Imperial Modernity: history and global inequity in rising Asia

Abstract

In the recently generalised historical coincidence of neoliberal free-market policy trends with accelerating global economic growth and inequality, India and China stand out as world regions with distinctive histories of imperial inequity. The rise of Asia shows that globalisation does not work the same way everywhere. In Asia historical dynamics of imperial territorialism generate inequities that fit global patterns through their absorption and mediation of capitalism. Economic reforms that brought Asia into global leadership ranks express imperial forms of power, authority, and inequity whose long histories need to be understood to make sense of Asia and global capitalism today. This article focuses particularly on India.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Ravinder Kaur for her encouragement and patience during therevision of this paper, which was composed for the 2010 ‘Governing Difference’ workshop, supported by the Asian Dynamics Initiative, University of Copenhagen. Some of these ideas appeared initially in the 2006 Wertheim Lecture for the International Institute for Asian Studies at the University of Amsterdam (http://www.iias.nl/asia/wertheim/lectures/WL_Ludden.pdf).

Notes

1 A Kohli, Poverty amid Plenty in the New India, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

2 See K Satchidanandan, ‘That third space: interrogating the diaspora paradigm’, in M Paranjape (ed), In Diaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts, Delhi: Indologue Publishers, 2001, pp 15–24. Thanks to Rosemary George for this reference. See also D Ludden, ‘Maps in the mind and the mobility of Asia’, Journal of Asian Studies, 62 (3), pp 1057–1078; and Ludden, ‘Nameless Asia and territorial angst’, himal South Asian, June 2003, at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/∼dludden/LuddenHIMALmaps1.htm.

3 A Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

4 M Hardt & A Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

5 On ‘licit’ realities, see W van Schendel, ‘Introduction: the making of illicitness’, in W van Schendel & I Abraham (eds), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005, pp 1–37.

6 For a compelling account of this intersection as it appears to a perceptive activist author in India, see A Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, Boston, MA: South End Press, 2004.

7 Focusing on these dynamics in India was the great initial contribution of Subaltern Studies, which, interestingly, began its career at the onset of contemporary trends in globalisation and inequality, and then diverted attention from those trends with its ‘cultural turn’ in the mid-1980s. See D Ludden, Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical Histories, Contested Meanings, and the Globalisation of South Asia, New Delhi/London: Permanent Black/Anthem Press, 2002.

8 M Davis, Planet of Slums, London: Verso, 2006; W van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia, London: Anthem, 2005.

9 L Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

10 See A Miller & AJ Rieber (eds), Imperial Rule, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004.

11 J Burbank & F Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

12 See Ludden, ‘Maps in the mind and the mobility of Asia’.

13 For the implications, see AO Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.

14 M Ravallion, ‘Can high-inequality developing countries escape absolute poverty?’, Economic Letters, 56, 1997, pp 51–57.

15 A good account is SL Engerman & Kenneth L Sokoloff, Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development among New World Economies, nber Working Paper 9259, at http://www.nber.org/papers/w9259, which demonstrates: ‘systematic patterns by which societies in the Americas that began with more extreme inequality or heterogeneity in the population were more likely to develop institutional structures that greatly advantaged members of elite classes (and disadvantaged the bulk of the population) by providing them with more political influence and access to economic opportunities’.

16 This is a basic characteristic of capitalism, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines nicely as ‘an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market’.

17 R Wade, ‘Income inequality: should we worry about global trends?’, European Journal of Development Research, 23, 2011, pp 513–520.

18 United Nations Development Programme (undp), Human Development Report, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992; undp, Human Development Report, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; and United Nations, The Inequality Predicament, New York: United Nations, 2005, p 18.

19 http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/1996/en/pdf/hdr_1996_overview.pdf. See also Gavin Kitching, Seeking Social Justice Through Globalisation, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001, p 175.

20 Congressional Budget Office data, analysed by Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, reported in the New York Times, 5 September 1999.

21 Dollars & Sense and United for a Fair Economy (eds), The Wealth Inequality Reader, New York: Economic Affairs Bureau, p 1.

22 The worst absolute poverty trend is in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average household consumed 20 per cent less in 1998 than 25 years earlier. undp, 1998 Human Development Report, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. However, the most dramatic relative poverty trend is in Latin America, where the number of poor fell in the 1970s, then nearly doubled in the 1980s, and was 33 per cent of the total population in 1997, and not falling despite renewed economic growth. N Birdsall & JL Londono, ‘Asset inequality matters: an assessment of the World Bank's approach to poverty reduction’, American Economic Review, 87(2), 1997, pp 32–37.

23 Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network (saprin), Structural Adjustment: The saprin Report—The Policy Roots of Economic Crisis, Poverty, and Inequality, London: Zed Books, 2004.

24 N Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, New York: Basic Books, 2002; D Lal, In Defense of Empire, Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute Press, 2004.

25 L Pritchett, ‘Divergence, big time’, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1995 at http://ideas.repec.org/e/ppr27.html.

26 See the OpEd section of the New York Times, 9 March 2006, p A23 on Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2003, which analyses child-rearing practices in rich and poor American families.

27 World Bank, World Development Report 2000/1, Washington, DC: World Bank; and undp, Choices for the Poor: Lessons from National Poverty Strategies, March 2001, at http://www.undp.org/dpa/publications/choicesforpoor/ENGLISH/.

28 T Roy, ‘Economic history and modern India: redefining the link’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(3), 2002, pp 109–130.

29 US Department of Commerce, British India, with Notes on Ceylon, Afghanistan, and Tibet, Special Consular Reports, No 72, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1915, p 9.

30 MD Morris, ‘The growth of large-scale industry to 1947’, in D Kumar (ed), The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume II, c 1757–c1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp 569, 576, 609.

31 Annual Statement of the Sea-Borne Trade of British India with the British Empire and Foreign Countries for the Fiscal Year ending 31st March, 1926, Calcutta: Government of India, 1926, Table 10.

32 JE Schwartzberg (ed), A Historical Atlas of South Asia, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978, p 115.

33 See G Balachandran (ed), India and the World Economy, 1850–1950, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003; DM Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in India, 1819–1836, London: IB Tauris, 1995; D Washbrook, ‘Agriculture and industrialization in India’, in P Mathias & A Davis (eds), Agriculture and Industrialization: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996; Washbrook, ‘Changing perspectives on the economic history of India’, unpublished keynote presented to the Economic History Workshop, University of Pennsylvania, 23 April 2006; and D Wasbrook, ‘The Indian economy and the British Empire’, in N Gooptu & DM Peers (eds), Oxford History of the British Empire: India, Oxford: Clarendon Press (forthcoming).

34 A Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. For a recent account of the famine's imperial dimensions, see M Mukerjee, Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II, New York: Basic Books, 2010.

35 G Clark, ‘The great divergence—world economic growth since 1800’, at http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/GlobalHistory/Global%20History-12.pdf; and Clark, ‘One polity, many countries: economic growth in India, 1873–2000’, at http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/210a/readings/One%20Polity.pdf.

36 D Ludden, ‘India's development regime’, in N Dirks (ed), Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992, pp 247–287; Ludden, ‘Development regimes in South Asia: history and the development conundrum’, Economic and Political Weekly, 10 September 2005, pp 4042–4051; and Ludden, ‘A useable past for a post-national present: governance and development in South Asia’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 50(1–2), 2006, pp 259–292.

37 B Milanovic, Half a World: Regional Inequality in Five Great Federations, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, September 2005, at http://www.worldbank.org/research/inequality/pdf/5countries1.pdf.

38 F Bourguignon & C Morrisson, ‘Inequality among world citizens, 1820–1992’, American Economic Review, September 2002, pp 727–744.

39 Clark, ‘The great divergence’, p 28, Figure 2.

40 ‘More or less equal?’, special report on global economic inequality, The Economist, 11 March 2004, at http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2498851.

41 GA Cornia with S Kiiski, ‘Trends in income distribution in the post-World War II period’, unu/wider Discussion Paper No 2001/89, September 2001.

42 Y Zheng, Globalization and State Transformation in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

43 D Ludden (ed), Making India Hindu: Community, Conflict, and the Politics of Democracy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.

44 For a recent example, see The Men Who Would Conquer China, a First Run Icarus film about how a US–Hong Kong business partnership bought state-owned Chinese companies.

45 See Ludden, ‘Development regimes in South Asia’; and Ludden, ‘A useable past for a post-national present’.

46 For Pakistan, see M Sokefeld, ‘From colonialism to postcolonialism: changing modes of domination in the northern areas of Pakistan’, Journal of Asian Studies, 64(4), 2005 pp 939–974.

47 T Besley & R Burgess, ‘Land reform, poverty reduction, and growth: evidence from India’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115(2), 2002, pp 389–430. For a descriptive account of policy trends, see FR Frankel, India's Political Economy, 1947–2004: The Gradual Revolution, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.

48 A Banerjee & L Iyer, ‘History, institutions and economic performance: the legacy of colonial land tenure systems in India’, October 2004, at http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/download_pdf.php?id=517. I thank Yuthika Sharma for this reference.

49 See Kohli, Poverty amid Plenty in the New India. For concurrent trends in cultural politics, see Ludden, Making India Hindu.

50 A Kishore, ‘Towards an Indian approach’, in D Gruen & T O'Brien, Globalisation, Living Standards, and Inequality: Recent Progress and Continuing Challenges, Sydney, Australia: Reserve Bank of Australia, 2002, p 126, at http://www.rba.gov.au/publications/conf/2002/kishore.pdf, accessed 10 December 2009.

51 BB Bhattacharya & S Sakthivel, ‘Regional growth and disparity in India: comparison of pre- and post-reform decades’, Economic and Political Weekly, 6 March 2004, pp 1071–1077. See also NJ Kurian, ‘Widening regional disparities in India: some indicators’, Economic and Political Weekly, 12–18 February 2000, pp 538–550.

52 Milanovic, Half a World; and Milanovic, ‘Social justice and stalled development: caste empowerment and the breakdown of governance in Bihar’, Philadelphia, PA: Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, 2006.

53 See A Deaton & J Dreze, Poverty and Inequality in India: A Reexamination, Working Paper No 107, Centre for Development Economics, New Delhi, 2002; J Ghosh, ‘Income inequality in India’, at http://pd.cpim.org/2004/0215/02152004_eco.htm; and A Deaton & V Kozel (eds), The Great Indian Poverty Debate, Delhi: Macmillan, 2005.

54 G Datt & M Ravallion, ‘Is India's economic growth leaving the poor behind?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(3), 2002, pp 103–106 state that cross-country regressions support the idea that several factors explain why growth reduces poverty in some places, for some people, more than others: ‘credit market imperfections and greater initial inequality of assets (particularly of land)’, ‘low educational attainment’, urban–rural sector divisions in ‘dualistic’ labour markets, They reiterate their earlier conclusion, from M Ravallion & G Datt, ‘Why has economic growth been more pro-poor in some states of India than others?’, World Bank Economic Review, 8(1), 2002, pp 1–25, that some conditions in Indian states in 1960—eg average farm yield, ratio of urban to rural average consumption, proportion of the state's landless population, literacy rate, and mortality rate—‘are significant predictors of the elasticity of poverty with respect to growth’. They find that poor initial conditions in rural development ‘inhibited the prospects of the poor participating in growth of the nonagricultural sector’ (p 104). They particularly emphasise ‘the role played by initial literacy’, noting ‘India's relatively poor performance in expanding literacy’ and the fact that Kerala's high literacy rate largely explains its success in poverty reduction.

55 J Assayag, The Making of Democratic Inequality : Caste, Class, Lobbies and Politics in Contemporary India, 1880–1995, Pondichery: Institut Français de Pondichery, 1995.

56 For China, a large proportion of inter-regional inequality can be explained by urban–rural disparities. AS Bhalla, S Yao & Z Zhang, ‘Causes of inequalities in China’, Journal of International Development, 15, 2003, pp 133–152; and R Kanbur & X Zhang, ‘Fifty years of regional inequality in China: a journey through central planning, reform, and openness’, cited in Milanovic, Half a World.

57 Deaton & Dreze, Poverty and Inequality in India. Datt & Ravallion, ‘Is India's economic growth leaving the poor behind?’, note that the two richest states in the 1980s (Punjab and Haryana) hit a low-growth trend in the 1990s but that, leaving these two states out, ‘there is a strong positive relationship between level of gdp in the mid-1980s and growth rate in the 1990s; that is, there is divergence between per capita gdp among all but the richest states in India’ (p 97).

58 D Ludden (ed), Agricultural Production and South Asian History, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.

59 Datt & Ravallion, ‘Is India's growth leaving the poor behind?’, pp 97–98.

60 Being out of the globalisation loop may not be so bad, as incorporation is exceptionally destructive for livelihoods and environments on these far peripheries and frontiers of imperial nations based in the lowlands. For a wider view of economies on the margins, see van Schendel & Abraham, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things.

61 MG de la Rocha & A Grinspun, ‘Private adjustments: households, crisis, and work’, in undp, Choices for the Poor, ch 3.

62 ‘Disparities in inequality’, at http://www.indiatogether.org/2003/mar/wom-states.htm; and DM Siddiqi, ‘Miracle worker or woman-machine? Tracking (trans)national realities in Bangladeshi factories’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27 May 2000, pp L11–L17.

63 I Ali & Y Sikand, ‘Survey of socio-economic conditions of Muslims in India’, at http://www.countercurrents.org/comm-sikand090206.htm; The Sachar Committee Report, Government of India, Ministry for Minority Affairs, Delhi, 2006. On Muslim women, see Z Hasan & R Menon, Unequal Citizens: Muslim Women in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.

64 S Adnan, Migration, Land Alienation, and Ethnic Conflict: Causes of Poverty in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, Dhaka: Research and Advisory Services, 2004.

65 MA Reddy, Lands and Tenants in South India: A Study of Nellore District 1850–1990, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996; and D Ludden, Peasant History in South India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.

66 For a broad view, see D Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

67 J Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. For the USA, see L Uchitelle, The Disposable American: Layoffs and their Consequences, New York: Knopf, 2006.

68 Datt & Ravallion, ‘Is India's economic growth leaving the poor behind?’, p 100.

69 For updated readings of Polanyi, see A Bugra & K Agartan (eds), Reading Karl Polanyi for the Twenty-First Century: Market Economy as a Political Project, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.

70 The effectiveness in reducing poverty of egalitarian state policies that shift power over resources down the class ranks is well demonstrated by the Indian state of Kerala, where the poverty rate was as high as that of India's poorest state, Bihar, in 1960, but less than half by 1990. Datt & Ravallion, ‘Is India's economic growth leaving the poor behind?’, p 98. Thus for promoting poverty reduction, Datt and Ravallion conclude that, in addition to economic growth, ‘The sectoral and geographic composition of growth is also important, as is the need to redress existing inequalities in human resource development and between urban and rural areas’ (p 106).