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Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital
In this innovative and ambitious global history, distinguished economic historian Amiya Kumar Bagchi critically analyzes the processes leading to the rise of the West since the sixteenth century to its current position as the most prosperous and powerful group of nations in the world. Integrating the history of armed conflict with the history of competition for trade, investment, and markets, Bagchi explores the human consequences for people both within and outside the region. He characterizes the emergence and operation of capitalism as a system driven by wars over resources and markets rather than one that genuinely operates on the principle of free markets. In tracing this history, he also charts what happened to the people who came under its sway during the last five centuries.
Bagchi thus broadens our understanding of the nature and history of capitalism and challenges the fetishism of commodities that limits the perspective of most economic historians. The book also challenges the Eurocentrism that still underlies the conceptual framework of many mainstream historians, joining earlier narratives that chronicle the history of human beings as living persons rather than as puppets serving the abstract cause of "economic growth."
His unflinching examination of the human costs of development—not only in the colonial periphery but in the core nations—includes not only economic processes and issues of inequality within and among nations but also the intertwining of economics and war-making on a world scale. The book also contributes to our knowledge of how and in what sequence human health has been shaped by public health care, sanitation, modern medicine, income levels and nutrition. Written with extraordinary range and depth, Perilous Passage will change the ways in which we think about many of the largest issues in world history and development.
Bagchi thus broadens our understanding of the nature and history of capitalism and challenges the fetishism of commodities that limits the perspective of most economic historians. The book also challenges the Eurocentrism that still underlies the conceptual framework of many mainstream historians, joining earlier narratives that chronicle the history of human beings as living persons rather than as puppets serving the abstract cause of "economic growth."
His unflinching examination of the human costs of development—not only in the colonial periphery but in the core nations—includes not only economic processes and issues of inequality within and among nations but also the intertwining of economics and war-making on a world scale. The book also contributes to our knowledge of how and in what sequence human health has been shaped by public health care, sanitation, modern medicine, income levels and nutrition. Written with extraordinary range and depth, Perilous Passage will change the ways in which we think about many of the largest issues in world history and development.
422 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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About the author
Amiya Kumar Bagchi
40 books14 followersAmiya Kumar Bagchi was an Indian political economist.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 6, 2024
History of Capitalism 101…
Preamble:
--This book is my foundation.
…Why study history? The critical approach I find most meaningful:
i) treat history as a dynamic social laboratory full of real-world experiments (note: real-world is not ideal, so we have to first consider context)
ii) observe the range of human potentials; learn from successes/failures
iii) theorize how change occurs and then consider our own actions: “where do we go from here?” (MLK Jr.)/“what is to be done?” (Lenin).
…Prior to starting this book, I went through the best of Western critical intros:
i) foreign policy: Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
ii) capitalism: Varoufakis’ Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
…Despite being staunch critics of imperialism, these intros naturally centered around Western sources. So, the next step was to synthesize Global South perspectives. Vijay Prashad (The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World) caught my attention with his engaging lectures.
…and then I came across Bagchi’s masterpiece.
Highlights:
1) What to Measure?:
--When there is rising cost of living/unemployment/homelessness/addiction on a degrading planet, but the news tells us the stock market is doing great, we must reconsider the measurements and their underlying goals:
a) Economic growth:
--Mainstream economists, educated as professional sociopaths, normalize economic growth as the key measure for the health of the “economy” (where capitalism is assumed as a given). The rest of the review will examine if this correlates with the health of the public/planet.
b) Human development:
--Historians have more obvious measures, starting with human needs (picture “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs”). The base is physiological needs (good health), which many non-sociopathic scholars study directly (physical anthropologists/demographers/medical historians/nutrition specialists etc.). This can be divided into:
i) Nutrition/resistance to disease (individual-level):
--Crucial measures here include mother/newborn health: infant mortality rate (IMR), maternal mortality, gender disparity, etc.
--Numerous socioeconomic factors (consumption level/income) are obviously important but may be challenging to build from older historical records. In such cases, a useful measure may be height (referencing Richard H. Steckel), which is often recorded for various administrative reasons.
--It takes careful considerations to build important measures like morbidity/mortality/life expectancy.
ii) Disease environment (environment-level):
--Clean water/air have many crucial factors: sanitation/prophylaxis (ex. sewage disposal/hygiene/vaccinations), agricultural/industrial pollution, home/work conditions (including safety, the next layer in Maslow’s hierarchy), etc.
--After these foundational survival needs comes cognitive/personality development (from belonging and love), political autonomy/civic freedom/community (literacy/education/participation/social values), etc.
2) Pre-capitalist Civilizations: “Tyrants” vs. Oligarchs?:
--Bagchi starts with the immediate context preceding European colonization, rather than longer histories (A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium) or prehistory (Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior).
--Bagchi focuses on dispelling the Eurocentric view of “oriental despotism” which frames Asian civilizations as stuck in history (while somehow simultaneously framing Europe’s absolutist states as a progressive stage towards capitalism), with the docile Oriental masses ruled by central tyrants.
--Precapitalist producers were not separated from their means of production and had certain rights to what they produce. Private property rights did exist, but embedded in various social regulations and responsibilities; peasants may have certain security from debt-induced evictions.
...Here, we are not trying to romanticize pre-capitalist hierarchies; long-term rulers (before capitalism’s short-term volatility and increased abstraction) had more direct incentives to preserve social cohesion and not have their peasants fall into debt bondage so they can provide their tribute of agricultural harvest, pay taxes, serve as soldiers, reproduce healthy future generations (pre-capitalist labour relied on population growth, whereas capitalism's freedoms from social responsibilities forced increased migration to try and keep up with capital movement), etc. Similarly, Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years) writes:
…Since the 6th century, Chinese state recruitment relied on competitive exams to enforce a level of meritocracy against oligarchy. Unsurprisingly, such incentive structures led to pioneering the welfare state long before Europe. A key innovation was the “ever-normal granary”, which served as public reserves for famine relief and regulated market prices against speculators. Widespread since Tang (618-907), this social service was maintained during stable administrations. Qing invested in agriculture via fertilizers/irrigation/water transport and control. Ming had already adopted smallpox vaccination (Western Europe had to wait until the 18th century), and community hygiene (ex. boiling water) was widespread.
…As for environmental health, Bagchi considers the tensions in elitist conservationism, as well as commercialization depletion vs. sustainability innovations. Since agriculture was dominated by small-holding peasants, there was a stronger incentive for planning long-term sustainability.
…see the comments below for rest of the review:
3) Capitalism: European Oligarchy’s Military-Industrial Complex
4) Asian Markets, European Appetites
5) Colonial Triangles, Imperialist Wars
6) “European Miracle”?
7) Capitalism’s Contradictions
Preamble:
--This book is my foundation.
…Why study history? The critical approach I find most meaningful:
i) treat history as a dynamic social laboratory full of real-world experiments (note: real-world is not ideal, so we have to first consider context)
ii) observe the range of human potentials; learn from successes/failures
iii) theorize how change occurs and then consider our own actions: “where do we go from here?” (MLK Jr.)/“what is to be done?” (Lenin).
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.--Despite being my top priority book for the past 6 years, I’m embarrassed to only finish it now. My only excuse is it’s an academic book and I get distracted.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
-Hélder Câmara
…Prior to starting this book, I went through the best of Western critical intros:
i) foreign policy: Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
ii) capitalism: Varoufakis’ Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
…Despite being staunch critics of imperialism, these intros naturally centered around Western sources. So, the next step was to synthesize Global South perspectives. Vijay Prashad (The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World) caught my attention with his engaging lectures.
…and then I came across Bagchi’s masterpiece.
Highlights:
1) What to Measure?:
--When there is rising cost of living/unemployment/homelessness/addiction on a degrading planet, but the news tells us the stock market is doing great, we must reconsider the measurements and their underlying goals:
a) Economic growth:
--Mainstream economists, educated as professional sociopaths, normalize economic growth as the key measure for the health of the “economy” (where capitalism is assumed as a given). The rest of the review will examine if this correlates with the health of the public/planet.
b) Human development:
--Historians have more obvious measures, starting with human needs (picture “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs”). The base is physiological needs (good health), which many non-sociopathic scholars study directly (physical anthropologists/demographers/medical historians/nutrition specialists etc.). This can be divided into:
i) Nutrition/resistance to disease (individual-level):
--Crucial measures here include mother/newborn health: infant mortality rate (IMR), maternal mortality, gender disparity, etc.
--Numerous socioeconomic factors (consumption level/income) are obviously important but may be challenging to build from older historical records. In such cases, a useful measure may be height (referencing Richard H. Steckel), which is often recorded for various administrative reasons.
--It takes careful considerations to build important measures like morbidity/mortality/life expectancy.
ii) Disease environment (environment-level):
--Clean water/air have many crucial factors: sanitation/prophylaxis (ex. sewage disposal/hygiene/vaccinations), agricultural/industrial pollution, home/work conditions (including safety, the next layer in Maslow’s hierarchy), etc.
--After these foundational survival needs comes cognitive/personality development (from belonging and love), political autonomy/civic freedom/community (literacy/education/participation/social values), etc.
2) Pre-capitalist Civilizations: “Tyrants” vs. Oligarchs?:
--Bagchi starts with the immediate context preceding European colonization, rather than longer histories (A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium) or prehistory (Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior).
--Bagchi focuses on dispelling the Eurocentric view of “oriental despotism” which frames Asian civilizations as stuck in history (while somehow simultaneously framing Europe’s absolutist states as a progressive stage towards capitalism), with the docile Oriental masses ruled by central tyrants.
--Precapitalist producers were not separated from their means of production and had certain rights to what they produce. Private property rights did exist, but embedded in various social regulations and responsibilities; peasants may have certain security from debt-induced evictions.
...Here, we are not trying to romanticize pre-capitalist hierarchies; long-term rulers (before capitalism’s short-term volatility and increased abstraction) had more direct incentives to preserve social cohesion and not have their peasants fall into debt bondage so they can provide their tribute of agricultural harvest, pay taxes, serve as soldiers, reproduce healthy future generations (pre-capitalist labour relied on population growth, whereas capitalism's freedoms from social responsibilities forced increased migration to try and keep up with capital movement), etc. Similarly, Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years) writes:
Over and over we hear the same familiar story: peasants down on their luck, whether due to natural disaster or the need to pay for a parent’s funeral—would fall into the hands of predatory lenders, who would seize their fields and houses, forcing them to work or pay rent in what had once been their own lands; the threat of rebellion would then drive the government to institute a dramatic program of reforms.…I’m also reminded of Michael Hudson’s framing of civilizations (The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point), where political “tyrants” (visible; long-term administration with incentive for social cohesion’s stability) have been a means of countering economic oligarchs (better hidden in abstraction, engaging in short-term predatory behaviors, esp. usurers i.e. money lenders) who reduce the masses to debt bondage. Once more, Graeber writes:
[…] China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites--though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamental selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world--even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.--Eurocentric history assume China was caught in a “high-level equilibrium trap”, i.e. huge economy but minimal growth. Bagchi reveals dynamism from late-Ming (1368-1644) to Qing (1644 up to 1860 Second Opium War). Once again, the tyrant vs. oligarchy dynamic was at play; Qing rulers countered the nobility by promoting small-holding peasant proprietorship. This, combined with regulated markets (prevent debt bondage/speculators), led to high agricultural productivity, building the surplus to allow economic diversity.
…Since the 6th century, Chinese state recruitment relied on competitive exams to enforce a level of meritocracy against oligarchy. Unsurprisingly, such incentive structures led to pioneering the welfare state long before Europe. A key innovation was the “ever-normal granary”, which served as public reserves for famine relief and regulated market prices against speculators. Widespread since Tang (618-907), this social service was maintained during stable administrations. Qing invested in agriculture via fertilizers/irrigation/water transport and control. Ming had already adopted smallpox vaccination (Western Europe had to wait until the 18th century), and community hygiene (ex. boiling water) was widespread.
…As for environmental health, Bagchi considers the tensions in elitist conservationism, as well as commercialization depletion vs. sustainability innovations. Since agriculture was dominated by small-holding peasants, there was a stronger incentive for planning long-term sustainability.
…see the comments below for rest of the review:
3) Capitalism: European Oligarchy’s Military-Industrial Complex
4) Asian Markets, European Appetites
5) Colonial Triangles, Imperialist Wars
6) “European Miracle”?
7) Capitalism’s Contradictions
October 23, 2015
Covering the same historiographical territory as the world systems guys (Wallerstein, Amin, Arrighi) but with the imperial core de-centred. Condensed world history but pretty detailed, with fantastically useful footnotes. For the US educated leftist who is not a specialist of the periphery, a lot of the directions Bagchi points the reader in re:scholarship will be new.
to-keep-reference
March 22, 2016Sobre como el proceso de expropiación capitalista destruyó la capacidad de producción industrial de China e India.
Citado en La Crisis Pág.68-69
Citado en La Crisis Pág.68-69
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews