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The Human Costs of Economic Growth :: Monthly ReviewImmanuel Wallerstein more on Economics

Immanuel Wallerstein is senior research scholar at Yale University. He is the author, most recently, ofEuropean Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power(The New Press, 2006).

Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital(Lanham, MD:Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 395 + xxiv pages, hardcover, $76, paper, $34.95.

The great debate of social science for the last two centuries at least has been how to account for theextraordinary economic growth of the modern world. We all know the basic picture. The overwhelmingmajority of authors have argued that the story is that of the rise of the West. There have been, however,two opposing versions of this narrative. One is the Whig interpretation of history, which argues that it hasbeen a story of steady social, intellectual, and moral progress whose explanation lies in some particularcharacteristic of the West (often just of England). In this version, the world is reaching its summit ofprogress today. The second version is Marxism, which has argued that the rise of the West is part of alarger story of steady dialectical and conflictual historical development. In this version, the present West-

dominated world order will inevitably be superseded by another phase of historical development, in whichcapitalism will be replaced by communism.

In the last twenty years or so, there has been an important counter-theorization to the rise of the West,which is centered around a discussion of Chinese history. It argues that China had been the center ofsome kind of world system for a very long time, that it was temporarily eclipsed in the last two centuriesby the so-called rise of the West, and that the pendulum is now (inevitably) swinging back to a Chinese-centered world.

Amiya Bagchi does not agree at all with the Whig interpretation of history nor does he really buy theChinese-centric narrative. Instead, he offers us a seriously modified version of the Marxist model. Or toput it in his own words,

this book brings together the insights of the historians of war, and those of Marxist and world-systemtheorists to characterize the emergence and operation of actually existing capitalism as a system thatengages in unlimited combat, backed when necessary by arms, for the conquest of labor power, nonlaborresources, and markets. (xi)

While Bagchi is surely not the first to argue against the idea that markets and free trade are the keyelements of capitalist development, he wants to do more than attack this view as an analytical descriptionof the modern world. He wishes to center his attention on the degree to which economic growth undercapitalism is very poorly correlated with human development, even in the West. His book is an attempt toanalyze in detail the human suffering that has been at the basis of the advantages reaped by the

European ruling classes (xiv).And while he agrees with the Chinese-centric school that the West had no significant economicadvantage over the Chinese and the Indians before the nineteenth century, he takes issue with them ontwo main questions. One is the significance of what happened in the early nineteenth century in theindustrializing countries led by Great Britain. He says that

there is a crucial distinction between a state (such as Qing China) that reins in the drive for unlimitedaccumulation and a social and political order (as in Hanoverian England) that promotes the uncheckedcentralization of economic power and thus facilitates the growth of factory-based industry. (xv)

The second dissent is a sort of so-what argument. Suppose, Bagchi says, that China would have

emerged in the nineteenth century as the supreme economic and military power rather than the West. Itwould have led to the same marginalization and immiseration of vast numbers of people around theworld (xvi), to the benefit of Chinese rather than of Western elites. To what he considers the undialecticalview of Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz based on neoclassical and monetarist economics, Bagchiasserts that

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we cannot regard human history as that of a tournament between different countries vying for the globalmarket nor can we confine our attention to the working of passive market forces. (11)

For Bagchi, capitalism is the culprit, not the West. And the damage it has wreaked has not merely beenone of material spoliation. For Bagchi insists on the damage wreaked by the two dominant ideologies thataccompanied capitalismthat of racism and the civilizing mission (in unbroken continuity from the Iberianconquistadores to the Bush administration) and that of Malthusianism and social Darwinism, whichtranslated into a view that the worlds resources are limited and therefore should/will only be shared by thefittest.

As for the largely Marxist theories of imperialismhe cites specifically Hobson, Hilferding, Luxemburg,Bukharin, and LeninBagchi sums up his disagreements clearly:

I have one major difference from most of the theories I have sketched so briefly. Building partly on thework of Ragnar Nurkse and Matthew Simon, I have shown that the nonwhite colonies were primarilysources of surplus extracted by the capitalist powers and were not destinations of their net investment,except perhaps in certain brief phases. In short, the colonies were not merely objects of conquest; theyalso provided a significant surplus to their colonizers. (271)

Basically, Bagchis whole case is made in a brief preface. The rest of the book gives the supportingevidence for the arguments. Part one lays out his theoretical position and seeks as well to explain the

construction of the concept of the European miracle. Part two reconstructs European history between thesixteenth and eighteenth centuries in order to explain the breakthrough of the West. Part three elaboratesthe kinds of human damage caused in the non-Western world as a result of the triumph of capitalismthroughout the world. Much of the celebration of the European miracle is based on the art of forgetting(81). Part four addresses the dangers facing humankind at the present time as a result of capitalistgrowth.

The strengths of this magisterial work are numerous. Bagchi treats the modern world as a capitalistworld, one that found its origins in Europe in the sixteenth century. In this he is faithful to the vision of Marx.As he says:

I find the notion of capitalism as a mode of production still useful for distinguishing, say, China or India ofthe eighteenth century from England or the Netherlands of the same period. This use is fully consistentwith my occasional use of the idea of hierarchies in the circuits of exchange that Braudel so fruitfullyemployed. (177)

Furthermore, Bagchi analyzes this capitalist world not in terms of how much growth it made possible buthow much human development it made possible, and in this regard he finds it very wanting. One of hisprincipal services to readers is his pulling together of the demographic literature on life expectancy, thepublic health literature on disease prevention and cure, data on nutrition, income levels, and the variousforms of labor coercion to give us a nuanced picture of human development over time and throughout theworld, one that is differentiated by geography, age cohorts, and gender.

He also presents a comprehensive comparative picture of the historical economic development of China,India, and Japan, and their relation to what happened in Europe and North America. It is hard to suggestanother work that does this in as small a space, so clearly, and based on such extensive acquaintancewith the empirical literature.

My one reservation is that, for someone so devoted to dissecting academic myths, Bagchi has paid noattention to the now quite extensive literature that raises into considerable doubt the industrial revolutionas something that occurred primarily in England and primarily at a given moment in time (from the end ofthe eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries).

Actually, he himself throws some cold water on the idea by talking of two, possibly three axial agesthefirst being that of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, the second occurring in the late

nineteenth to early twentieth centuries (and in some places he says only after 1945), and a possible thirdone occurring now. He does say that the improvement in the European standard of living occurs only inhis second axial age. He doesnt really spell out what is supposed to be happening in the third.

But Schumpeter already showed in his book on business cycles that similar axial agesSchumpeterdoes not call them thatcould be found at a number of moments in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

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It is not that machine production is unimportant. It is rather that it has been produced by a series of burstsforward that have been going on continually for four centuries. Just as the West invented the concept ofthe European miracle because it was ideologically useful, there is good reason to believe that the West(more specifically Arnold Toynbee) invented the concept of the single industrial revolution for similarideological purposes.

But, having laid out my one major reserve, I must say it is refreshing to have Bagchis voice added to therather small list of important works on the origins and development of the modern world. The fact that heis an Indian well grounded in Indias own economic history gives him a vantage point on the overall

process that allows him to insert elements into our collective efforts that might otherwise have escapedus. One can only hope that the book will have a wide international reading public.