Abstract
Through his exhaustive study of Gujurat and Mysore in the period from the 17th century to the early 19th century, Kaveh Yazdani is able to review the history of Mughal and post-Mughal India. Through a comprehensive analysis of these two regions, he attempts to understand the history of the sub-continent in the light of recent revisionist scholarship which seeks to acknowledge both the progress of India in this period and the reasons behind the Great Divergence between East and West. In the post-Mughal period, Gujurat was a highly fragmented region with a strong merchant class and Mysore a tightly centralized kingdom, and Yazdani takes both these regions as case studies. He demonstrates that in terms of agricultural progress, living standards, development of transport and infrastructure, military capabilities, commercial and manufacturing capacity and the social mobility of the middle class; these two areas did not compare unfavourably to West. On the contrary, in terms of the development of rational science, new technology, property rights and institutional efficiency, Indian development lagged behind. As a result, Yazdani offers the reader a major piece of research which adds to the growing body of historical scholarship which challenges the Western assumption of Indian stagnation.
In this study, Yazdani’s methodology is an eclectic mix of Marxism, the Annales paradigm, world-systems analysis and post-colonialism. Indeed, in the course of his study he brings to bear an impressive awareness of some of the major theoretical and historiographical issues in contemporary scholarship which greatly increases the value of his local investigations Above all, he works with the concept of modernity which he associates with the rise of the bourgeoisie both in the East and West. Distancing himself from Eurocentrism, he insists on the necessity of delinking modernity from a European trajectory. Rather, modernity represented a global shift with many different sources in Eurasia and Africa. Rejecting the Eurocentric concept of the Middle Ages, he sees modernity as not dating from 1500 A.D. but rather 1000 A.D., and as including the advance of China, Central Asia, South Asia and the Middle East as well as Europe. State-building as well as agricultural innovation, commercial and manufacturing growth and urbanization characterize all these regions. Yazdani conceives modernity as tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie and even to the emergence of a world market. We conclude that his non-European formulation of the notion of modernity is of some historical value.
On the contrary, such a conception runs the risk of occluding Marx’s and our own understanding of the origins and history of capitalism based on the idea of a revolutionary break. Marx did not use the word ‘modernity’, but he did capture its novel and world-changing character in certain breath-taking and unforgettable passages of the Communist Manifesto (‘all things solid melt into air’). But Yazdani shows little understanding of Marx’s conception of modernity, which is integrally connected to his understanding of capitalism rooted in the fate of the producers and importance of primitive accumulation, the sale of labour power as a commodity and of accumulation reflecting the cumulative expansion of value. He fails thereby to grasp how important the rupture in 1500 was to global history.
Rather than stressing the importance of the idea of modernity, Yazdani would have done better to work with the Marxist concept of the mode of production, whose importance he at least briefly acknowledges. Marx used it to make clear the decisive difference between the capitalist mode of production and other modes. Including the means as well as relations of production, Marx understood the capitalist mode of production as entailing a dramatic change in the relations of production in the first instance and subsequently a transformation in the means of production. For him, the emergence of wage labour and capitalist control of the means of production were determinative in that together they made possible accumulation. At the same time, Marx also referred to the feudal, slave, petty, Asiatic and socialist modes of production among other ones.
It was Louis Althusser who showed how the concept of mode of production could be historicized by positing that different modes of production could co-exist in the same social formation with one being dominant. Thus, in Western Europe capitalism developed in the interstices of the still dominant feudal mode of production. Yazdani uses this approach in his discussion of the Indian social formation, but he fails to employ it to clarify the distinction between the capitalist and other modes of production. Rather, he deploys it awkwardly in such a way as to further muddy the waters of our comprehension of the Indian social formation. In the first place, he admits that he is in no position to determine which of the pre-capitalist modes of production characterized India. He then adds to the confusion by suggesting that India went through several modes in the course of its history and that in the modern period several modes co-existed without telling us which one predominated. Still, it is gratifying that unlike some Indian historians who run away from the concept, he is prepared to admit that in certain times and regions the Asiatic mode might have played an important role. Indeed, French Marxist anthropologists have demonstrated how important the concept of the Asiatic mode is to an understanding of the global historical process and to comprehending the development of class-based society.
The concept of mode of production is important in another sense as well. Yazdani has an affinity with the post-colonial school in that in his work he is constantly measuring India in terms of the economic success of the capitalist West rather than understanding India in its own terms. I would suggest that such a perspective is becoming increasingly dubious.
In these times of sweeping historical change, including growing social inequality, economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, the rise of Japan, China and India, and growing disenchantment with the consequences of unlimited economic growth, a historical viewpoint which harps on economic growth and which takes the achievements of the West as its measure seems increasingly beside the point or even an intellectual trap. What difference does it make to the future of humanity whether the West beat the rest of the world in the race towards capitalism when growth itself has become the problem? Or even if it should happen that Asian capitalism might catch up and surpass that of the West. This is an approach that can concern only the organic intellectuals of capitalism whether in the East or West. There is a growing understanding that humankind is on the threshold of momentous change for better or worse. What is of concern is finding the means of overcoming the capitalist mode of production and its growth obsession and making the transition to the socialist mode with its commitment not to endless growth but to material sufficiency and democracy. In this light, what is necessary is to turn the spotlight back to the study of modes of production as defined by Marx. Understanding the dynamics of the different modes of production and the dynamics of economic provision within them, how they evolved within successive social formations and how the transition from one mode of production to another was made ought to be the priority of a forward-looking scholarship. Study of the achievement of or approximations to capitalist modernity at this point appears increasingly unsatisfactory.