From chapter 2 of "Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital" by Amiya Kumar Bagchi (a review of this book by Immanuel Wallerstein is scheduled to appear in an upcoming MR.)
As we have seen, the Eurocentric historians portray the record of Europe's internal ascent and its outdistancing of the rest of the world as a much more ancient history than it actually is. There is little evidence that European records of human survival, health, consumption, or incomes were in advance of major Asian countries before the nineteenth century. Most of the advances in the crude indicators of human development were registered in Europe only from the late eighteenth century. Even in England, the homeland of the first industrial revolution, the changeover to factory methods was not attended immediately with an improvement in consumption and nutrition of the ordinary people. The grandiose invocation of a "consumer revolution" in eighteenth-century England by McKendrick has not stood up to serious empirical scrutiny. As far as ordinary men, women, and children working in the fields, factories, and mines were concerned, the Industrial Revolution turned out to be an "industrious revolution" (to use a characterization of De Vries 1993, pp. 117-18). The industriousness was induced by poverty as well as the prospect of making a living by producing goods for the expanding market. The greater industriousness of workers was in many instances associated with worse states of nutrition, poorer physique, and shorter lives. In the phase of domination of merchant capital and so-called protoindustrialization, this also involved more work by women and children working under a putting-out system.
The Eurocentric historians have mystified the growth of private property rights in Europe itself. Common property rights held sway over a very large part of the cultivated land and forests in most countries of Europe until the final triumph of capitalism in the nineteenth century. Private property in land and goods had been recognized in most of the older settled civilizations of Eurasia. In India private property rights were recognized in the times of Gautama Buddha, that is, fifth century B.C. and probably earlier. Moreover, the victory of Europe over the rest of the world owed much more to intra-European military conflict and the resultant advance in the arts of war than to the protection of property rights as such. It is the marriage between the pursuit of profit and the arts of warfare, rather than firm protection of private property rights, that has to be credited with European conquests. Furthermore, the protection of property rights at home very often went hand in hand with trampling rights to property, liberty, and lives of conquered peoples. But as in Europe, also in settled Asian lands such as India, common property rights and overlapping-very often hierarchical-property rights coexisted with exclusive property rights of individuals, communities, and corporations. This generated a mosaic rather than a map of lands clearly demarcated as exclusively common property or unmistakably private property of designated individuals.
Those who idealize the working of the market tend to underestimate the role of preexisting bastions of privilege in facilitating the concentration of wealth and power under capitalist rules of the game. It is well-known, for example, that through the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and the civil wars of the seventeenth century, a class of landlords came to power in Britain that increased its wealth and power further in the eighteenth century. By various devices such as primogeniture, strict settlement at the time of marriage, and entail, this class tried to prevent subdivision of their property and would impede the working of the land market when it threatened their hold on landed property. One of the weirdest devices used by them to retain their stranglehold on large properties was that of the so-called equity of redemption. Under this legal doctrine, which gathered strength between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even after a landlord had mortgaged his property, was unable to repay his debt to the mortgagee, and his property was foreclosed, he retained the right to reclaim his property at some future date. Hence the land market remained heavily biased in favor of incumbent landlords. On the other side of the coin, in nonwhite colonies such as India, in which private property rights already existed, the British conquerors generally subverted the rights of native proprietors and replaced them with much more insecure tenures, contingent on a regular payment of tribute to the new rulers. In countries in which private property in land had not yet appeared, the British colonizers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at first transplanted many features of a feudal tenure, seeking to create a land-based white aristocracy. When freehold tenure was introduced in any nonwhite dependency, it was restricted almost exclusively to ownership by Europeans. So the much-vaunted institution of private property rights was racially tinted whenever European conquerors had a free hand. For all these reasons and for the cultural associations that went with them (such as the value placed on ancestry, hunting and sport, going to the right school, and a paradoxical disdain for the trade that fueled capitalist colonialism), British capitalism has been styled "gentlemanly capitalism" by Cain and Hopkins (1986). This story or the story of how the health, education, and purchasing power of the British working people could be ultimately improved only through struggles for democracy, the suspension of the freedom of contract, and extensive state or municipal action is generally overlooked in Eurocentric historiography.
That historiography also minimizes the destructive impact that much of European enterprise had on the rest of the world and also the contribution made by the forced extraction of resources from other continents to the development of human capabilities in Europe. Genocide has an old history among humankind (Diamond 1992,1998). But it is not to be excused just because it has an old history. In many lands, genocide was a systemic outcome of the spread of actually existing capitalism, and some of it was deliberately engineered by the advancing troops of capital. Some of the destruction enhanced the power of the conquistadores and merchants. However, some of the destruction of life, social cohesion, or ecology was a deadweight loss that benefited nobody but could not be stopped because of the very logic of profit-seeking capital and power-seeking ruling classes. The destruction of so-called natural economies did not always or even in the majority of cases lead to the growth of new economic structures that made people richer, longer-lived, or freer. The changes wrought by the onslaught of European capital also left legacies that rendered productivity-raising or freedom-enhancing transformations that much harder for vast numbers of people. Racism, for example, has remained as a permanent legacy of chattel slavery inflicted on Africans by European capital. The caste system in India acquired a new rigidity under the kind of law and order without prosperity or freedom that became a hallmark of British rule in India. Landlordism in India and Latin America inherited from the nineteenth century or earlier has continued to hinder the freedom and development of hundreds of millions of people. The ideology of capitalism in its pure form was all the time mocked by the actual developments under the hegemony of European, North American (and Japanese) capital.
This book addresses issues primarily in the domains of the economy and the state and the questions of mortality and survival, literacy, and education. But I also note the pattern and variety of moments in the history of the civilizing mission as conceived by the European conquerors.
Not only the Eurocentric historians but some of the nativist critics of Orientalism tend to ignore these uglier aspects of the civilizing mission. Certainly, religion and science have been extensively used for achieving ideological hegemony and securing legitimacy over non-European peoples. But material and coercive correlatives and their resultant evils have undergirded such discursive manifestations of the civilizing mission. Moreover, similar iniquities were inflicted on their own peoples by European property owners and power holders.
Edward Said's ringing denunciation of Orientalism is also a rebuttal of the Eurocentric view of human affairs. Orientalism and the construction of the West or the essence of being, say, English shaped the way Europeans wrote the history of their own peoples. These constructions were in turn intertwined with theories that justified colonial conquests or opposed them, often by invoking the principles of free trade or liberalism . These theorists were often involved in contradictions, because they were examining a contradictory and complex phenomenon going on through centuries. For example, the great novelist Joseph Conrad wrote of the cruelty and barbarity in Belgian Congo, which King Leopold held as his personal domain, in The Heart of Darkness. In Nostromo the theme was the sordidness and romance of prospecting for precious metals in South America. But he also wanted the civilization of the West to be purged of the kind of cloak-and-dagger politics portrayed in The Secret Agent. By implication, the lands of Europe populated by Slavs, including Poland, Conrad's country of origin, would be outside the West, as constructed by him. But the countries settled by Europeans outside Europe would be included. Thus the Western civilization in his account is not synonymous with European civilization but a construct limited to a certain style of functioning of states and societies. Perhaps he had only England and its overseas offshoots in mind?
The economic historians and publicists who have come forward as the new champions of the glory of European culture have adopted Conrad's construction of the West. But they would not acknowledge the depredations of the likes of Kurtz as part of the same legacy of the Europe they have embraced. The new phase of Eurocentrism seems to have been inspired, on the one hand, by the experience of the so-called golden age of capitalism (roughly 1950-1973) and more recently and paradoxically, by the patent failure of the Eurocentric, free-market project in most countries outside the North Atlantic seaboard. The dogmatic believers in the virtues of an unrestrained market are trying to explain away these failures by invoking the myth of a unique European culture that the non-European peoples are unable to emulate.
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