[xxii]

There is today in neo-liberal times, a reified politics of identity, feeding into neo-Malthusian anxieties. There is a paradox here: while neo-liberalism exalts and celebrates the individual, identities are increasingly drawn in communitarian terms, and carved in heartless stone. Sen notes wryly that we have today a “discipline of identity” based on the unfounded assumption that we must have a single or principle identity that we “discover” (Sen 2005: 350).[xxiii] Of course, this discovery is most often of a spurious ethnic kind, forgetting that the ethnic, or the nativist, is only one among many claims to loyalty, and indeed that there is frequently nothing authentic either about imagined ethnicity.  Wedded here are essentialisms of various kinds: nativist post-modern, with fundamentalist neo-Orientalism, with right-wing neo-liberalism. Uniting all these essentialisms is also a fervent anti-feminism, seen as both tarnished by the Enlightenment project, anti-traditional and derivative (Sangari 2001).[xxiv] It is thus no accident that the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt (Ali 2002),[xxv] the murderous Hindu fascists, George Bush and Anders Breveik echo each other in derivative irony. Entirely missing in these discourses is the notion of imperialism or neo-imperialism, which indeed gilds them, even as it holds them together.

The uncanny similarities between Malthusian times and the nineteen nineties have been widely noted. Both periods were characterized by a relentless drive to create free markets, “not by chance nor as a result of spontaneous development, but as an artefact of power and statecraft. In nineteenth century England it was the outcome of the project of classical political economy; now it is a monetarist project, to create a global market society largely unconstrained by public action” (Wuyts 1998: 34).[xxvi]  This new global market was to be created by the second wave of imperialist globalization enveloping the world, led by the Bretton Woods institutions, with new rules framed by the WTO. Imperialist globalisation sups comfortably at the same table with fundamentalisms; while doing so it also feeds it fresh blood. This is not only through the empirical truth that imperialism has funded fundamentalisms in various countries (Mamdani 2004),[xxvii] but also by fracturing broader identities, in a situation of a smaller cake for the masses, encourages the growth of political forces that feed on each other, along ethnic or religious lines (Patnaik 2003).[xxviii] From Yugoslavia, to Rwanda and now Iraq: the same story authored by imperialism unfolds sadly (Mamdani 2001).[xxix] Population arguments have contributed in all of them, appealing to community, to race, ideas of purity and blood. In all these cases, blood is defined by patriarchy.

What is frightening is that the atavistic appeals to blood, to tribe and to race, seem to carry so much power when we finally know there is no such thing as race. Current post-modern distrust of the modern state, and its violences, and the invocation of naive nativism feed their poison into this. Thus Algeria for the Algerians – who should not be in France! But in a world where historic revisionism is current, where new “tribal wars” are unleashed every day[xxx] with the coining of a new and frighteningly aseptic phrase to describe it, ethnic cleansing, it is eminently desirable to retrace the links between neo-Malthusianism, eugenics and the Holocaust. It is an irony of history that victims of the Holocaust, in one of the first modern countries created on the basis of religion, in order to supposedly protect their “race” are perpetrating yet another one today. Thus the population growth rate among Palestinians is frequently evoked in order to stoke fears among Israelis who are not Zionists (Avnery cited in Hartmann and Hendrixson)[xxxi]. By engendering fear and anxiety about the future, what neo-Malthusianism successfully does is evoke complicity in morally offensive policies among people.

The collapse of multi-national states as in Yugoslavia, the yearning for ethnically pure “nations of blood and ties” that caused and were a consequence of this collapse, have something tragic to teach us.  The horrible implications for huge sections of the population, ethnically cleansed into post-colonial states that have forgotten their anti-imperialist histories, is too recent to be forgotten.

Ethnic nationalism, combined with the essentialism of numbers, implies that “ one is in the grip of a love greater than reason, stronger than the will, a love akin to fate and destiny. Such a love assists the belief that it is fate, however tragic, that obliges you to kill” (Ignatieff 1993: 10).[xxxii]  History is then reworked to create the fiction of ethnic purity in the past, in which “ history is the savage play of ascriptive sympathies and antipathies, in which the ‘natural’ condition of groups of different origins is one in which they are wholly apart” (Al-Azmeh 1993:9).[xxxiii]

Thus, invoked in the rape and genocide of Muslims in Bosnia is the appeal to concocted history, to ethnic tribalism in all its gory, and ancient, essential symbols:

Miraculous Virgins make their scheduled appearance. Lurid posters show shafts of light touching the pommels of mysterious swords, or blazoning the talons of vicious two-headed eagles as more than a million Serbs attend a frenzied rally on the battle site of Kosavo where their forbears were humiliated in 1389, and hear former communists rave in accents of wounded tribalisms. Ancient insignias, totems, feudal coats of arms, talismans, oaths, rituals, icons and regalia jostle to take the field. A society long sunk in political stagnation is convulsed: puking up great rancid chunks of undigested barbarism ( Hitchens 1992 cited in Al-Azmeh 1993:10).[xxxiv]

The politics of nostalgia, of fictive identities, swirling with unresolved conflicts with neo-imperialism, create post-modern states painfully emulating the nation states imagined in Romantic Germany, as a nation of volk, of people of the soil, of primordial ties embedded in an ancient culture, in a fierce anti-Enlightenment discourse. This is of course eerily familiar to those of us in India, witness to pogroms against Muslims launched by the Sangh parivar. As Baber has shown, communalisation and racism are intertwined, often enough with cultures, to produce fictive ascriptive identities (Baber 2011).[xxxv]

The onslaught against the Muslims, is accompanied by concoction of history which is a mélange of myths and fiction, accompanied by the invention of “traditions”, the classification of Indian culture as “essentially” Hindu culture and so on. Fundamentalist demography is built upon these layered tissues of lies and populist myths to create a political community of Hindus. As with all fundamentalisms, these are also carved on the bodies of women. Internalising – with bewilderment, hurt and anger – colonial descriptions of Hindus as effeminate, the new identity that is sought to be created is virulently masculinist.[xxxvi] Along with the semitisation of Hinduism ( Jaiswal 1991)[xxxvii], there is an attempt also to make Hindu males more virile, more dangerous, more predatory, more like the allegedly Muslim male. Could this explain the huge increase in violence against females that we have also simultaneously witnessed?

As Malouf has observed, the rush for identities, to seek some fundamental allegiance, often religious, racial or ethnic, leads to murderous identities of blood. Responding to imagined atavistic fears and anxieties, we seem to be heading towards what Malouf describes as the age of “global tribes” (Malouf 2001).[xxxviii]

Imbricated in this is the celebration of the pure “community” even as ideas of the nation are scoffed at, when development is supposed to be automatically and necessarily linked to violence. This is accompanied by a deep distrust of ideas of rationality, curiously described as Western, in a bizarre reflection from Orientalist mirrors. Embedded in this discourse are spurious ideas of oneness with nature in the pre-modern past, of equally innocent ideas of the wholeness in human affairs in those golden ages, a forgetting that a tribal past was a past of constant and continuous warfare. In short, that a tribal past, an ethnic past, a past celebrating blood ties, was equally oppressive: to a large majority of women and men, the ants of these societies, put to labour and set to breed. My fear is that revocations of this past, suitably re-worked, would also mean a divestment of citizenship rights that tribal communities of course did not know about, or have any use for. For as opposed to the membership of a tribe, what is at stake is citizenship in a nation.

Sometimes, in sophisticated formulations, instead of race and tribes, what is often invoked today is “culture”, reified, petrified, timeless and endlessly frozen. As Al-Azmeh observes, “In the 1980s this relegation of the non-European world to irreducible and therefore irredeemable particularlism was officiated, with increasing frequency and clearly as a mark of bewilderment, under the title of ‘culture’, which became little more than a token for incomprehension: each ‘culture’ is represented as a monadic universe of solipsism and impermeability, consisting in its manifold instances of an essential self,” (Al-Azmeh 1993:21).[xxxix] The politics of the east is east, and the west west with never the twain meeting is played out with new tropes, new metaphors, all of which of course elide the reality of imperialism, even as they privilege the essentialisms of difference and timeless culture. The Other, thus constructed, is then ineluctably outside the human pale. And then, their numbers begin to threaten. Should we then, not fear Them, hate Them? Should we do nothing, will they engulf Us?

Being outside the human pale, is what makes their numbers threatening, and genocide possible (Mamdani 2001 ).[xl] Or the widespread use of rape and violence against women and children – from Bosnia, to Rwanda to Gujarat.

Lionel Penrose, a British physician who was one of those questioning the central tenet of eugenic thinking, the heritability of mental disorders and intelligence, was equally puzzled by the frequent assertion among the elites that feebleminded people had strong sexual drives. There was simply no empirical evidence for these claims, and yet there were frequent calls for eugenic sterilisation – although of course sterilisation is known not to decrease the libido. Penrose offered a Freudian explanation that is appealing. He wrote:

It is a well-known psychological mechanism that hatred, which is repressed under normal circumstances, may become manifest in the presence of an object which is already discredited in some way.  An excuse for viewing mentally defective individuals with abhorrence is the idea that those at large enjoy themselves sexually in ways which are forbidden or difficult to accomplish in the higher strata of society. The association between the idea of the supposed fecundity of the feebleminded and the need for their sterilization is apparently rational, but it may be emphasized by an unconscious desire to forbid these supposed sexual excesses. It is of course well known that advocates of sterilization never desire it applied to their own class, but always to someone else (Penrose cited in Kevles 1995:108).[xli]

Could this equally be an explanation for neo-Malthusian ideas about the reproductive profligacy of the poor? Could this be the explanation for the irrational communal anxieties about the Muslim rate of population growth among a section of Hindus in the country? The frequent slogan “Hum do, hamare do; Woh paanch, unke pachees” won the leader of the genocide in Gujarat in 2002 a shameful but resounding electoral victory. Does this also tie in with the trope of the alleged vegetarianism of Hindus along with the sexual rapacity of non-vegetarian Muslims?

Sarkar notes that “there is a dark sexual obsession about the allegedly ultra-virile Muslim male bodies and over-fertile Muslim female ones” (Sarkar 2002: 2874).[xlii] Recounting the unspeakable horrors perpetrated on Muslim women and children in the Gujarat genocide, she offers the following explanations. In communal violence, rape is a sign of collective dishonouring of a community; the same patriarchy that views the female body as the symbol of lineage, of community, of nation – and their purity – would besmirch an entire community as impure and polluted once “their” women are raped. There are also the calculated, and politically charged rumours spread of Muslim men luring away Hindu girls, “ a kind of penis envy and anxiety about emasculation that can only be overcome by violence”. And finally, the anxieties whipped up over generations about “Muslim fertility rates”, of their uncontrolled breeding and the dying of “the Hindu nation”, led to the brutal killing of children, the new blood of the “Muslim race”.

Nussbaum has argued that the creation of virulent masculinities is perhaps a part of the project of nationalisms of the European variety. Emulating this project other communities, other nations of blood and tribes, are also creating masculinities of the European sort. She notes that Israel and India are both seats of construction of this notion of virulent masculinities, both directed at Muslims, classified in colonial discourse as a “martial race”. Those scoffed at as effeminate or over-intellectual, not manly enough to command empires, set out to recreate themselves in colonial mirrors, creating a style of masculinity that is associated with the oppressors in the past, much as they recreate colonial definitions of history. This too is responsible for the horrors of Gujarat, as is the essentialism of numbers, as they wreak murder and rape, “annihilating the female” both in themselves and in the Other (Nussbaum 2007).[xliii] Linking this sadistic sexual violence with fascism, Sontag similarly argues that this was “the ideal incarnation of fascism’s overt celebration of the righteousness of violence, the right to have total power over others and to treat them as absolutely inferior…acted out in a singularly brutal and efficient manner” ( Sontag 1980:99).[xliv]

As early as 1909 U.N.Mukherji had written a book entitled Hindus: A Dying Race, which went on to influence many tracts and publications by the Hindu Maha Sabha, the parent organisation of the RSS. [xlv]  This book seemed to meet a widespread demand, going into many reprints, feeding into Hindu communalism, and helping create it. It had a special appeal to Hindu communalists at this time, anxious to create a monolithic Hindu community, in the face of demands for separate representation emanating from both Muslims and lower-castes. Whipping up anxiety about Muslims would be one way to weld together hugely diverse, and often antagonistic, castes into one community, erasing the structural divisions in caste society. Indeed it has been noted that “for Hindu communalism, it (the book, A Dying Race) had a more direct resonance as Hindu communalism was now preoccupied with numbers…the possibility of low castes declassifying themselves as Hindus was a motivating anxiety behind the origins of Hindu communalism “(Datta 1999: 18).[xlvi] Deeply riddled with inaccuracies, wild flights of prediction of the future with utterly no basis, the book nevertheless provided “demographic common sense functioning as a trope for extinction” (Datta 1999: 23).[xlvii]Also fundamentally, the Hindu communalists believed – and continue to believe – that a nation is defined “culturally” as a Hindu nation, just as Muslim communalists believed in the purity of an Islamic Pakistan. So neatly did the communalists of both religions, Hindu and Muslim, by evoking demographic fears, subscribe to colonial definitions of Indian society! The Censuses of the period also contributed (Cohn 1987).[xlviii] Although England never collected religious data in her population despite all her religious wars in the past, in India, on the other hand, following 1857, religious data on Hindu and Muslim populations were regularly collected and disseminated, from the 1872 Census onwards. Justifying this, the Census Commissioner of 1931 wrote “India is the most religious country in the world” ( cited in Bhagat 2001).[xlix] What this also did is to create homogenous Hindu and Muslim communities where none existed. We must, however, remember that this discourse emerged at an embattled political space, as colonialism was contested, as political classes were formed, as the working class was congealing, and early feminist ideas were gaining ground. None of these, of course, configure in the communalist discourse.

Charu Gupta’s work, based on examining the many tracts produced by the Hindu right-wing, providing an excellent analysis of communalization of population and its gender implications, notes one such tract, which states:

Some Hindus argue that what do we have to do with increasing our numbers? We should be more concerned with preserving the seed of our true Aryan identity. Dear, what do you mean by protection of the seed? In every census, the number of Hindus is decreasing while that of Muslims and Christians is increasing. And you are just concerned with the protection of the seed! Our aim should be to increase numbers, first and foremost ( Cited in Gupta 2004:4303)[l]

There was yet another flame stoking these fears among Hindu communalists, resentful of social reform. Emblematic here was the tragic figure of the Hindu widow.[li] Forbidden remarriage among the upper castes – now increasingly emulated by sanskritising lower castes – she was at once responsible for the dying of the “Hindu race” as she was an allurement for virile Muslim men, a danger within the sacred heart of the Hindu household, waiting to be profaned. Fitting neatly into this gendered anxiety was the communalisation of the issue of “abduction” of Hindu women. Indeed, this too was prominent in the form of epidemics of rumours before the Gujarat genocide in 2002. Thus the embedding of patriarchy, nationhood, and violence against women in discourses on numbers, inscribing on reproductive women’s bodies atavistic anxieties about the future, and the politics of genocide.

Recently we have had leaders from these groups opposing family planning among Hindus, claiming there is a “demographic war” (www.newkerala.com, 2005). [lii] The leader of the VHP enjoined Hindus not to accept family planning as their numbers were going down, even as those of Muslims were increasing. At a public meeting attended by thousands, and in the presence of the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, the leader of the Madhya Pradesh unit of the RSS claimed that the Muslim population was increasing at a rapid pace, and that this, combined with infiltration of Muslims from Bangladesh, portended doom for India. Claiming that this “demographic war” was being waged across the world, he attributed the breakup of the Soviet Union, to such “demographic imbalance” (The Hindu:2005:5).[liii] The same groups have also opposed access to abortion, arguing that a disproportionate number of Hindu women utilise abortion facilities (Rao 2001).[liv] We have also had a huge and unedifying controversy erupting  when the Census Commissioner announced the religion-wise data from the 2001 Census, forgetting to add that these could not be compared to previous figures since the 1991 Census had not been conducted in Kashmir, a Muslim majority state ( Jayaraj and Subramaniam 2004).[lv] The Hindu right created an uproar about “them” out-numbering “us” in our own country, with a lot of help from the national media. This was despite clarifications issued by the Census Commissioner, despite figures showing that the rate of decline of the Muslim growth rate was substantial and indeed sharper than among Hindus. Indeed what has come to be called “saffron demography” has come to stay, “a set of pernicious myths” masquerading often as “common sense” (Jeffery and Jeffery 2005:447).[lvi]

In an extraordinary work, Anandhi reveals how neo-Malthusian concerns were transforming upper-caste anxieties about the lower castes, now asserting themselves, in Tamil Nadu (Anandhi 1998).[lvii] She notes the ease with which the upper class neo-Malthusian agenda interweaves with the upper caste agenda of Brahminical Hinduism to reduce women to merely reproductive bodies requiring male control, in a reimbrication of patriarchy. A number of men, predominantly Brahmin, involved in the early debates on birth control, members of the Neo-Malthusian League in Madras in the early twentieth century, invoked Brahminical texts that apparently regulated the sexuality, and thus the birth rate, among Hindus. Thus is achieved the seamless welding of “Hindu” with upper-castes, the conflation of upper caste practices and norms as Hindu ones. Thus Krishnamurthy Ayyar, noted that, in the case of Hindus, the Code of Manu imposed certain marriage practices that were anti-natal, although curiously he does not mention a deeply embarrassing topic of debate, namely the situation of widows in upper-caste Hindu society. This apparently prevented over-population of Hindus, while conversely creating over-population of those communities not similarly guided by the code of Manu. He also added that the upper caste dietary code of vegetarianism was perfect for regulating reproduction by dampening sexual appetites:

Taking the people of India, the birth rate among the Brahmins, particularly those of Madras and other purely vegetarian communities is the lowest except among the Parsees.[lviii] The Mohammedans who partake of animal foods have increased from 1881 to 1921…the Brahmins, who are purely vegetarian, there was no increase between 1891 and 1921, but a fall (cited in Anandhi 1998:143).[lix]

What was central to the arguments here were the reproductive excesses of the lower castes (and of the Muslims), their unbridled sexuality, the need therefore for upper caste normative control – defined in terms of desexualizing lower caste bodies. As Chakravarty has argued, what Brahminical patriarchy feared, indeed what was supposed to have brought on Kaliyuga, was miscegenation, “the purity of women has a centrality in brahminical patriarchy, because the purity of caste is contingent upon it” (Chakravarthi 1993: 579).[lx]  In short, the lower castes had to practice birth control both to improve the Hindu race and to emulate the upper castes who supposedly practiced continence except for reproductive purposes.[lxi]

As Ayyar observed:

As long as the germ cells belong to the race and human beings are their trusted custodians, birth control should not be resorted to unless it is for considerations of health or economic conditions. If it is practiced with the view to shirk responsibility and to lead a life of merely carnal pleasure, it is committing a crime towards the race (Ayyar cited in Anandhi 1998: 144).[lxii]

What is curious, and indeed striking, is that although there is anxiety about the sexuality of the lower castes, Hindutva does not seem to reveal obvious anxieties about the numbers of the lower castes. On the one hand, as the experience of Gujarat indicates, this could be related to the fact that Hindutva anxieties are largely focused on the growth rates of Christians and Muslims and that they see the dalits and the lower castes as foot soldiers in their fratricidal war. On the other, this could be related to their obvious role as perhaps the sole producers of value. The statement of a landlord in Tamil Nadu to Human Rights Watch illustrates this:

In the past, dalits enjoyed the practice of untouchability…the women enjoyed being oppressed by men. Ladies would boast that my husband has more wives. Most dalit women enjoy relations with men. They enjoy upper caste community men having them as concubines. Anything with dalits is not done by force….Without dalits we cannot live. We are landholders. We want workers for the fields. Without them we cannot cultivate or take care of our cattle. But dalit women’s relations with other men are not out of economic dependency. She wants it from him. He permits it. (Human Rights Watch 1999: 31).[lxiii]

In Conclusion

“Most Americans Want Immigration Drastically Reduced” reads a full-page advertisement in Harper’s of October 2004 (Vol.309, No.1853: 19), put forth by Negative Population Growth. It goes on to argue about the “catastrophic effect of overpopulation on our environment, resources and standard of living.” Neo-Malthusian underpinnings are evident in some of the security discourses on refugees, and are at the heart of dominant global discourses on the environment. We only need to remember that as soon as elections are announced in the U.K., immigration becomes an issue, not just for the Conservatives, but also for the New Labour of Tony Blair. At the same time, a sub-discipline of “strategic demography” has emerged, that seeks to locate the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in the “youth bulge theory, ” i.e. that population growth in Islamic countries, characterized by a high proportion of youth, spells political hazards, not just to democracy in their own countries but to the so-called free world (See Hendrixson, Anne (2004), Angry Young Men, Veiled Young Women: Constructing a New Population Threat, Cornerhouse Briefing No.34, December). This does not explain the rise to dominance of fundamentalism in the United States, which of course has no youth bulge, but such matters of truth or rigour rarely troubled demographic discourses in the past, and obviously do not, today. In other words, the population growth argument remains compelling, explaining just about everything, and thus of course explaining nothing.

The issue of population is of course a field where a rational and historical examination of facts is often clouded, occluded, rendered opaque.  Neo Malthusian arguments are truly protean, they are like Vishnu’s avatars, taking myriad forms: that poverty in our country primarily persists due to population growth; that the poor do not know what is good for them and for society as a whole, behave irrationally, and thus need to be educated; that population growth among religious communities is because some religious groups seek to outbreed and take over “our” country; the belief that affirmative action for the dalits presents a threat to social well-being and indeed that all welfare schemes represent a waste of productive investments; that “we” as a nation are in a bind, and, having tried everything, the only way out is that the poor can and indeed must be coerced to control their numbers; that population growth represents the main threat to the environment; that population growth in Third World countries can act as a security threat to the interests of freedom and democracy in the world and so on. Now of course, with the global war on terror, youth bulge theories have contributed to, and drawn sustenance from, global Islamophobia. Lurking at the heart of all these discourses, crazily, simplistically, is the idea of neo-Malthusianism, a simple arithmetical one.

At the most obvious level as to why people believe what they do, it is true that many people have, for hundreds of years, believed in something simply because this is “common sense”. The belief that the earth is flat and that it is at the center of the universe is one such belief that lasted centuries, and still apparently has followers. This, of course, begs the question as to what is common sense and how this is created, or indeed constructed.

Neo-Malthusianism offers a simple ordering of a complex, fractured and frightening world. In this ordering of the world, God is indeed in His heaven and all would be well had it not been for the predilection of the poor, the Them, to breed quite so incontinently. It is a profound alchemy of the mind that endows society with biological characteristics, all the better to control and recreate it. It allows us to think of the world without dangerous ideas of re-ordering a deeply unjust social order, indeed blaming victims, the “them”, who would otherwise threaten “us” with their demands for equality and justice. It is not only a beguilingly simple explanation of the world, this explanation has also the imprimatur of the state and all powerful organs of dissemination of knowledge and information, constantly reiterated and restated in any number of ways. Indeed, it might perhaps not be an exaggeration to state that more resources have been spent on creating this common sense over more than a hundred years than any other such idea in the world. Lurking below the surface, these ideas have always a strange way of resurfacing in what are perceived by some as incomprehensibly apocalyptic times, when the world as we know it stands threatened, or is changing too fast for our liking, when we yearn for a prelapsarian age of innocence and glory, when things were said to have been so much simpler. Thus the re-invention of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983)[lxiv], the entirely understandable fear of the heartless immorality of the modern, indeed of the demands of the hitherto dispossessed – which is also fundamentally part of this modernity.

Yet another factor is the ease, or the appeal, of linear or closed system thinking. It is thus not surprising that so many biologists, equating human societies with agglomerations of mango-flies or other instinctive creatures, frequently offer doomsday scenarios of population growth, as if humans are not reflexive, learning, reacting, eternally changing.

Nothing perhaps is more appealing to crude “common sense” than the many images of humankind such thinking creates: the image of human societies as crawling, over-breeding insects in a finite jar, or of organisms in a petri dish. But the imagery is not always crude, appealing to the most insentient in us. Most such images of the population question undoubtedly appeal to the altruistic: the images of starving children, hungry mothers, eyes powerfully accusing, along with the message of over-population. Indeed we are then exhorted to do something about it by contributing to population control in Third World countries. What many of these images also appeal to is the immediate, the un-reflexive, thus a-historical, in a world profoundly troubled by history and impatient with it.

Writing quite innocently about the communalization of population in India several years ago, I was utterly astonished, indeed frightened – which, I suspect was the intention – by the responses I received, in the form of many many postcards. I was labeled anti-Hindu, and many of the writers hoped that I would move to Pakistan, where they said my wife would get raped. A decade later websites run by Non Resident Indians in the USA, anxious about their Hindu-ness, while they had forsaken their country, repeated similar venom. This too could be inexplicable, indeed unthinkable: here are the self-proclaimed best and brightest, at the acme of their professional careers in the land of milk and honey, writing what can only be described as pornography.

How does one explain this? What this essay has attempted to do is to understand how ideas of population, of neo- Malthusianism, are re-configured, re-constructed and moulded by other ideas, of race, of gender, of community, and indeed nationhood. It does not seem to matter at all that neo-Malthusian ideas are repeatedly shown to be historically and empirically shallow. They bafflingly gild many disconnected discourses, giving the politics of numbers contemporary bite and pungency.

The novelist Julian Barnes, similarly baffled by the appeal of Thatcher, notes that her achievements were truly remarkable. She revealed that it was possible at times to do the truly unthinkable. She taught us that:

You could survive while allowing unemployment to rise to levels previously thought politically untenable. You could politicize hitherto unpolitical public bodies, and force the holy principles of the market into areas of society presumed sacrosanct. You could sharply diminish union power and increase employer power… You could make the rich richer and the poor poorer until you had restored the gap that existed at the end of the last century…. You could do all this and in the process traumatize the opposition …and even manage to get votes from the unemployed” (Barnes 1999: 546).[lxv]

How did she manage this? One, alas all too banal way, was, of course, by appeals to demagoguery and chauvinism. The second was what Barnes calls the “gut appeal to nature. ” But of course a nature modeled on capitalism, of nature red in tooth and claw, much as Darwin did with talk of the survival of the fittest. [lxvi]  Thus natural is constructed to mean the celebration of supreme and un-curtailed self-interest of the rich, and competitiveness in society.

If nature was indeed this way, who were we to intervene? Perhaps it is hubris to intervene? Nature, in other words, appears to tell the listener that the poor and other victims of the system are merely reaping what they sow, just as the rich and the privileged do.  What Thatcher did, much as Malthus did before her, was to argue that the poor had no moral right therefore to welfare. What she also did was to reduce the enormous complexities of social life to simple homilies, replacing hesitation and questioning with granitic certitudes, set in cold stone. In short, the success of neo-Malthusianism is the reduction of unpredictabilities, of uncertainties of life, of the political with the hard givens of Malthusian arithmetic, thus depoliticising politics. The success is precisely in naturalizing the social and therefore the contingent, giving it a timelessness, a timelessness as fragile as anything carved on stone.

As the new wave of globalisation, sharpens inequalities, accentuates the rate of exploitation, and the dispossession, of the poor globally, increases the transfer of resources from the poor to the rich countries, neo-Malthusian discourses serve to both naturalise these processes, as provide natural explanations for sharp political conflicts over resources, natural, social and intellectual. Fundamentalisms, anti-feminisms, and racisms are congealed into this.

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[i] Often the same organizations, today arguing for reproductive health and rights, were involved in creating the population explosion concept. They have the same attached academics and NGOs. Recently, of course, their numbers – and reach – have dramatically increased, in response to increasing NGO-isation of the health system, most often in response to donor/lender demands. What needs to be sufficiently explored, and it hasn’t been, is why and how these donor/lender agencies command so much clout, given their relatively small contribution to India’s health budget.

[ii] Lipschutz, Ronnie D. and Turcotte, Heather (2005), “Duct Tape or Plastic? The Political Economy of Threats and the Production of Fear” in Betsy Hartmann, Banu Subrmaniam and Charles Zerner (Eds), Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham.

[iii] Europol (2010), “ EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report” accessed at http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload?TE-SAT%202010.pdf on 23^rd September 2011. I am grateful to Mukul Kesavan for this reference.

[iv] Posner, Sarah (2011), “Breivik’s Demographic Warfare and the American Right’s Demographic Winter”, accessed at http://www.newage islam.com/New AgeIslamMuslimsAndIslamophobia on 27^th July 2011.

[v] Puar, Jasbir (2010), “Israel’s Gay Propaganda War”, The Guardian, 1^st July 2010, accessed at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/01/israels-gay-propaganda-war, accessed on 20^th September 2011.

[vi] Kaur, Ravinder (2011), “The Intimate Enemy”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XLVI, No.35, 27^th August.

[vii] Kaur, Ravinder (2011), Ibid.

[viii] Express News Service” (2011)” The Norwegian Killers Ideas are not Entirely Wrong: BJP MP, B.P.Singhal”, 27^th July.

[ix] Gould, Stephen Jay (1981), The Mismeasure of Man, W.W.Norton and Co., New York.

[x] Rudyard Kipling (1899), The White Man’s Burden
                    Take up the White Man's burden
                    Send forth the best ye breed
                    Go bind your sons to exile
                    To serve your captives' need;
                    To wait in heavy harness,
                    On fluttered folk and wild
                    Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
               Half-devil and half-child.

[xi] Gould, op cit.

[xii] These tropes hang heavy and loom over neo-Malthusian discourses in contemporary times, when we are enveloped in the second wave of globalisation.

[xiii]  Gould, op cit.

[xiv] For how eugenic ideas, fused with Evangelical Christianity, about the Other influenced US soldiers in their many wars in South America, see Greg Grandin (2006), Empires Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of a New Imperialism, Metropolitan Books, New York..

[xv]Francis Galton, cited in Kevles, Daniel J. (1995), In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

[xvi] Rao, Mohan (2004), From Population Control to Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic, Sage, New Delhi.

[xvii]  Oakley, Ann (1986),The Captured Womb: A History of Medical Care of Pregnant Women, Basil Blackwell, London.

[xviii] Adolf  Hitler in  Mein Kampf, cited in Bondestam, Lars and Bergstrom, Staffan (Ed)(1980), Poverty and Population Control, Academic Press, London.

[xix] Brunius, Harry (2006), Better for all the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilisations and America’s Quest for Racial Purity, Alfred A.Knopf, New York.

[xx] Enzenberger, H.M. ( 1992 ), “The Great Migrants”, in Krauts, Granta 42, Penguin London.

[xxi] Nussbaum, Martha (2007), The Clash Within: Violence, Hope and India’s Future, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

[xxii] Casolari, Marzia (2000), “Hindutvas Foreign Tie-Up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XXXV, No.4, Jan 22^nd.

[xxiii] Sen, Amartya (2005), The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, Penguin, New Delhi.

[xxiv] Sangari, Kumkum (2001), Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives, Colonial English, Tulika, New Delhi.

[xxv] Ali, Kamran Asdar (2002), Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves, University of Texas Press, Austin.

[xxvi] Wuyts, Marc (1998), Malthus, Then and Now: The Novelty of Old Ideas on Population and Economy, Dies Natalis Address, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague.

[xxvii] Mamdani, Mahmood (2004), Good Muslims, Bad Muslims: Islam, the USA and the Global War Against Terror, Permanent Black, Delhi.

[xxviii] Patnaik, Prabhat (2003), The Retreat to Unfreedom: Essays on the Emerging World Order, Tulika, New Delhi.

[xxix] Mamdani, Mahmood ( 2001), When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

[xxx] For a critique of this concept, and how they are framed by both colonialism and imperialism, see Mamdani (2001).

[xxxi] Uri Avneri (2002), “ A Jewish Demographic State”, cited in Betsy Hartmann and Anne Hendrixson “Pernicious Peasants and Angry Young Men”, in Hartmann, Subramanian and Zerner (Eds), op cit.

[xxxii] Ignatieff, Michael (1993), Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, Penguin, London..

[xxxiii]  Al-Azmeh, Aziz (1993), Islams and Modernities, Verso, London.

[xxxiv] Christopher Hitchens (1992), “Appointment in Sarajevo” cited in Al-Azmeh, ibid.

[xxxv] Baber, Zaheer (2004), “’Race’, Religion and Riot: The ‘Racialisation’ of Communal Identity and Conflict in India”, Sociology, Vol.38, No.4.

[xxxvi] Anand Patwardhan’s documentary of 1995, “The Father, Son and Holy War “ explores this theme with its trenchant – and sharp- documentation of the Hindu right-wing’s project.

[xxxvii] Jaiswal, Suvira (1991), “Semitising Hinduism: Changing Paradigms of Brahminical Integration”, Social Scientist, Vol.19, No.12, December.

[xxxviii] Malouf, Amin (2001), In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, Arcade Publishing, New York.

[xxxix] Al Azmeh (1993), op cit.

[xl] Mamdani (2001), op cit. Mamdani notes the ease with which over-population arguments were used to explain the genocide in Rwanda, even as he shows how the colonial constructions of race, carried over into post-colonial institutionalisation of citizenship, were both powerful factors in the genocide at Rwanda, but to carry this out, the victims were first to be denied humanity. See also Greg Grandin (2006), Empires Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of a New Imperialism, Metropolitan Books, New York. Grandin shows us that the much earlier genocide in Latin America, indeed the genocides in the Americas, was possible only because Indians were deemed not human, not fit for redemption into humanity.

[xli] Kevles, Daniel J. (1995), op cit.

[xlii] Sarkar, Tanika (2002), “ Semiotics of Muslim Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rashtra”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XXXVII, No.28.

[xliii] Nussbaum, Martha (2007), The Clash Within: Violence, Hope and India’s Future, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

[xliv] Sontag, Susan (1980), “Fascinating Fascism” in Under the Sign of Saturn, The Noonday Press, N.Y.

[xlv] Curiously Sidney Webb wrote his tract The Decline of the Birth Rate at about the same time. He was concerned the English were committing “race suicide” with the population of England becoming increasingly Jewish and Irish (Jayal, Niraja Gopal (ed) (1987), Sidney and Beatrice Webb: Indian Diary, OUP, Delhi.). The Webbs, Wells and Shaw, were all fervent believers in eugenics.

[xlvi]Datta, Pradip Kumar (1999), Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth Century Bengal,O.U.P., Delhi.

[xlvii] Ibid.

[xlviii] Cohn, Bernard S.(1987), “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia”, in An Anthropologist Among Historians and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

[xlix] Bhagat, R.B (2001), “ Census and the Construction of Communalism in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXXXI, No. 47, November 24^th, 2001. What Bhagat also shows us is the enormous problems the census faced in classifying people they enumerated.

[l] Gupta, Charu (2004), “Censuses, Communalism, Gender and Identity: A Historical Perspective”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XXXXIV, No.39, Sep 25th.

[li] It is interesting that it was the semiotics of this image that was conjured up by some women members of the BJP, protesting the possibility of Sonia Gandhi exercising her citizenship rights to the Prime Ministership of the country.  These MPs threatened to tonsure their heads if Ms.Gandhi was elected the PM. A tonsured head is of course the sign of an upper caste widow in Hindu society. The matter, they argued, was not of rights and the Constitution, but Hindu emotion that over-rode these rights. Thus is wedded anti-feminism to communalism, with women BJP members making a patriarchal bargain. While the appeal of course is to the timeless, and to culture, albeit upper-caste ones, what was being fought over was much more quotidian.

[lii]  http://www.newkerala.com/ (30 December 2004),” VHP Supremo Asks Hindus to give up Family Planning”.  The PTI reported from Rohtak on December 29^th that the VHP president Ashok Singhal said Hindus should give up family planning so that their population does not
go down. Speaking at the inaugural session of VHP’s joint meeting of the international board of trustees and the central management committee, he said population of minorities, especially Muslims, had been rising at “such a fast pace” that it would be 25 to 30 per cent of the total population in 50 years. Singhal said it would be “suicidal” for Hindus if they did not raise their population. He said that it was essential to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya for ‘dharmik azadi’ (religious freedom) of the Hindus. Further, at the Margadarshak Mandal, its apex body meeting in February 2005, a resolution was passed calling upon Hindus to follow the ideal family size set by Lord Krishna’s parents and “contribute constructively towards increasing the Hindu population” (“VHP asks Hindus to Abandon Two Child Norm”,The Statesman, Wednesday 16^th February 2005). The resolution also called for checking Bangladeshi infiltration and preventing Hindu girls from marrying Muslim boys. Krishna, the resolution pointed, out was the eight child of his parents as was Netaji Bose, and Rabindranath Tagore, the ninth!

[liii] Staff Correspondent (2005), “RSS sees ‘demographic war’”, The Hindu, 24^th January 2005.

[liv] Rao, Mohan (2001),“Female Foeticide; Where Do We Go?”, Issues in Medical Ethics, Vol.IX, No.4, October.

[lv] Jayaraj, D. and Subramaniam, S. (2004), “Manufacturing Hysteria: On Census-Inspired ‘Nationalism’”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXXIX, No.39, Sep 25^th.

 24. Jeffery, Roger and Jeffery, Patricia (2005), “Saffron Demography, Common Wisdom, Aspirations and Uneven Governmentalities”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XL, No.5.

[lvii]Anandhi, S. (1998), “Reproductive Bodies and Regulated Sexuality: Birth Control Debates in Early Twentieth Century Tamilanadu” in Mary E.John and Janaki Nair (ed), A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, Kali for Women, Delhi.

[lviii]This sentence is riddled with minefields, defeating his own argument, since he notes that non-vegetarian Parsees also had low birth rates. Nevertheless there is a curious, and entirely incorrect, characterisation of Brahmins as strictly vegetarian. Indeed the Brahmins of Kashmir, who consider themselves the Brahmins of Brahmins, are non-vegetarians, as also the Brahmins of Bengal and South Kanara. But today at the height of Hindutvavadi resurgence it is being asserted that all Hindus are essentially vegetarian in a move to deny beef to the dalit and Muslim communities.

[lix]Anandhi, S. (1998), op cit.

[lx] Chakravarthi, Uma (1993), “Conceptualising Brahminical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XXVIII, No.14.

[lxi] This indeed was Mahatma Gandhi’s position on birth control.

[lxii] Anandhi, S. (1998), op cit.

[lxiii] Human Rights Watch (1999), Broken People: Caste Violence Against India’s ‘Untouchables’, Books for Change, Bangalore.

[lxiv] Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (Eds), The Invention of Traditions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

[lxv]Barnes, Julian (1999), “Mrs.Thatcher Remembers” in Ian Hamilton (Ed), The Book of Twentieth Century Essays, Fromm International, New York.

[lxvi] Tennyson might well be turning in his grave if he knew how his famous line “Nature red in truth and  claw” inspired not just Thatcher and the Bushes, pere and fils, but also the Hindu right and the Islamic Brotherhood and indeed all those who favour the current  neo-liberal world order.!

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A medical doctor, specialised in public health, Mohan Rao is Professor at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of From Population Control to Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic(Sage, 2004) and has edited Disinvesting in Health: The World Bank’s Health Prescriptions (Sage, 1999) and The Unheard Scream: Reproductive Health and Women’s Lives in India (Zubaan,2004), and, with Sarah Sexton, Markets and Malthus: Population, Gender and Health in Neoliberal Times (Sage 2010)

Moral Economies of Wellbeing

Supriya Chaudhuri

For reasons still unclear to me, I was asked to speak at a research workshop at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, on ‘Moral Economies of Wellbeing’. Neither a historian nor an economist, I was ill-equipped for the exercise. I undertook it in the belief that every individual, however unpracticed in the disciplines of the social sciences, should be possessed of an opinion as to what constitutes a moral economy and what is implied by well-being. It is a part of morality to think about these issues, though it may not add to general profit or wellbeing for me to hold forth on them. My reflections are partial and open to revision.

The phrase ‘moral economy’, in the specific context of ‘the moral economy of the poor’, was put into circulation by E. P. Thompson in a famous essay published in Past and Present in 1971. As we know, it was immediately applied to a quite different, non-European setting by James C. Scott in his 1976 book The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), and it became one of the principal terms in a still-inconclusive debate about the motives of action in market- and non-market economies, as illustrated in a much-cited article by William Booth, ‘On the Idea of the Moral Economy’ (American Political Science Review, 88 (1994) 653-667). It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that the confidence with which Thompson used the phrase was bred of a conviction both that we would understand what he meant by it in his special historical instance, and what it might mean as a term in ethics. Twenty-one years later, at a conference in the University of Birmingham (1992: see E. P. Thompson in Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority, 2000) Thompson was unable to locate the origin of the term from his notes, but felt convinced that he had coined it as the opposite of ‘market economy’. Yet it had appeared long before, in the title of a book by the American philosopher Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy, published in 1909. Perry, who later came to be known for his support of the interest theory of value, offers in this early work a largely Aristotelian account of the moral organization of life, an ideal oikonomia based on ethical principles, and upon an idea of justice arising out of the reconciliation of the widest-possible range of interests. It may indeed be suggested that our theme today, the moral economy of wellbeing, is sited in the space between philosophy and economics, between Perry’s philosophical account of the good life, eudaimonia, and Thompson’s social-historical examination of the rationale for a form of economic action, the food riots of eighteenth-centuryEngland.

It may be recalled that the controversy around Thompson’s article largely centred on his presumed hostility to the free-market doctrines of Adam Smith, the most important economic theorist of eighteenth-century England, and in fact it is this opposition, between moral economies and market economies, that has largely sustained the debate till the present day. Booth’s article on ‘The Idea of the Moral Economy’, for example, criticizes the notion of ‘embeddedness’ attributed to pre-market economies by Karl Polanyi (in The Great Transformation, 1944), and argues that the principles of contractual exchange in market economies have an equally embedded and moral character. Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness made much of the presumed network of rights and obligations in an agricultural economy where food production and food entitlement, for example, were linked. Booth argued that market economies also have an inbuilt structure of contractual obligations. What is at stake in much of this debate is a certain notion of distributive justice, of justice as fairness: which is why other sections of Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice than the one in your reading file (for example, the section on equality and liberty) might have been relevant to this problem. In this respect Sen’s idea of justice owes something to Rawls, whose pupil he was, but it is he who of all modern economic philosophers has attempted most consistently to reconcile justice with happiness. Justice requires, one might say, that a moral economy be directed towards, and be capable of achieving, wellbeing.

I will begin by briefly considering some points in the discussion of justice in Book V of  Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1129b 3-5) that may have a bearing upon market economies. Aristotle is at this place talking about particular justice and injustice, that is, justice exercised as one virtue among others by individuals with respect to goods such as honour, money and safety. Aristotle makes it clear that in such cases, injustice (adikia) is rooted in greed, the desire to have more than others (pleonexia). If one knowingly contrives an unjust distribution out of a motive of gain, one is adikos and pleonektes, and a society ruled by greed and competitiveness is therefore likely to be an unjust society. Yet it as Bernard Williams notes (in Moral Luck, Cambridge UP 1981, 92-93), Aristotle does not sufficiently characterize pleonexia here: it is, we can see, not in itself a motive, but a product of desire for specific goods, such as honour or fame on the one hand, and money or property on the other. Williams finds Aristotle’s identification of injustice with pleonexia inadequate and wrong (‘a mistake, one which dogs Aristotle’s account’), but it is worth our asking whether this brief discussion does not point the way to a deeper understanding of justice as fairness, and of the distribution of goods as key to our perception of a just society.

The point is relevant to a contrast between moral economies and market economies, though there is, regrettably, no universally accepted definition of the moral economy. If it is a system in which moral predispositions, norms and habits guide economic choices and behaviours, it could be argued (as by Russell Keat and Andrew Sayer) that every economy has a set of moral predispositions governing it, and thus that ‘every economy is a moral economy’ (Keat; building on Booth). Moreover, while Polanyi’s thesis about the embeddedness of economic practices in pre-market societies and the threat posed to such embeddedness by the commodification of labour and the emergence of a market society obviously has important implications for the contrast of moral and market economies, it is equally clear that many practices common in pre-market societies, such as slavery and patriarchy, are immoral in a lay use of the term. One could, further, argue that while market economies are generally characterized as being non-moral in that their operations are ostensibly freed of moral compulsions, the secular sphere in which such economies operate may promote an increased social compulsion to achieve ‘universal’ wellbeing, which then comes to inflect the apparently unregulated pursuit of profit at the cost of others (i.e., pleonexia). Indeed, as many have pointed out, Adam Smith was working simultaneously on his Wealth of Nations (1776) and his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; 6^th edn. revised 1789), regarding the latter as his more important work, and arguing in it that human beings in their everyday transactions with others develop fellow-feeling and sentiments like gratitude and pity, seeking to regulate their behaviour in relation to the human communities of which they are part. So, finally, should we revive the archaic sense of the term ‘moral economy’, using it simply to describe the just regulation of the moral sentiments, a sort of housekeeping of the self in relation to others, to achieve happiness, i.e. eudaimonia or wellbeing? Which of these meanings are we to choose?

It is no part of my intention here to analyse at length the issues raised in the debate between (say) Polanyi and Booth, or to comment on the correctness or otherwise of E. P. Thompson’s reading of crowd behaviour in the eighteenth century. I offer it as my opinion that one issue skirted by these historians and political theorists in their study of pre-market and market societies is the complicated investment of power in social relations. More attention to existing imbalances in power, both in the ‘embedded’, pre-market network of duties, obligations and needs, and the non-embedded play of market forces, might have produced a more accurate picture of the real conditions of labouring classes, women, disadvantaged groups, non-workers, and so on. This is a point made by critics of classical male political and economic theory such as – very differently – Martha Nussbaum and Mary Midgley.

I would like to concentrate on one idea that seems to be crucial both to a consideration of the moral economy and to the desire for wellbeing, and this is the idea of justice. It is an idea about which everyone, we may say, may be permitted to have an opinion. In his deeply considered response to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), Amartya Sen (The Idea of Justice, 2009) has argued that justice is grounded in fairness, but this cannot be a transcendental fairness agreed on in some mythical Original Situation, under a veil of ignorance (as Rawls conceives of it), but a fairness painfully, perhaps inadequately, won from experience and from circumstantial reality. Sen has a good example of the problem of justice in his fable of the three children disputing their entitlement to one flute (one has made it, another can play it, a third has greatest need of its solace). Justice in such a context can only be comparative, not absolute justice: but in an increasingly unjust world, it is the only kind that we can claim with any moral justification.

Our existence in this world teaches us that happiness or wellbeing is not just a matter of moral action or deserts, but a matter of luck, as the Greeks realized when they called the good life eudaimonia. The difficulty of separating the good life from good fortune is acutely discussed by Bernard Williams (Moral Luck, 1981) and Martha Nussbaum (The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge UP, 1986). That I have the chance to be happy may depend most of all on my station in life, my freedom from disease, my possession of my senses, my safety from enemies. It may also depend on my possession of a moral sense. There is no agreement, however, on the meaning of the word ‘moral’ in moral philosophy (or economy). In After Virtue (2^nd ed., Duckworth 1985) Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out that moral terms no longer mean what they did to the Greeks and their immediate successors. To him it appeared that as with other forms of knowledge in the wake of a nuclear disaster, in the case of moral philosophy what we possess are the fragments of a conceptual scheme almost wholly bereft of its past significance. MacIntyre’s philosophical endeavour, therefore, has been to revive a discussion of the ‘virtues’ of Aristotelian moral philosophy, attempting both to situate their meanings in history and to examine what they could signify in a contemporary context. However, the ‘goods’ of life that conduce to wellbeing are not all of them moral attributes. Moreover, one could enjoy a form of happiness (though not the eudaimonia of the Greeks, which is critically connected to moral luck) even when deprived of many of the ‘goods’ of life (thus we could instance the paradoxical case of the ‘happy slave’, or the relative happiness of the poor peasant over the rich merchant). Nevertheless, it is generally supposed that a degree of material comfort and mental sufficiency are necessary to wellbeing. In addition, one must possess the capability of being happy, that is, of recognizing one’s own wellbeing, which many suicidal possessors of the ‘goods’ of life clearly do not do. So the moral economy that produces wellbeing is not simply a matter of the fair distribution of goods, though justice in that respect must be seen as extremely important: it is a matter of the way in which we perceive what we have and how we use it. If wellbeing is to be widely distributed in society, it must depend on a larger social participation in moral norms: in the minimization of harm to others, even if one’s own happiness is limited thereby. It may even take the form of collective participation in social acts of kindness that conduce more to the wellbeing of the agent than of the patient.

In an extraordinary poem written between 1796 and 1800, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, William Wordsworth seems to suggest that community and love are in a sense produced by the continuing abjection and vagrancy of the beggar, who becomes a site for the collective experience of charity, a moral economy based on a paradoxical combination of injustice and altruism. The same idea is suggested in a quite different moral context by William Blake in ‘The Human Abstract’, when he writes that ‘mercy could be no more/If we did not make somebody poor’. Blake’s indignation on this account, like Wordsworth’s interest in poverty and the relation of moral principles to economic facts, make their poetry a subject of deep fascination to social historians like E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. In fact any discussion of the virtues, like Aristotle’s account of the pursuit of particular goods, would need to take into account the social context in which they have to operate.

But in the classic contrast between the moral economy and the market economy, Thompson was arguing that the economic actions of the poor are guided by a strong, even if outwardly self-destructive moral sense. He founded this argument on his analysis of the food riots of the eighteenth century, when crowds of poor people not only took enormous risks in resorting to public action, but sometimes destroyed stocks of food in an attempt to draw attention to the practices of hoarders and blackmarketers. Thus his notion of the moral economy of the poor was strictly directed towards an explanation of economic actions which, as he saw it, were founded on a moral schema, a sense of what was just or right.

Amartya Sen’s major work as an economist was conducted with respect to poverty and famines, especially the Bengalfamine of 1943 which he witnessed as a child. It is not surprising, therefore, that his 2009 book The Idea of Justice contains a chapter on famine, significantly titled ‘The Practice of Democracy’ (Chapter 16, pp. 338-354). I think that it is here that he engages, though we may not immediately recognize this, with the relation of moral economy to wellbeing. It is an extreme example, but for that reason one that we might effectively use to state the problem at its starkest. The phenomenon of famine, Sen argues, stands in a critical relation to the organization of political power, to the possibility of asserting a moral claim. Indeed, he argues that large-scale famines are characteristic of non-democratic societies, and that democracy is the condition for poor people to resist state neglect, oppression and tyranny. This argument should be set against Thompson’s analysis of English food riots as expressive of popular morality. Since both theorists are in effect examining notions of justice in terms of a ‘moral economy’, I would like to look more closely at some of the difficulties presented by the latter case, that of the Bengal famine of 1943. Some of those present in this room will remember one of many short stories written by the Bengali novelist Manik Bandyopadhyay against this harsh backdrop, a story with a question in its title: ‘Why didn’t they take the food by force?’ (Chhiniye khayni keno?) The question Manik puts here stands in stark contrast to the behaviour of the English crowd in the eighteenth century, so effectively analysed as an instance of the moral economy of the poor by Thompson. It was rumoured at the time that Jawaharlal Nehru had asked the question: it is repeated throughout the story, as an insoluble problem standing as a block to our understanding of human morals, human self-interest, and the idea of justice.

In the story, Jogi, a bandit-turned-householder who holds forth to the narrator about the famine, comments on the entry of the English word food into common Bengali speech. For most people, he suggests, this lexical acquisition indicated the difference between food as a category, a collection of marketable commodities, and the rice and vegetables that people ate, since Bengalis normally referred to everything that collectively made up the daily meal by the name of its principal ingredient as cooked rice, ‘bhat’. But ‘all the rice and lentils and oil and salt that never reach poor people’s mouths, but simply change warehouses for money – that’s what food is’, Jogi says. For him, food belongs to the market: bhat belongs to an agricultural order where production and consumption are closely linked. All that people needed to survive on, he says, was rice: so why didn’t they take it by force? This is the question (chhiniye khayni keno?) that provides a title to this remarkable story, one of several that Manik placed against the background of perhaps the most decisive event to mould him as a writer – and I do not except the Tebhaga movement, which also cast its literary shadows, for example in Haraner Natjamai and the other stories in Chhoto Bado (1948). ‘Chhiniye khayni keno?’ was published in 1947, in a collection called Khatiyan, but Manik had already devoted many of the stories in the preceding year’s collection, Aj Kal Porshur Galpo, including the title narrative, to the famine of 1943.

The harsh, sometimes polemical realism of these stories can be seen to evidence a kind of representational anxiety, a response, I would suggest, to the pressure of a real event that exceeds fictional understanding or adequacy. ‘Chhiniye khayni keno?’ pushes this struggle for representational common sense, as we might describe it, to the edge of a question that is put to history: why do people starve if there is food before them? The 1943 famine is above all the event that has raised this question, asked at the time by western observers as well as somewhat distanced Indians, and repeated subsequently by sociologists, economists and historians trying to come to terms with the cruelty of the contradiction that history has so faithfully recorded: food in the warehouses, deaths on the streets.[1] The story offers the ex-bandit Jogi’s response, in the form of a rambling monologue framed by the almost silent narrator’s observation of his setting: the hut in which they sit, Jogi’s posture, his wife’s pregnancy, the brief indications of how she survived the famine, her serving the guest with food. The narrative flows, eddies and returns to the question and its answer – or what is presented as Jogi’s answer, for as the narrator tells him, ‘I know what the babus say, Jogi, but what do you say?’

 

The theory Jogi offers is rooted in the nature of hunger itself: the hungry are weak, their physical enfeeblement makes them passive and unresponsive, unable to seek their own recourse. Jogi considers, and dismisses with sarcastic humour, the various other explanations offered at the time: that Bengali peasants were accustomed to starvation (he asks, were they accustomed to death?); that the common people were fatalists, accepting death as their lot (he asks, did they not try to avert calamity if they could at other times?); that they were law-abiding (he says, if you knew you would be fed in prison, you’d try to go there). Only he knows the true reason why people did not resist, he says, and his explanation makes hunger a self-perpetuating phenomenon, draining the body of its will to life. The hungry body eats itself. The narrative presents him not only as a survivor, but as a curious experimenter with history, restlessly seeking an answer to the mystery that surrounds him, the enigma of a population unresisting of its own end. He even attempts to form a gang that will tour the countryside looting and redistributing grain, but his efforts are unsuccessful; he joins the band of the hungry at a relief kitchen, hoping to organize them so that they protest against the watering of their gruel and the diversion of provisions meant for them. When he manages to ensure that their supplies are not stolen and they are properly fed for a few days, they speak of resistance and struggle. But fatally for his purpose, he waits for a few days before leading a revolt, and soon the supplies dry up, the watery gruel reappears, and the inmates return to a condition of listless passivity.

What Jogi observes, what he reports from his experience of the relief camps with their starving men and their women who seek to offer their emaciated bodies in return for food, is like the record of a survivor of the Holocaust, also a strictly contemporary event. And what puzzles him is what might equally puzzle a latter-day student of this other history: the relative passivity, even connivance in their own destruction, of a large populace which submits when resistance could not materially worsen their chances of survival (though, we may note, it might not improve those chances either). Some commentators have likened the culpability of the British government of the time in the deaths of four million people in a man-made famine, to the culpability of Hitler and the Nazis in the murder of six million Jews: indeed there are some parallels, though there are also significant differences in the two events. But both, we may say, weigh human conscience with the same kind of weight: the insolubility of a moral problem that presents itself as a physical contradiction.

In fact there were some incidents of looting and rioting, though limited and unfruitful given the scale of the disaster; the shops were well-guarded, there were troops in abundance, and in the countryside, where the supply-system had almost completely collapsed, large stocks of grain had disappeared. Jogi does not take recourse to these larger forms of explanation. Despite his own willingness to engage in any desperate form of armed resistance or opportunistic self-help, his explanation, such as it is, is rooted in the material nature of hunger. Beyond that liminal point where the body crosses into the exhaustion and physical depletion of hunger, the body is its own food, hunger consumes it like an other, and in so doing it estranges and alienates the self, so that it appears to have no worldly recourse.

The 1943 Bengal famine, known in its own time as panchasher manvantar in reference to its Bengali year, 1350, has drawn an enormous body of historical study, literary representation and economic analysis. No writer who lived through that period failed to comment on the devastation of those years – between 1942 and 1945 – when around four million men, women and children died of starvation in Bengal, though the warehouses were stocked with grain, the government was busily procuring rice, there was a good harvest in 1942 and a moderate one in 1943. I shall not rehearse the variety of explanations for this calamity – or crime – familiar to us from the work of modern economists and historians including Amartya Sen and Paul Greenough: the effects of wartime hoarding and profiteering in rice; the government’s boat-denial and rice-denial policies, aimed at preventing the Japanese from securing their advance westwards from Singapore and effectively destroying the rice-supply network in Bengal; the rural-urban divide; the brown-spot disease; the cyclone; inequality in income and entitlement; the influx of refugees and troops; the government’s procurement system.[2]

 As contemporary observers and later historians pointed out, the event was never officially declared a famine, and the term was avoided in administrative correspondence.[3]

David Arnold and B. M. Bhatia have argued that a number of other, more long-term factors lay behind the extreme vulnerability of the rural population of Bengalto a disaster of this kind. These include an agricultural decline leading to the increasing pauperization of the peasantry and their growing burden of debt; so delicate was the balance between subsistence and starvation that the slightest imbalance could produce a famine.[4] Once Japan had cut off the supply of Burmese rice in mid-1942, and the British government had destroyed or removed boats to prevent enemy advances, thus hindering the movement of supplies, the fear of invasion led to panic-stricken hoarding and massive price rises in early 1943. The weaker sections of the population inevitably suffered most: as Greenough comments, ‘patterns of abandonment began to emerge, marked by the snapping of moral and economic bonds upon which rural society had hitherto been erected’.[5]

 But all these explanations and analyses apart, Manik sees fit to devote his attention to an insoluble mystery at the heart of catastrophe, the inability of human beings to resist their own destruction. The answer that he provides to this mystery is rooted, I would like to suggest, in the most absolute and irresistible of the forms of power to which the subaltern is subject: the physical constitution of the body. Instead of being able to illustrate the moral economy of the poor by demonstrating the instinct of justice through which the poor seek recourse by defying the law and asserting their claim to food, Manik is compelled to record the extremity of a situation where that moral economy fails: or, at least, is inexpressive and silent. In a lifelong effort to explain that moment of failure, Amartya Sen argues that the lack we note here is a political lack: a lack of entitlement, a lack of rights. The insufficiency of the moral economy to right a manifest wrong, its impotence and collapse, might then be traced on the one hand to the triumph of a market economy and on the other to systems of power so deeply entrenched that the body of the subaltern is unable to resist their operation.

Some twenty years after this catastrophic event, the poor did indeed riot in the streets ofCalcuttato protest food scarcities and high prices. The communist poet Birendra Chattopadhyay, born in 1920, a witness to that great famine of pre-independent India, recorded this post-Independence time of dearth in a poem of remarkable economy and power, published in 1965:

āscharjya bhāter gandha rātrir ākāshe

kārā jeno ājo bhāt rāndhe

bhāt bāde, bhāt khāy.

 

ār āmrā shārā rāt jege āchhi

āscharjya bhāter gandhe

prārthanāy, shārā rāt.

 

The strange aroma of rice in the night sky

It seems that some still cook rice,

Still serve it, eat it.

And we are awake, all night

With the strange aroma of rice,

In supplication, all night.[6]

Smell, the aroma of rice, constitutes, one might say, the contested site of wellbeing, experienced in a paradoxical fusion of presence and absence, of satiety and lack. This is not simply a metaphysical enigma experienced by the desiring subject. In the material world that we inhabit, those who eat and those who starve live in the same moment. In the poem, the simultaneity of presence and absence is not to be understood as a postmodernist trope, but as a material contradiction between rice and hunger. The space of this contradiction is filled, we may say, by the strange ‘ascharjya’ smell of rice, as it rises from the cooking-pot to the night sky, but not to fill the bellies of the starving. Smell, the fragrance of food, traditionally described as half the meal (ghrānena ardhabhojanam), is ironically evoked in all its richness and reach to become a figure, not only for dearth, but for an absolute separation between those who eat and those who do not. The admirable restraint and elegance with which this figure is deployed by the old communist poet offers a lesson, we may say, in representational technique: it retains the paradox while at the same time breaking it open.

Moral economies of wellbeing, then, must contend, as Thompson did in that seminal essay of 1971, with the problem of who eats and who starves, and how much energy or liberty we have to determine our own wellbeing and that of others. The moral economy is not simply an account of the moral principles of our actions, the ends that we judge to be necessary to our wellbeing, and the economic structures we endorse. It is finally, in my view, a critical account of power and its exercise, of capabilities and entitlement in the most basic terms. It has to be articulated in terms of those whose power we have taken away, those whose claims we have ignored. For all that the moral economy and the market economy are opposed to each other in scholarly discourse as though they inhabited different moments of historical time, I do not think that this was the point of Thompson’s use of the phrase in his account of the ‘moral economy of the poor’. In the end, I think, I would like to endorse the view of the moral economy as a normative condition, not a description of a past or present society, but something that is a necessary means of our pursuit of happiness.

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[1] See, e.g. Subrata Kumar Mitra, Power, Protest and Participation: Local Elites and the Politics of Development in India (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 175-76.

[2] See Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivations (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), chapter 6, and Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943-44 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Sen argued forcefully that the problem was caused not by inadequate harvests but by deliberate withholding of rice from the market and putting it out of the reach of poorer consumers. An early account is to be found in Kali Charan Ghosh, Famines in Bengal, 1770-1943 (Calcutta: Indian Associated Publishing Co., 1944).

[3] Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 79, and W. R. Aykroyd, The Conquest of Famine (London: 1974), p. 78.

[4] See B. M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India 1860-1965 (Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 2^nd ed. 1967) and David Arnold, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) on the combination of factors behind the phenomenon of a modern famine.

[5] Greenough, Prosperity and Misery, p. 138. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, in Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 48-50, analyse the gender bias in entitlement to food.

[6] Birendra Chattopadhyay, Birendra Samagra [Works], ed. Pulak Chanda and Sabyasachi Deb (Kolkata: Anustup, 1988) vol 1, p. 191. My translation.

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Supriya Chaudhuri  is Professor of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

Success, Publishing & Indian Comics

Bharath Murthy

This piece is a presentation of my views on the comics medium in India, and some of my ideas for the growth of the form. These ideas are the result of the last few years spent trying to understand the medium. My background is in painting, (I studied painting in college) and I want to create as well as publish comics successfully to the end of my life. These views come from this commitment to the form. I also studied film making, and strangely enough, I had an opportunity to make a feature length documentary film in Japan about its vast self-published comics (doujinshi) culture. I learnt about the manga industry and found out why it is the the most successful comics industry in the world. I met many manga authors, publishers, printers, readers and realized how little westerners and Asians like us know about Japanese manga. Before making this film, I also sniffed around a little bit into the Indian comics scene, having received a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, Bengaluru, to study Indian comics. I wrote a 5000 word essay about Indian comics which was published in Marg magazine in 2009. The same year, I also started an independent comics magazine called COMIX.INDIA (www.comixindia.com). What follows is a ‘fact finding report’, and the ‘recommendations’ of this report on how we can have fun, make money and generally enjoy creating and consuming comics in India.

Why black & white is better than colour for comics printing:

 Colour printing began during the late 19^th century, but picked up only by the 1930s. Colour comic strips appeared in American Sunday supplements pretty much the same time as comic strips themselves. The newspaper form gave birth to the modern comic strip as we know it. By the 1930s, 32 page comic books appeared in American news stands in 4-colour printing. This is the format of American comic book that continues to this day.

From the website http://www.dereksantos.com/comicpage/pregold.html :

In 1933, after seeing the Ledger syndicate publish a small amount of their Sunday comics on 7 by 9 inch plates, an idea hit upon two printer employees. Sales manager Harry L. Wildenberg and saleman Max. C. Gaines, employees of Eastern Color Printing Company in New York, saw the plates and figured two of these plates could fit on a tabloid page and produce a 7 1/2 by 10 inch book when folded. Gathering 32 pages of newspaper reprints including Mutt and Jeff, Joe Palooka, and Reg’lar Fellas, they created Funnies on Parade. This was the first comic produced in a format similiar to modern comics. Looking to test their product, they published 10,000 copies to be given out as premiums by Proctor and Gamble.

Impressed by this success, Gaines convinced Eastern Color that he could sell thousands of these to big advertisers like Kinney Shoe Stores, Canada Dry, and Wheatena to be used as premiums and radio giveaways. Because of this, Eastern followed by printing Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics and later Century of Comics, both containing Sunday newspaper reprints. M. C. Gaines was able to sell these in quantities of 100,000 to 250,000 copies. Century of Comics was the 2nd comic book and the first 100 page comic.

One fact is significant here. The first comic books were reprints of Sunday strips that first appeared in the low quality newspaper format, where they met with initial success. The first monthly comic magazines were anthologies and appeared in 1934. They all had 4-colour printing. In 1935, National Allied Publications, later renamed DC Comics, was the first publisher to print original material in the 32 page monthly comic format. It was in this format that superhero characters came to be in 1938, beginning with Superman. From then, till now, 2009, 71 years later, the format has been the same. 4-colour printing has become synonymous with superheroes and with the comic book form itself.

In India, colour printing got associated with comics by following the American example. It gave rise to the notion that comics MUST BE in colour, and the idea that Indian comic readers will not buy comics unless they are in colour. These notions are common among Indian comics publishers. However, we’ve had our fair share of successful b&w comics and 2-colour comics (way cheaper than full 4-colour printing). For example, Mayukh Choudhury, Narayan Debnath, Toms from Kottayam, Diamond comics magazine (all Pran comics in b&w), the comics in the now extinct ‘Target’ magazine, and countless other short comics in magazines.

The model for comics production in India is the American DC/Marvel Comics model. This involves an assembly line setup, with employees working on a monthly salary or per project. In other words, a factory. This style of production is suited for large volumes. Artists are paid average salaries (unless their reputations precede them) and monthly colour comics are produced for news stands. But colour poses a problem here. If high quality colour comics are to be produced, the cost shoots up too much. Colouring takes the longest time to do in the production process. As a result, the narratives have to be short, so that they can be coloured on time. 32 pages a month, at high quality, is a very tough target to achieve. At low quality, it is easier, but doing colour and doing low quality is not such a great idea.

Price Comparison of comics:

Comic	no. of pages	Price in Rs.	Quality of color printing
Raj Comics (India)	96	40	low
Tinkle Double Digest (India)	94	75	low-medium
Virgin Comics (India)	32	30	high
One volume of ‘Sandman’(DC Comics, America)	258	782	high
Tintin comic (Europe)	62	380	very high
One volume of ‘Buddha’(Black &White comic, Japan)	429	295	-n.a.-

From this simple comparison, it is clear that colour comics are expensive to produce and buy, and the higher the production quality, the lesser the number of pages offered, restricting narrative length. The best value for money is provided by the lowest quality colour printing, and full black & white printing.

What about European style colour comic ‘albums’? They are the luxury goods of the comics medium, much like other over priced European luxury items. The most expensive comics are European ones. A 62 page Tintin album costs Rs.380 on the ACK website. Too expensive even for me. The interesting thing about Tintin is that the initial few stories were first produced in b&w and serialized in a b&w comic magazine. Only later were they collected, redrawn, coloured, and released as a book. Even the direct-to-colour albums were serialized as pages in magazines. Ananda Bazaar Patrika has released a few Tintin style albums, a 38 page full colour book costing Rs.40. Recently, Puffin has published a few colour comics first serialized in newspaper supplements, a 48 page album costing Rs. 99. Comics already have a restricted audience, and further restrictions due to high cost is sure to kill the medium. The high cost of European comic albums has ensured that so much of their great comics remain unavailable in the English language. In England, however, there has been a b&w cheap comic magazine tradition, and one will recall that Alan Moore’s ‘V for Vendetta’ for example, was first published in a b&w comic magazine, and so was ‘From Hell’.

So, we’ve covered Europe and America, and seen that colour comics dominate and are expensive products, thereby restricting readers and also narrative length, eventually stifling the medium. What remains to be studied are Japanese comics, called ‘manga’. Japan happens to be the world’s largest comics producer and consumer. It seems that they draw comics as effortlessly as the rest of the world writes text. What is the secret of the stupendous, unimaginable success of manga? Is there a lesson in it for Indian comics creators and publishers?

The secret of the success of Japanese manga:

 When I went to Japan to make a film about self-published Japanese comics sub-culture, (which is larger than the commercial American comic market), I realised how little Indians like me knew about manga. First of all, manga is not a particular style of drawing faces and figures. The big-eyed faces popularized as ‘manga style’ is only one among a whole spectrum of styles, from hyper-realism to extreme abstraction. MANGA is simply a general term for ‘Japanese Comics.’ Manga narratives cover every possible genre that exists on planet earth in  both fiction and non-fiction, and they have created a very unique genre that exists only in manga called ‘Yaoi’ or ‘Boys Love.’ Wiki it for more info. And contrary to notions, there are quite a few manga which are printed in full colour. However, most manga are black & white. Part of the reason manga is so misunderstood is because most manga remains untranslated. What we read in English is the tip of the iceberg. But another reason we misunderstand manga is because we have a preconceived idea of what comics are and what they can do.

The secret of Japanese manga is their method of production, and its got nothing to do with the quality of the content. The entire most successful comics industry in the world rests squarely on CHEAP B&W MAGAZINES produced week after week. The high-end ‘books’ that appear in Indian bookshops are only reprints of the most successful stories from the manga magazines. Virtually ALL manga stories first appear in the manga magazines. And you have to see them to believe the kind of low quality product they are. Hardly any ink is used! Its worse than photocopy resolution! And that’s what most people read and enjoy. The well-printed book manga is a sort of bonus for the author who has proved successful in the magazine form. I still don’t know how the publishers get their feedback on popularity, but fan letters and self-published comics featuring characters from mainstream commercial manga are two of them. Surveys are also done, but I don’t know details about that.

Because of the magazine form, because its b&w, and because it’s printed cheaply, comics are affordable by everyone. Even a high-end ‘artistic’, ‘serious’, ‘intellectual’ ‘literary’, ‘graphic novelesque’ whatever story first appears in cheap manga magazines. This ensures that literary stuff is also affordable by everyone. Contrary to popular conception, cheap printing DOES NOT equal cheap content. This is a truly unique feature of manga that we could do well to adopt. In Indian text-based books, cheap printing is generally equated with pulp fiction, (of course there are exceptions). Books claiming higher literary status tend to have better quality paper and printing, and are costlier.

The uniqueness of Japanese comics printing is in the fact that all content regardless of artistic merit passes through the initial ‘cheap-magazine-printing’ phase, guarantees income (paid by page rate) to the author, and on positive feedback, gives a second lease of life to the author through high-quality reprints in book form (called ‘tankobon’ in Japanese) that give the author royalties. The author owns the rights to the work throughout. The ‘cheap-magazine-printing’ phase also ensures space for newcomers who are always required for a comics culture to flourish, while providing fresh, original material and also fostering healthy competition. As I see it, this is a fool-proof system.

Aesthetic reasons for black & white over colour printing:

Very interestingly, there’s also an aesthetic reason why black & white is better than colour for comics publishing, in a rare instance where art and commerce fit hand-in-glove. The clue to this lies in the nature and characteristics of the comic medium. The success or failure of a comic is not at all dependent on the ‘quality’ of the artwork. It lies in how narrative information is communicated and manipulated using images and text. You might have an grand gorgeously produced image, but to the reader, it is just narrative information. He or she will quickly turn the page and your painstakingly drawn beautiful image is gone, it has become information in the reader’s head. Lets face the awful truth here– comic drawing is NOT painting (no offence to great comic artists here, I am an artist myself, and I know how to paint). Any amount of extra detail in artwork only goes into narrative info. Another problem that occurs in cases when extreme stress is given to gorgeous colour artwork is inconsistency. This inconsistency is very obvious in many Indian colour comics. The first few pages are great, then the deterioration starts.

The truth is, the reader demands narrative information first and foremost, and all the aesthetic appreciation comes later. You can independently admire the artist’s virtuosity for as long as you want, but only after narrative satisfaction is complete. Artistic virtuosity is an added ‘bonus’ for a comic, and not an absolute necessity. If artistic virtuosity was the only criteria for a successful comic, many many comics authors would have been failures. Colour information in a comic adds artistic value to the drawing, but it does nothing to the narrative. A panel of Superman kicking ass in black & white has exactly the same amount of NARRATIVE INFORMATION as the same panel in colour.

Mainstream Indian publishers are very reluctant to publish full colour graphic novels, and rightly so. Its a huge burden on them. Its a huge burden on the artists too. I say remove colour, cut out the fat, and we’ll have a healthier comics industry. Why imitate all the wrong ideas from American comics.

In order to save artists from self-destruction, this tyranny of colour must go. Also, my little experience of comics has convinced me that the line is the basic tool of comic art. A bad line and no amount of jazzy colouring can save it.

Why printed books are still the best medium for comics in the age of the internet:

Now that we’ve seen the value of Black and White in comics printing, I want to make a point that is relevant to the times we live in. With the coming of the internet, one might ask the question, why bother with traditional printing at all? Why not simply do comics on the internet? Why not sell them as e-books? Why print comics?

One part of the answer to this is the obvious advantages of the book. No electricity required, no batteries, no machine breakdowns, durable, one can take it anywhere, and finally, feel the tactility of the book on your hands. But with comics printing, there is another techno-aesthetic reason why comics can be best enjoyed as a printed book. This is because of the fact that COMICS ARE HAND DRAWN. Even if you use a pen tablet and computer, which is the cutting edge of comics drawing technology, you are still drawing by hand. Even if you use photographs instead of drawings, there is still a major amount of handicraft involved. The printing of a hand drawn inscription brings us as close as possible to the actual process of drawing of the author. There’s an intimacy generated with the author. I believe this is part of the reason for the strange urge felt by comics fans to copy comic artwork. I’ve tried reading b&w comics on the Amazon Kindle e-book reader, and it is very cumbersome. Of course, the technology will get better, so maybe e-book readers are another distribution channel, but I doubt very much that it will kill the printed comic book. It might kill the text-only book however, but this is unnecessary speculation on my part, sorry!

How cheaply produced black & white comics magazines can save Indian comics:

The black & white comic magazine format has a huge number of obvious advantages going for it. The failure of many comics companies doing full colour comics (recent example, Virgin), has debunked the myth that extreme high quality colour artwork will guarantee success. On the other hand, a totally low-quality dirt cheap b&w comic magazine drawn and published by Malayali cartoonist Toms has been a success in Kerala for many many years. The reader wants an enjoyable, informative narrative, first and foremost. If you are able to provide that, everything else falls in place. One can always attempt to imitate the limited success of ACK or Raj Comics, by doing full colour. But to start and run a high quality colour comics company now is a very risky proposition. I would not attribute Raj Comics and ACK’s success to great quality or great artwork, but to the fact that they began way before everybody else, and are now venerable institutions. The truth is both companies were going downhill in the late nineties. ACK changed ownership, while Raj redrew and recreated their old characters, just like how DC and Marvel Comics of America have been doing. The problem with this method of production is not that colour is evil or something, it is that building a team of in-house artists and writers producing full colour comics is a lot of expense, and not recoverable in the short run. This colour method also gives little space for new talent, for reasons I’ve given above.

A good place to change our notions is to learn from cartooning, those quickly drawn, mostly black & white, single panel nuggets of narrative mainly used for humour. Cartooning in India has truly become an Indian art form, complete with a history and tradition, even though now it has lost its edge. Cartooning has lost relevance only because it imposed a sort of censorship on itself, both in content and form. Comics can simply be seen as cartooning expanded to many panels. This self-censorship has resulted in us not having a strong ‘comic strip’ tradition, let alone a comics tradition. Comics have come to us mainly via imitation. But all we need to do is build on what we already have, a cartooning tradition. This argument also leads to the creation of b&w comics magazines. It was in fact a black & white cartooning magazine called ‘Shankar’s Weekly’ that helped establish a whole generation of cartoonists.

          

Comparison between b&w and colour magazines:

BLACK &WHITE COMIC MAGAZINES	COLOUR COMIC MAGAZINES
Very cheap to produce.	Very expensive to produce.
One author can create a whole comic story.	Requires a team.
Can be done fast, deadlines can be met.	Takes a lot more time.
Because b&w is cheap to print, narratives can be much longer.	Narratives tend to be short because more pages means more time and more money.
More space for newcomers, as emphasis is on narrative rather than only drawing skills.	High skills required. Entry barriers high. Stifles growth.
Affordable by working class, students, and others with little money to spare, but would love to read.	Restricted audience because of lesser affordability.
Increased possibility of reprinting popular serialized comics into affordable b&w books, resulting in royalties for author.	Reprinting high quality colour comics into full length books is prohibitively expensive.
Longer narratives also mean one story can run over many books. More demand and supply. Good for book publishing in general.	Fewer colour pages mean fewer books.

           

Bharath Murthy is a comics author and makes non-fiction videos for a living. He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S University, Baroda; and Film direction at the Satyajit Ray Film and TV institute, Kolkata. He was commissioned by Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) to make a documentary on the comics subculture of the countryThe film titled, “The Fragile Heart of Moe”, was part of a series on Japan’s capital, called Tokyo Modern. The films, all by non-Japanese filmmakers, explored the various facets of life in the metropolitan. Bharath explored the subculture of Japanese comics called manga. He did a comic strip for The New Indian Express for a while, and excerpts from his ongoing book-length work were published in ‘Siruvarmalar’. He started COMIX.INDIA magazine in 2009, which is currently the only independant Indian comics magazine in this country. 5 Volumes have been published. Follow Bharath Murthy at: http://bcomix.wordpress.com

            

Reconstructing Historical Materialism II

Jairus Banaji

[ This is the second and concluding part of the essay. It was presented at the 6th Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London, 2009]

 

3. The indeterminacy of ‘free labour’ and the return to materialist categories

The last issue I‘d like to raise is the incoherence of the notion of free labour. Much is made of free labour in run-of-the-mill discussions of historical materialism, as if the whole edifice of Marxist theory would collapse without the crucial cornerstones of free/unfree labour, economic/extra-economic coercion, and so on. These dichotomies are rooted in the voluntarist models of contract that sprang from the pervasive individualism of the nineteenth century and barely survived the searing assaults of American legal realism. (61) If Marxists continue to repeat them, one imagines that is because they derive comfort from the illusion that free labour is essential to capitalism. But the dichotomy between free and unfree labour is either a tautology (under most legal systems there are individuals who are either free or unfree) or a remarkably naïve reposing of faith in freedom of contract which is assumed to be a reality when it is in fact a transparent fiction, even more of one today than it was in the nineteenth century, as every good lawyer knows.(62) Marx called it an ‘embellishment’ on the sale and purchase of labour-power. (63) Contracts between employers and workers were simply a ‘legal fiction.’ (64) More often than not, free labour for Marx only meant labour dispossessed of the means of production. More illuminating than the contrast between free and unfree labour and its obvious potential for mystification would be a history of wage-labour itself, the ‘differences of form’ that Marx would doubtless have developed in his ‘special study of wage-labour’, (65) but reconstructed historically, with a wealth of material that scarcely existed for him.

Both the extent of wage-labour before capitalism and the brutality with which wage-labourers were treated under capitalism (and still are in most parts of the world) have been massively underestimated by Marxists. These are both issues that only historians can sort out properly but they will obviously have a major bearing on the future shape of historical materialism. As Karen Orren writes, “the institution of wage labor long preceded the emergence of capitalism in the seventeenth century.’ (66)Both the dispossession of labour and large-scale migrancy have been more common throughout history than the standard model of historical materialism suggests. Dispossessed farmers who worked as casual labourers or tenant-farmers on great estates in China from the late seventh century on, (67) ‘runaway households’ as the early T‘ang sources refer to such impoverished peasants; (68) the seasonal labourers who migrated from Umbria to the Sabine country to handle the harvests there; (69) the substantial volume of hired labour used in public works at Rome; (70) or the extensive use of wage-labour on English estates of the thirteenth century (71) are random examples drawn from the history of China and Europe. What was distinctive about agrarian, mining and industrial capital was not the existence of wage-labour markets but their forcible creation — laws for the ‘enforcement of industry,’ (72) the control of unregulated squatting on private land, (73) the kind of mechanisms discussed by Arrighi in his classic paper ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective’; and so on. That the Roman agricultural writer Varro recommended the use of wage-labourers for hazardous jobs (74) suggests that the capital invested in slaves was seen as fixed capital and vulnerable to loss (devaluation).

 It was Roman civil law that evolved the first clear model of the buying and selling of labour-power, doubtless because the use of hired labour was so widespread. Indeed, Roman labour markets were incomparably less regulated than the labour markets of colonialism with their widespread regulation by master and servant regimes. For example, there were half a million contract workers in the tea gardens of Assam by the early twentieth century, yet flogging of men and women was common in every garden, either for non-completion of work or for disobedience and desertion,’ (75) The forced recruitment of wage-labour that characterized pre-industrial forms of capitalism shaded off into the repeated use of force against wage-labourers, even in England in the nineteenth century when legal coercion was widely used against craft workers and the English working-class was, in a technical sense at least, still ‘unfree’ when Marx wrote Capital. (76) Indeed, it may well be that the overdetermination of ‘purely’ economic coercion by legal compulsion is a peculiarity of modern wage-labour markets, if we date the emergence of these to the Statute of Labourers in the fourteenth century.

To return to Laclau with this background behind us, the centrality of free labour to capitalism was the crux of his critique of Frank. Laclau‘s implicit reasoning was as follows: capitalism is characterized by free labour, free labour by the use of purely economic coercion. ‘Extra-economic’ coercion defines non-capitalist relations of exploitation, and these in turn constitute pre-capitalist modes of production. If the expansion of world capitalism consolidated pre-capitalist modes of production, then that is because it was bound up with the widespread use of non-capitalist relations of exploitation in the countrysides of Latin America and other parts of the Third World. The coherence of this picture is still seductive some forty years down the line, which is why Laclau continues to be cited.

But taken individually, almost every link in the chain of reasoning is false. The contrast between servile relations of production in the periphery and free labour in Europe is consistently overstated. Dispossession was no less characteristic of the colonies then it was of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was sufficiently widespread in New Spain in 1633 for the abolition of compulsory labour to have no serious effect on the supply of farm workers to private estates. (77) In South Africa, “the struggle to dispossess blacks on alienated land and subjugate them in the interests of capital accumulation proper” lasted throughout the nineteenth century. In the sheep-farming districts of the Cape interior, “Khoi labour was thoroughly proletarianised, even if subject to non-economic coercion.” (78) Second, free labour in the classic nineteenth-century sense that Marx understood it was certainly not free of penal coercion or most other forms of extra-economic compulsion. (79)

In England,  “employers commonly used criminal sanctions to hold skilled workers to long contracts.” (80) Most peones who worked on Mexican estates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not serfs but wage-labourers bound by debt. (81) They lacked any means of subsistence of their own and worked full time for the estates. Thus the distinction between free and unfree labour collapses in a grey area which is much better sorted out in terms of a notion of how wage-labour markets are structured and how they work, especially in agriculture, than through the distorting lens of ideological categories that have nothing to do with historical materialism. Finally, there is no logical inference from non-capitalist relations of exploitation to non-capitalist relations of production. Slave labour can feed into the expansion of individual capitals. Forced labour under fascism sustained large sectors of German industry, e.g., in Volkswagen plants the foreigner contingent was as high as 45% by 1942, and, as Ulrich Herbert says, “Virtually all large enterprises demonstrated their strong interest in foreign skilled workers,” i.e. forced labour. (82)

The more general point here is that modes of production cannot be inferred from the relations of exploitation that are typical of them. Their laws of motion suggest a more complex level of determination than any simple characterization in terms of slavery, serfdom, and so on. The corollary of this is that the analysis of exploitation also implicates a much richer, denser level of abstraction than simple taxonomies based on historically generic categories conceived in their abstract purity. The reason why Marxist historians have paid so little attention to this level of analysis, the deployment of labour, is that they have rarely moved beyond the general categories of labour to a grasp of the actual organization and control of labour-processes in history. Histories of capitalism in agriculture are a partial exception to this (Frank Snowden‘s work on Italy, William Beinart, Helen Bradford and Tim Keegan on South Africa, William Dusinberre on the slave-based capitalism of the Carolina ‘rice kingdom,’ (83) Mertens on the Mexican estates) but in general the ‘special study of wage-labour’ that Marx had planned remains a huge lacuna in Marxist theory. Much of his study would clearly have been about ‘distinctions of form,’ For example, when Tim Keegan refers to “white farmers’ preference for a tenant labour force rather than a proletarian one,” the contrast here is not between wage-labourers and other forms of labour but a ‘form determination’ within wage-labour, a contrast between labour-tenants and ‘pure’ wage-labourers, paid in cash, that Keegan describes as a ‘proletarian work force,’ (84)

Again, the sharecroppers (haris) employed by large landlords in Sind were on one description “more like labourers than tenants,”‘ “They were hired by the season and did not necessarily work for the same zamindar in consecutive seasons.” They were a “floating population drifting from zamindar to zamindar,” (85) The ‘form’ of sharecropping doesn‘t settle the issue of the nature of exploitation, only a concrete grasp of the actual relations concealed within it can do that. Such examples could be multiplied — the Instleute on nineteenth-century Prussian estates, paid largely in kind, including small allotments of land; (86) shepherds on the livestock haciendas of the Peruvian altiplano, whose remuneration was even more complex; (87) the peculiar methods of payment used to attract the thousands of casual labourers that descended on the reclaimed areas of Emilia, the bulk of them women88 (the nucleus of Giuseppe Massarenti‘s ‘proletarian republic’ at Molinella — from the 1890s to 1920 — and the seminal base of the Italian Socialist Party); etc. In the section on ground rent proposed for Volume 3, Marx, Engels noted, was planning to deal with the “diversity of forms of exploitation” of the Russian agricultural labour-force but “was never able to carry out this plan.” (89) There is clearly a major ‘scientific research programme’ here that Marxists have barely begun to address, but when they do, with the same sense for method that distinguished Marx himself, we shall finally have a more complex model of the integration of world economy than the schematic and formalist constructions on offer today.

 61 Dalton, ‘An Essay in the Deconstruction of Contract Doctrine,’ Yale Law Journal, 94 (1985).

62 Atiyah, An Introduction to the Law of Contract, p. 17.

63 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 682.

64 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 719.

65 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 683.

66 Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States, p. 10.

67 Twitchett, Financial Administration, p. 12ff., 16ff.

68 Pulleyblank, The Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan, p. 27.

69 de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, p. 187.

70 Brunt, ‘Free Labour and Public Works at Rome,’ JRS 1980; DeLaine, The Baths of Caracalla: A Study in the Design, Construction, and Economics of Large-Scale Building Projects in Imperial Rome.

71 Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, p. 263.

72 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 785, citing Tuckett.

73 Chanock, ‘South Africa, 1841–1924: Race, Contract, and Coercion,’ in Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants (n. 79), p. 343.

74 Varro, RR, 1.xvii.3.

75 Behal and Mohapatra, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations, 1840–1908,’ J. of Peasant Studies, 19 (1992) p. 157.

76 Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century.

77 Zavala, New Viewpoints on the Spanish Colonization of America, p. 98.

78 Keegan, ‘The Origins of Agrarian Capitalism in South Africa: A Reply,’ J. of Southern African Studies, 15 (1989) pp. 677, 673–4.

79 See Hay and Craven, ‘Introduction,’ in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, p. 29.

80 Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, p. 59.

81 Borah, Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real, p. 177: ‘recruitment of wage labor bound by debt.’ This view goes back, of course, to Silvio Zavala.

82 Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich, pp. 248 (Volkswagen), 208 (all large enterprises).

83 Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps.

84 Keegan, Rural Transformations in Industrializing South Africa: The Southern Highveld to 1914, pp. 124, 122.

85 Cheesman, Landlord Power and Rural Indebtedness in Colonial Sind, 1865–1901, pp. 60, 77.

86 Schissler, Preussische Agrargesellschaft im Wandel, p. 176ff.

87 Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, p. 295ff., access to pastures for own livestock a key element of wages. Marx was quite clear that “whether the captalist pays the worker in money or in means of subsistence does not affect (the definition of variable capital). It affects only the mode of existence of the value advanced by him.”‘. “The creation of 12

surplus-value, hence the capitalization of the sum of value advanced, arises neither from the money form nor from the natural form of wages…It arises from the exchange of value for value-creating power,”Marx, Capital, vol. 2, pp. 297–8.

88 Medici and Orlando, Agricoltura e disoccupazione. I braccianti nella bassa padana, p. 165ff., on compartecipazione.

89 Engels, ‘Preface’ in Marx, Capital, vol. 3, pp.96–7.

Jairus Banaji  is the author of Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation  (Historical Materialism Book Series 25) (Brill, 2010).

Reconstructing Historical Materialism

 Jairus Banaji

 [This is Part I of a two part essay that HUG is publishing. The paper was presented at the 6th Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London, 2009]

What I‘d like to do in this paper is raise the general issue of how we can develop historical materialism in more powerful ways than Marxists have tried to do since the sixties. The general issue is addressed by raising three specific questions. First, how should Marxists periodize capitalism? Second, is there a consistent materialist characterization of  ‘Asiatic’ regimes, since Marx‘s Asiatic mode of production clearly doesn‘t work as one? And third, why have Marxists had so little to say about the deployment of labour? By deployment of labour I mean not the general ways of controlling and exploiting labour that Marx himself would repeatedly refer to in categories such as  ‘slavery’,  ‘serfdom’ and so on, but the organization and control of the labour-process in concrete settings , as in Carlo Poni‘s fine monograph on the struggle between landowners and sharecroppers over methods of ploughing that increased the intensity of labour (1) or Hans-Günther Mertens‘ discussion of the organization of Mexican estates. (2)

1. Commercial capitalism, slaveholder capitalism: the problem of configurations

Let me start with the issue of slavery because that will lead into the wider issue of the periodization of capitalism. In the Grundrisse Marx states, “The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour.’ (3) This has always struck me as one of the most intriguing passages in all of Marx‘s writings. The Southern slaveholders are called capitalists but their form of capitalism is anomalous, because capitalism for Marx presupposes free labour (or at least wage-labour) and the Southern plantations are clearly not based on that. On the other hand, the plantations clearly are capitalist enterprises (in Marx‘s eyes) or the problem of characterizing them wouldn‘t exist. A passage in Theories of Surplus-Value is more explicit in exposing the roots of the tension evident here. Here Marx writes, “In the second types of colonies — plantations — where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of (blacks) precludes free wage-labour, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it‘. (4) Here he actually states that a capitalist mode of production exists in the colonial plantations despite the existence of slave labour. It is clear that the two determinations that summed up the nature of capitalist production for Marx (the production of capital or the drive to accumulate, on the one hand, the domination and use of wage-labour on the other) were in conflict here, and that Marx seemed to think that in one sense at least, that of characterizing the nature of these enterprises, the former mattered more.

By the 1860s this was certainly his position, because in Volume 2 he describes the money capital invested in the purchase of (slave) labour-power as ‘fixed capital’, (5) and in Volume 3 he states bluntly, “Where the capitalist conception prevails, as on the American plantations…’. (6) I‘d like to suggest that the real reason why Marx had to acknowledge the capitalist nature of the plantations was the impact of the colonial trades on the equalization of the general rate of profit, in particular their role in  ‘raising the general level of profit’. (7)”As far as capital invested in the colonies, etc. is concerned…the reason why this can yield higher rates of profit is that the profit rate is generally higher there on account of the lower degree of development, and so too is the exploitation of labour, through the use of slaves and coolies, etc. Now there is no reason why the higher rates of profit that capital invested in certain branches yields in this way, and brings home to its country of origin, should not enter into the equalization of the general rate of profit and hence raise this in due proportion, unless monopolies stand in the way.’ (8) Again, “the average rate of profit depends on the level of exploitation of labour as a whole by capital as a whole”. (9) ‘Labour as a whole’, including, then, slave labour or any other form of labour whose exploitation generated capital. It was Marx‘s recognition of the contribution of the colonial trades to the general rate of profit that tilted his conception decisively in favour of seeing the Atlantic slave economy essentially as capitalist.

But if that is so, the implications of this view for historical materialism have scarcely been discussed. On the contrary, most Marxists have played it safe and forestalled such a discussion by endorsing an orthodoxy that has little to do with Marx himself. For example, in his debate with Frank, Laclau took the stand that “in the plantations of the West Indies, the economy was based on a mode of production constituted by slave labour’, (10) characterizing the use of slave labour as a ‘mode of production’ when Marx himself had stated explicitly that a capitalist mode of production ‘exists’ in the slave plantations. That was in 1971. By 1997 when Blackburn published The Making of New World Slavery, the same orthodoxy persisted but now in a much less confident form. “The American slave planter of the seventeenth century and after was not a capitalist — in the strict sense of the term, the species was only just coming into existence — but neither was he as far removed from capitalism as the feudal lord or the Ancient slaveowner.’ (11) Or again,  “the undoubted fact that neither the feudal estates of Eastern Europe nor the slave plantations of the Americas can properly be regarded as capitalist enterprises should not lead us, as it has led some writers, to regard them as equivalently distant from the capitalist mode of production.” (12) The hesitation expressed in these passages stemmed presumably from Blackburn‘s deeper historical understanding of the Caribbean plantations. They were  “run according to business principles which were very advanced for the epoch”; “The construction of slave plantations did indeed require large fixed investments”; “The performance of the early eighteenth-century sugar plantation embodied technical improvements in nearly every aspect of cultivation and processing”; and finally, “the high capital value of a Caribbean slave plantation put pressure on the planter to maximize output from a given crew”. (13) All of which was a considerable advance over Laclau‘s blunt assertion of a ‘mode of production constituted by slave labour.’

By contrast, the historiography of the Old South moved in the 1990s to an aggressive assertion of what James Oakes would call the ‘capitalist nature of the slave system’ there. (14) Genovese, Oakes argued,  “misses the powerful force of capitalism within the slave system. Marx captured the essence of the problem when he wrote of capitalism as having been ‘grafted’ on to slavery in the Old South.” (15) A whole strand of American historiography had seen Southern slavery as a capitalist structure. Lewis Gray, for example, had described the plantation as a “capitalistic type of agricultural organization in which a considerable number of unfree laborers were employed under unified direction and control”. (16) That was in the early 1930s. “Was not the plantation owner just another capitalist?”, Barrington Moore had asked in the sixties. (17) When Fogel and Engerman demonstrated the profitability of slavery in the 1970s, it was no longer possible to see the South as an economic backwater. (18) In retrospect, Genovese was fighting a rearguard action and Oakes had seen why. “Implicitly equating capitalism with free labor, Genovese argues that slavery was a pre-capitalist form of social organization…”.(19) The upshot of the Southern debate is not, of course, that the peculiarities of the South should be disregarded but that Southern paternalism was not “intrinsically antagonistic to capitalist enterprise”, not “necessarily a barrier to profit maximization”. (20) In other words, historical materialism has to be able to accommodate distinct configurations of capitalism and not look at the history of capitalism by simply reiterating the abstract unity of capital  “in contrast to the multiplicity of its external forms”. This method of forced abstraction will only contribute to stagnation and leave the best historical work to historians less encumbered by false notions of orthodoxy.

If it was capitalism that generated modern slavery, then we need to ask both what kind of capitalism and what that means for the history of capitalism more generally. Marx himself drew a sharp distinction between manufacture and large-scale industry and worked with a periodization of capitalism that contrasted the ‘period’ of manufacture with that of large-scale industry. Both were forms of the ‘modern mode of production’  but manufacture was its first ‘period’, (21) which Marx saw as firmly established by the sixteenth century, when, as he says, “the modern history of capital starts to unfold”. (22) It was the creation of the world market that formed the great watershed of the sixteenth century. Manufacture “springs up where mass quantities are produced for export, for the external market — i.e. on the basis of large-scale overland and maritime commerce, in its emporiums like the Italian cities, Constantinople, in the Flemish, Dutch cities, a few Spanish ones, such as Barcelona etc.”. (23) In Volume 1 Marx was willing to concede that “we come across the first sporadic traces of capitalist production as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries in certain towns of the Mediterranean”, (24) and in the Grundrisse these early centuries, labelled the ‘Mercantile system’, are called an ‘epoch’. (25) The variegated backgrounds and origins of this first epoch of capitalism would culminate eventually in the dominance of Dutch capitalism in the seventeenth century. (26) The global history of capitalism between the later Middle Ages and the seventeenth century was of course one of the emergence and brute consolidation of the ‘colonial system’, and it was Holland that “first brought the colonial system to its full development”. (27) A large part of Dutch capital was tied up in the Atlantic sugar industry. (28) Indeed, sugar was “more heavily capitalized than any other plantation industry of that day…the industrial capital of the plantation …was probably not much less than half its total capital”.(29) Now, for Marx the striking feature of the colonial system was the fact that under it commercial capital ceased to be a mere mediation between extremes and dominated production directly.(30) It was the fusion of merchant capital and production that formed the true hallmark of commercial capitalism, and if the slave plantations were exemplars of this form of capitalism, ‘an aspect of early modern capitalist enterprise’, as one historian has described them recently, (31) so of course were the many forms of the putting-out system and the domination exercised by merchants over direct producers (weavers and other artisans) in a whole range of industries in Europe itself. (32) Marx saw this type of capitalism transforming artisans into ‘mere wage-labourers’ (33) and a likely starting-point for the evolution of ‘manufacture proper’. (34)

The theoretical point here is that it is just not tenable to hold fast to the distinction between circulation and production, or between ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism’ (Laclau), when we drop the level of abstraction and depict the concrete movement of capital as this appears in history. The task facing materialist historiography is not the endless repetition of formulas valid at certain levels of abstraction but writing histories of early capitalism that can generate more sophisticated models of the world economy than any currently on offer. Laclau‘s response to Frank that the expansion of capitalism consolidated pre-capitalist modes of production suffers from its radical incoherence. The colonial system was a legacy of commercial capitalism and the forms of exploitation used within it were not independent modes of production in any strict historical sense but forms of productive organization and control of labour peculiar to specific configurations of capital. The hybrid culture of Southern capitalism (35) could easily count as an example of this sort of purely historical configuration, but the historiography of the medieval and early modern worlds is sufficiently rich and detailed for Marxists to be able to map more of them.

2. ‘Asiatic’ regimes, or the class relations of tributary production

Turning to Asiatic regimes, Anderson‘s understanding of Russian Absolutism can serve as the counterpart to Blackburn‘s anomalous characterization of Atlantic slavery. Anderson reads Russian absolutism on a European model, describing the boyars as a feudal aristocracy,(36) referring to the “impulse within the aristocracy towards a military monarchy”, (37) as if Russian absolutism was the creation of a coherent aristocracy (!), and even arguing that “undiluted feudal principles were to govern the construction of the State machine”. (38) None of this comes remotely close to grasping the peculiarities of Russia‘s historical development or displaying any sense of why Trotsky for example characterized Tsarism as a ‘bureaucratic autocracy’ (39) or ‘bureaucratic absolutism’ (40) and insisted on the ‘special features’ that set Russia apart from western Europe. (41) The issue is crucial, because once we have demolished the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, which is easy to do (and which Anderson himself does effectively), we are left with whole continents of history — Byzantine, early Islamic, Russian, Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese, etc. — that clamour for a Marxist characterization lest they sink torpidly into the ‘absolving ocean’ of feudalism. (42) What Slavatinsky called the “fundamental difference which separates our ―service nobility‖ from the feudal landowning aristocracy of Western Europe” (43) marked off a distinct configuration of class relationships, a ‘totality’ of production relations, (44) quite different from feudalism. The dispossession of the old boyar aristocracy that culminated in the sixteenth century under Ivan the Terrible and its forcible integration into an expanded service class would mean that by the late sixteenth century “private property of the means of production became virtually extinct”. (45) “It was the combination of absolute political power with nearly complete control of the country’s productive resources that made the Muscovite monarchy so formidable an institution”. (46)

On the wider canvas that stretches back to the autocracies of the Byzantine and early Islamic worlds, it is the feudal mode of production that appears exceptional. The more widespread pattern was state economy and the regimes based on it, where class relations were configured around the legal fiction of the sovereign as the ‘real’ owner of all the land and the ruler either had no feudal elements to contend with (Muslim Spain) (47) or ruthlessly subordinated such elements on the model of Ivan‘s subversion of the aristocracy. If, with John Haldon, we call these regimes the tributary mode of production, (48) then Muslim societies lay at one extreme of a spectrum of class relationships defined in their case by the absence of an aristocracy in any conventional sense. The ‘Islamic social formation’ (to use M. Acién‘s expression) emerged through conquest and, as Coulson noted, the conquered territories were retained in the “public ownership of the Muslim community”. (49) Marx even believed that it was the Muslims who “first established the principle of ―no property in land‖ throughout the whole of Asia”.(50) Be that as it may, the key institution was the iqta or what the Russian liberal historian Paul Miliukov called the “eastern system of military holdings” which was eventually borrowed by the Muscovite princes in their creation of the pomest’ye in the fifteenth century.(51) With taxation as the general form of ground-rent, the assignment of villages to members of the military élite (amirs, pomeshchiki, etc.) was essentially an assignment of revenue, so that the class relations of tributary production were defined by an inherent instability of property rights. At the other extreme from this tightly centralized model lie India and China but exemplifying a less autocratic pattern in opposite ways. If Tsarism encapsulated the integration of the aristocratic and the service element into a unified Court nobility, Trotsky‘s ‘noble bureaucracy’, (52) but one totally subservient to the ruler [they numbered c.3000 in 1552], (53) then India under the Mughals, coeval with the paroxysm of Absolutism in sixteenth-century Russia, illustrates the falling apart of those elements, a model that juxtaposes a service élite with powerful regional aristocracies that were only loosely integrated into the administration (54) and heavily armed to boot. (55) This was certainly the most conflicted form of the tributary mode, one where Imperial cohesion was irreparably vulnerable to refractory aristocracies. (56) Despite their own internal divisions and amorphousness, the zamindars were an entrenched source of subversion, a perfect counterpoint to the disciplined nobility (mansabdars) that Akbar had created as the backbone of his imperial State. Finally, China saw new landed élites emerge from the ranks of higher officialdom, once the territorial aristocracies of the North had finally disintegrated and a more powerful bureaucratic regime emerged in the great transition from T‘ang to Sung (tenth century). The ‘widespread illegal acquisition of landed properties’ (57) was nothing new in China, and the Sung developments can be seen either as collusion between the bureaucracy and the landed élite or a pattern where powerful landed interests could dominate the government because they were leading members of the official class.(58)

This is hardly the place to rehearse the details of these separate forms of evolution. The key point here is that these variant class patterns describe the different ways in which the tributary mode was configured historically. This matches the point made earlier that the history of the capitalist mode of production is itself best reconstructed as a movement of distinct historical configurations of capitalism, each absorbing the previous one (Marx refers to industrial capital first having to ‘destroy’ commercial capital as an independent form). (59) More importantly, there was sufficient historical connectivity between the different forms and exemplars of the tributary mode for us to call ‘Asiatic production’ (60) an epoch that ran concurrently with feudalism in the West and outlasted it by several centuries till its own eventual dissolution under the unremitting pressure of world capitalism, starting with zamindar rebellions and outright seizure of territory in India, large-scale foreign borrowings by the Ottomans, and so on. But while they lasted, the ‘Asiatic’ or tributary regimes had considerably more vitality than Marx ever attributed to the Asiatic mode.

  1 Poni, Gli aratri e l’economia agraria nel Bolognese dal XVII al XIX secolo.

2 Mertens, Wirtschaftliche und soziale Strukturen zentralmexicanischer Weizenhaciendas aus dem Tal von Atlixco (1890–1912).

3 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 513.

4 Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, 2, p. 302–3.

5 Marx, Capital, vol. 2, p. 554: “In the slave system, the money capital laid out on the purchase of labour-power plays the role of fixed capital in the money form…”.

6 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 940.

7 Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, 2, p. 436.

8 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 345.

9 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 299.

10 Laclau, ‘Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America’, NLR 1/67 (1971), p. 30.

11 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, p. 376.

12 Blackburn, Making, p. 374.

13 Blackburn, Making, pp. 379, 336, 343, 339.

14 Oakes, The Ruling Race, p. xi.

15 Oakes, Slavery and Freedom, p. 55; the reference is Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 345.

16 Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol. 1, p. 302.

17 Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 121.

18 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross (1974).

19 Oakes, The Ruling Race, p. xiii.

20 Smith, Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South, p. 24; Smith is a good introduction to these debates.

21 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 450: “And yet the modern mode of production in its first period, that of manufacture, developed only where the conditions for it had been created in the Middle Ages”.

22 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 247: “World trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century, and from then on the modern history of capital starts to unfold”.

23 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 510–11.

24 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 875–6.

25 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 327.

26 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 916, stating, “Holland was the model capitalist nation of the seventeenth century”.

27 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 918.

28 Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570–1670), p. 231.

29 Pares, Merchants and Planters, p. 24.

30 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, pp. 446–7.

31 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, p. 403.

32 E.g., Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, 3, pp. 468–70.

33 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, pp. 452–3.

34 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 510.

35 Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860, pp. 6–7.

36 Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 336.

37 Anderson, Lineages, p. 201.

38 Anderson, Lineages, p. 218. The subtext is clearly serfdom, but Anderson shows no awareness of Khlebnikov‘s crucial point that the Muscovite serf was more like a “state worker through the intermediacy of the landlord” than a serf in the strictly European sense, cf. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime , p.105.

39 Trotsky, 1905, p. 8.

40 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 1, p. 25.

41 Trotsky, 1905, p. 3: “the Russian revolution bore a character wholly peculiar to itself, a character which was the outcome of the special features of our entire social and historical development”; written in 1907.

42 Anderson, Lineages, p. 402.

43 Cited Madariaga, ‘The Russian Nobility in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, p. 223.

44 Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital: “The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society…Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois society are such totalities of production relations”.

45 Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, pp. 93–4.

46 Pipes, Russia, p. 94.

47 Guichard, Les musulmans de Valence et la Reconquête, xie-xiiie siècles, 2 vols.

48 Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production.

49 Acién Almansa, Entre el Feudalismo y el Islam; Coulson, History of Islamic Law, p. 23.

50 Marx to Engels, 14/6/1853, in Avineri, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, p. 457.

51 Miliukov, Russia and its Crisis, pp. 114–21.

52 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 1, p. 26.

53 Pavlov, ‘Les réformes du milieu du XVIe siècle et l‘évolution structurelle de la noblesse russe’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 46 (2005) p. 96.

54 The duality is best described in John F. Richards‘ classic monograph, Mughal Administration in Golconda (1975).

55 Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy; Richards, ‘Warriors and the State in Early Modern India’, JESHO 47 (2004), pp. 390ff., reviewing Kolff.

56 Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India.

57 Twitchett, Financial Administration under the T’ang Dynasty, p. 10.

58 Ch‘ao-ting Chi, Key Economic Areas in Chinese History, pp. 135–9. 11

59 Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, 3, p. 468.

60 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 452.

Jairus Banaji  is the author of Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation  (Historical Materialism Book Series 25) (Brill, 2010).