Commercialism
and Capitalism
(An
essay composed originally for the Indira Gandhi Open University Economic
History Syllabus)
David Ludden
What is commercialisation?
Commerce is market exchange, the trading of things
with intermediary media called “money.”
In the social relations of commercial exchange, the value of money
establishes exchange values, or “prices,” for things called “commodities,”
which may have other values, based for example, in culture and nutrition, but
only their relative market values appear in the calculations that organize
commercial transactions where people buy and sell things for money.
Commercialisation is a historical process that turns
more things into commodities, brings more people into market exchange, makes
more social transactions commercial transactions, and interprets more of the
value of things through pricing. Commercialisation pervades societies with
commodities, expands the geographical reach of commerce, and makes markets more
pervasive in everyday life.
Commercialisation transforms human experience by establishing commercial
transactions in settings where markets had previously been absent or
unimportant.
Culture, society and commerce
To study commercialisation, we can imagine a spectrum
of social settings, on one end of which, there is no commerce, as for example,
in transactions between a nursing mother and her newborn child, and on the
other end of which, markets organize all transactions, as on a stock
exchange. We can also imagine this
spectrum spatially, as being composed of places, like isolated villages, with
little commerce, and others, like cities and suburbs, with a lot. Over time, commercialisation increases the
proportion of market transactions in social life and social space.
Moving up the scale of commercialisation implicates
culture as well as economic life. Creating markets requires making rules to
govern the possession, or ownership, of items held as property and exchanged
for money. Commercial actors must also
agree about procedures for measuring exchange values. Such shared understandings about the
conduct of commerce comprise its cultural content, and we can use
“commercialism” to denote any combination of ideas, symbols, values, rules, and
institutions that forms the cultural basis of market exchange.
Commercialism often includes people with different
cultural identities, defined by ethnicity, language, and religion, because
people often share understandings about market exchange despite other
differences. Yet each culture also gives commercialism distinctive features, by
giving things symbolic values that inform prices, by forming bonds of trust and
credit-worthiness, and by legitimating political institutions and social power
relations that form effective rules of ownership and legitimate social
exchange. Rulers mint money, define property
rights, adjudicate disputes, punish violations, and establish official
measurements. Cultural elites engage
commerce in and across cultural boundaries, using assets acquired through
trade, gifts, plunder, theft, tribute, and taxation. People with power and authority make implicit
rules as well as explicit laws that govern the possession and exchange of
commodities. [Appadurai 1986; Curtin 1984; Gregory 1997; Ludden 1996; Rudner
1994]
Many if not most social transactions operate without
recourse to money and markets. How we
understand this realm of non-commercial exchange influences how we understand
the conditions under which commercialisation occurs and its impact on social
environments.
One method is to classify societies according to their
dominant form of social exchange. Using this method, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and
others depict societies dominated by communal, feudal, and despotic social
relations, which allow commerce a marginal role. Theorists thus identify
societies that inhabit the low end of the spectrum of commercialisation, and
argue that moving such societies up the scale of commercialisation involves a
fundamental transformation of a social structure, a dramatic disjuncture, which
generates new social structures characterized by increasingly prevalent market
exchange. [Hobsbawm 1964; Avineri 1969; Weber 1947]
Another method is to analyze the range of exchange
relationships in society. Using this method, Karl Polanyi defined two forms of
non-commercial exchange, called “reciprocity” and “redistribution.” In reciprocal exchange, transactions among
individuals express feelings of mutual obligation, and in redistributive
exchange, people deliver goods and services to a central authority for
redistribution according to established rules of entitlement. E.P.Thompson used
the phrase “moral economy” to denote cultural rules that express such
obligations and entitlements. Societies
that include a mix of reciprocal, redistributive, and market exchange inhabit a
range of locations on the spectrum of commercialisation; and moving up the
scale involves changing the balance and content of social relations to make
markets more prevalent. [Chayanov 1966, 1977; Hochschild 2003; Polanyi 1957a,
1957b; Thompson 1971; Scott 1976; Sen 1981]
Theorists thus provide various ways to conceptualize social
environments that may contradict, resist, accommodate, and encourage
commercialisation. Historians have used
and revised these theoretical approaches to study commercialisation in
The classical approach to Indian commercialisation
By classifying social structures according to their
dominant form of social exchange, many scholars have concluded that though
commercialism had spread widely across pre-modern
When the English term, “capitalism,” entered our
vocabulary, about 1850,[2]
it referred to the idea promoted by Adam Smith that national wealth grows in
proportion to the productive force of autonomous individuals using privately
owned assets for personal gain in market exchange. By 1890, the term was in wide circulation,
and for the next century, its usage carried three implications: an economic
system based on private property, individual profit, and state enforced market
principles emerged uniquely in
In this classical
view, European capitalism generated commercialisation around the world. In
In this classical
perspective, Indian commercialisation began with British imperialism, which
introduced capitalism and launched a dramatic transformation of
Revising the history of Indian
commercialisation
Historical research
indicates that pre-modern
Instead of
imagining that British capitalism invaded a traditional
Such revised
understandings of Indian commercialisation now inform scholarly disputes about
the uniquely European origins and character of capitalism. Global commercialisation may indeed have had
many origins. Culturally distinct forms
of capitalism may have emerged in many environments, connected to one another
by Western imperialism, which made Western models of capitalism ideologically
dominant. Rather than imagining that Europe forced Asia up the scale of
commercialisation, many scholars argue that historical capitalism inhabits
shifting cultural spaces where diverse peoples have invented diverse
capitalisms, in a world of growing inequality, where the idea of the West’s
unique capacity to modernize the world became an ideological tool that served
imperialism, nationalism, and Cold War, but no longer constrains the historical
imagination. [Bose 1990; Ludden 2004; Maddison 1983; Pomeranz 2000].
Commercialisation in pre-modern
Structural images of traditional
The scale of human mobility increased in every
century.
All this mobility entailed widespread conflict and
expanding commercial activity, commodity production, and economic
interconnections. Mobility spawned
market exchange on routes among places with diverse ecological endowments,
where people specialized in using local resources and traded products with
other localities, near and far.
Borderlands between forest and plain, valleys and uplands, and land and
sea were most active commercial spaces.
Caste societies embraced commercialism. Village people active in markets included
weavers, oil-pressers, toddy tappers, carpenters, ironsmiths, herders, hunters,
and farmers producing tobacco, dyes, spices, cotton, fruits, and
vegetables. All variety of cloth, metal,
wood, stone, animals, and foodstuffs moved in markets. Elaborate cuisines, arts, and manufactures
emerged in sites of commercial accumulation, where social elites stimulated
consumer trades, as did rulers and religious institutions. Buddhism and Islam moved along trade routes.
Hindu temples became central sites for commercial transactions. Pilgrimage and festivals spawned
markets. Many people sold their labor
for money, including well diggers, soldiers, and many other service workers.
Cities and towns developed as demographic collections
of consumers and specialized occupational groups. Pre-modern urbanism was by no means confined
to precincts of walled cities; it rather spread out to envelop settlements in
walking or boating distance where mobile people and goods met in dense
combinations. State revenues depended
especially on regions where people and trade concentrated, where taxes enriched
financiers who invested in trade, money exchange, and state taxation. Regions
of commercialism developed around such sites, whose influence expanded into
hinterlands, creating geographies of commercialisation, anchored in local combinations
of state power, religious authority, and social solidarity, connected by trade
routes and enriched by networks of mobility with no boundaries whatever.
Political territories in commercial spaces
Pre-modern commercialism moved among many sites, routes,
and institutions, and was never contained by political or cultural territory.
Yet the political geography of the Mughal Empire had significant consequences
for commercialisation, because it incorporated commercial centers and routes
from Kabul to Dhaka and from Srinagar to Daultabad, and thus produced
unprecedented economic integration among regions of commercialism, each
operating in its own environment yet connected by Mughal militarism, coinage,
elites, entitlements, and taxation.
Urbanism became more prominent along routes inside
Mughal territory, which extended across southern
Mughal borderlands of Indian commercialisation became
heartlands for a new kind of imperialism that arose in highly commercialised
coastal regions around
Eighteenth century land and sea routes of Indian
commercialism sustained an expansively commercial militarism that engaged many
inland rulers who funded war with cash revenues drawn from commercialised
regions, with credit from rural and urban bankers, and with direct state
borrowing from urban bankers. To this pool of military funding, the English
added funds from speculators in
Transitions to capitalist empire
From its Portuguese beginning, in 1498, European sea
trades in
During British wars against Napoleon, Tipu Sultan, and
Marathas (1790-1818), an epochal shift occurred in the historic relationship
between commerce and militarism, and thus between geographies of commerce and
state territorialism. Previously, rulers
had used armies to secure territories where commerce expanded in connected but
borderless spaces; now, the English used the military to force regions into
commercial territories to benefit the parent state of the
After 1820, British industrialism emerged as a
pre-eminent economic and political force, having been boosted financially by
war state expenditure and Indian revenues.[6]
As English industry took center stage in
imperial policy, English industrialists used state power over trade to advance
their own interests and thus impoverished weavers in
In decades from 1820 to 1860, as imperial armies
conquered most of what became
From 1823 to 1854, the exchange value of the Indian
Rupee declined, which increased the real value of
In the 1840s, a commission of Parliament met to
consider ways to improve supplies of raw cotton to
After 1870, state investments produced foundations for
Spatial patterns of modern commercialisation
From 1880 to 1920,
By 1880, new spatial patterns of commercialisation had
emerged in
Specialized regions of farm production developed in
British India along railways that led to major port cities. One major example is the Deccan, which became
cotton country, where commercial investments entangled most all farmers, poor
and rich alike. In 1876, Deccan Riots
were the first major clash between local farmers and immigrant Indian
financiers, and gave birth to official anxiety about village stability during
capitalist development. This anxiety
became a major impetus for imperial theories of traditional village harmony,
which needed support by state patronage for local landed elites.
The responsiveness of Indian farmers to price
incentives spawned many commercially specialized regions with an export
orientation, producing cotton, wheat, rice, coal, coke, jute, hides and skins,
tea, ores, and wool. Data from 1914 show
that most Indian cotton left Bombay and came from Maharashtra. All tea came to
Calcutta and Colombo from British plantations in Assam, Darjeeling, and hills
around Kandy. Most export rice came to
Rangoon. Wheat came primarily from
fields under state irrigation in Punjab and western United Provinces (Uttar
Pradesh). Oilseeds came to Bombay from
Hyderabad territory (Andhra Pradesh), the Central Provinces (Madhya Pradesh),
and Bombay Presidency (Maharashtra).
Coal, coke, and ores came from Jharkhand to Calcutta and Bombay. Eastern Bengal (Bangladesh) produced almost
all the world's jute, which went to Scotland but also increasingly to jute
mills around Calcutta.
Indian industrialism emerged in this context and
accelerated commercialisation around major cities. After 1880, two decades of low prices in
Europe and America and rising prices in South Asia encouraged investments in
India by firms producing for Indian as well as world markets. Commodity prices in India rose rapidly after
1880, along with export commodity production, until the crash in 1929. These were decades of the most rapid
expansion of commercial farm production to that time.
Early Indian industrialization was so impressive that
the imperial Factory Act (1881) imposed rules on Indian factories to reduce
their comparative advantage in virtue of low local labour costs and cheap
access to raw materials in India. In
1887, J.N.Tata's Empress Mill arose at Nagpur, in the heart of cotton
country. Tata Iron and Steel Works at
Jamshedpur consumed increasing supplies of ore and coal, which by the 1920s
rivaled exports from Calcutta. In 1914,
India was the world's fourth largest industrial cotton textile producer. Coal,
iron, steel, jute and other industries generated specialized regions of heavy
industry around Bombay, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Kanpur, Calcutta, Jamshedpur, and
Madras. [8]
World War One stimulated imperial policies to enhance
India's industrialization to make India less dependent on imports; and the
Great Depression, 1929-1933, again boosted industrial growth by reducing prices
for farm output compared to manufactures.
As a result, industrial output in British India grew steadily from 1913
to 1938 and was 58% higher at the end of the Depression than at the start of
World War One; compared to slower and more uneven rates of growth in the UK and
Germany.[9]
By 1920, India had a complex national economy,
dominated by agriculture but including a large public sector, major centres of
large-scale industrial production, and countless small-scale industrial
concerns producing cloth, leather, and metal goods. In 1913, manufactures
comprised twenty percent of Indian exports, valued at ten percent of national
income, figures never since surpassed.
In 1914, the US Consul at Bombay called India "one of the few large
countries of the world where there is an 'open door' for the trade of all
countries."[10] England was still India's dominant trading
partner, but losing ground. In 1914, the
UK sent 63% of British India's imports and received 25% of its exports; and by
1926, these figures stood at 51% and 21%, respectively. By 1926, total trade with the UK averaged 32%
for the five major ports (Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Karachi, and Rangoon). Bombay and Rangoon did 43% of overseas
business with Asia and the Middle East.
Calcutta did a quarter of its business with America.[11] [Roy 1999, 2000]
Migration data also indicate the growing complexity of India as a
region of the world economy. In 1911,
the British numbered only 62% of resident Europeans in British India. Four times more immigrants arrived in India
from Asia than from Europe, and seven of ten came from Nepal and
Afghanistan. In 1911, Nepalis entering
India outnumbered resident Britons by fifty percent; total Asian immigrants
numbered three times as many. By 1921,
Indian emigration far exceeded immigration.
Between 1896 and 1928, 83% of 1,206,000 emigrants left British India
from Madras (which accounted for only 10% of overseas trade), where most went
to Ceylon and Malaya. Bombay emigrants
went mostly to East and South Africa, and Calcutta emigrants, to Fiji and the
West Indies.[12] By
1921, India’s modern diaspora was well underway.
Geographical continuities in Indian commercialisation
The British began their Indian empire on the
coast. Their power then extended up
river valleys into the interior, and finally, into highlands and
mountains. These coasts, river valleys,
highlands, and mountains had been distinctive commercial environments before
1800, and though increasingly forged into a unified imperial pattern, remained
distinctive in 1947. Since then,
national development has not erased their distinctiveness.
Before 1800, coastal environs had been most open to
direct local involvements with overseas commercialism, and after 1800, imperial
capitalism concentrated first around ports.
The imperial economic order then spread along railways inland from
Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. Coastal
ports became cosmopolitan sites for the mixing of inland and overseas cultures
and interests. Indications of this
distinction appear in the 1911 census, which shows that English literates
numbered less than 1% of the population of British India, but 12% of the
population of Calcutta. Madras and Bombay shared with Calcutta very high
figures for the percent of literate people who were literate in English. The mixing of old and new social elites was
most intense along the coast. Brahmans
were about 6% of the total 1911 Indian population, with very high rates of
English literacy, especially near the coast. More than 25% of literate Brahmans
were literate in English in Madras and Bengal Presidencies, and about 20% in
Bombay Presidency.
British imperialism moved inland along river valleys
into uplands and regions, where the Mughals and their competitors, allies, and
subordinates had held much more power than along the coast. In these regions, commercialisation after
1800 continued to include noticeably higher doses of state coercion, violence,
and rebellion. Strategic alliances
between imperial and local military force anchored the colonial regime. Cantonments and security installations marked
the spatial and social organization of commercialisation.
Post-1857 grants of huge Talukdar estates to old
Zamindars in Western UP represent a broad accommodation of old military elites.
In Punjab, military recruitment and establishments grew alongside state
investment in irrigation canals that benefited military-peasant-landlords. In Bombay Presidency, Maratha jagirdars,
sardars, inamdars, deshmukhs, and deshpandes kept old estates under new
property laws.
Imperial expansion into highlands and mountains
combined the force of Indian and British lowland interests, which both moved
into areas of shifting cultivation inhabited by groups who became known as
“tribals” in British India. Before 1947,
many mountain territories were still not conquered sufficiently to allow full
incorporation into the lowland economy, but many were. Coffee and tea planters took mountains around
Assam and Mysore. Mountain forests
everywhere became sites for commercial timber extraction.
Most highlands remote from centres of Mughal power in
1700 remained remote from centres of political and economic power in 1950, but
commercialisation of the highlands increased with the expansion of lowland
agrarian populations into the mountains, which steadily displaced tribal
inhabitants, causing numerous clashes; and with the incorporation of tribal
people into circuits of labour migration in the plains, which, for example,
brought countless Nepalis into India, and incorporated tribals into agrarian
economies in Berar and Gujarat. [Bates 1981, 1985, 1988; Breman 1985, 1989; Jha
1996]
As India became a unified commercial economy, old
regions of commercialism retained distinctive characteristics and acquired new
ones. The Mughal heartland became a
corridor of British imperial investments that steadily increased the wealth of
western regions compared to the east.
This unequal development continues today. Madras and Bombay hinterlands retained
independent economic identities, as did commercial regions around Trivandrum,
Bangalore, and Hyderabad. Mountain
domains became increasingly marked by subordination to the plains, which
disadvantaged local populations compared to lowland immigrants. Highlands and dry lands became the modern
frontier for agricultural expansion.
From 1880 to 1980, the highest rates of increase in the ratio of total
farmland to total land area (from 903% to 206%) appear in Tripura, Sikkim,
Nagaland, Assam, Rajasthan, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, and Orissa. The lowest figures (from 122% to 103%) appear
in the old agrarian lowlands of Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh,
Maharashtra, and Kerala.[13]
The impact of Indian commercialisation
Today, historians focus research on geographical regions in which
patterns of change indicate commercialisation had different meanings for
different people and in different places and times. Some patterns emerge across regions and
comprise national patterns in contemporary India. Regional conditions are significant
everywhere: they continue today to inform prices, bonds of trust and credit,
and social power relations that set effective rules of ownership and social
exchange. One good example is commercial
sugar cultivation, which has operated in eastern UP under the impress of local
landed elite domination and in Maharashtra under the control of staunchly
independent landed entrepreneurs. [Amin 1984; Attwood 1992]
Commercialisation progressed along with other changes that influenced
its impact. Most importantly, the
quantitative proportion of land and population shifted. India became a densely populated region of
the world for the first time after 1850.
Social competition for land and other natural resources increased accordingly.
The relative market value of land and labour shifted: land become more valuable
compared to labour. The imperial state
made landed property a strictly defined object of legal possession. Landed property rights thus became a modern
institutional basis for commercialisation.
In this context, capital investments in land, above all, irrigation,
commercial agriculture, and urban development, increase the value of privileged
land most rapidly and differentiated the landscape into sites defined by their
respective attractiveness for investors.
Technological change, above all, in industry, transportation, and
communication, enhanced the differential impact of commercialisation, by making
some sites especially valuable for commercial investment, particularly around
cities and towns. Urbanization advanced rapidly after 1900 and accelerated
after 1947. The percent of India’s population living in urban centres increased
by just over one percent (from 11% to 12%) during the first three
decades after 1900, by six percent during the next three (1931-1961),
and by eight percent in the next three decades (1961-1991). Ecological change accelerated similarly. In three decades after 1950,
livestock, net cultivation, and built-up land increased as much they had during
seven previous decades, while forest cover declined at the same rate and
population grew about fifteen percent faster.[14]
Commercialisation is thus impossible to disentangle from other
historical processes that have also changed the composition of social
environments. Political change is
important in this context. Imperialism
has structured commercialisation to serve Western interests. Nationalism has
produced new state territories where politics structures commercialisation to
serve national interests. New state borders broke old routes of commercial
transit in some parts of South Asia, which had, for instance, carried land
rents and jute from eastern Bengal to enrich the Calcutta bhadralok and to sustain Calcutta jute mills for
many decades. The partition of Punjab
caused massive disruptions and severed many old commercial connections. India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Burma
emerged as entirely new territories for commercialisation under national
regimes whose respective histories have structured its impact ever since.
In India, regional state regimes emerged after 1956, which enhanced the
regionalism of Indian commercialisation and continuities with regional patterns
that developed in pre-modern times and under British rule. In all Indian
states, local and regional elites now engage commerce using power and authority
to make rules that effectively govern the possession and exchange of most
commodities. India’s integration as a
national economy and its economic governance in New Delhi increased under a
regime of national development planning, which made the Indian bureaucracy and
intelligentsia increasingly influential.
The politics of commercialism in India today thus involves local,
regional, and national institutions, whose combined impact continues to
differentiate the meanings of commercialisation. [Bardhan 1984, 1986; Rudra 1984, 1989; Rudra
and Bardhan 1978]
In a long-term
perspective, commercialisation has comprised a process that began long before
1800 and accelerated thereafter to shift the balance and content of exchange
relationships everywhere in India. Two
commodities, land and labour, indicate most clearly how that alteration defines
Indian capitalism as a distinctive formation operating inside India’s national
borders. State laws pertain more
forcefully to land and labour than to other items of exchange, and the
historical process of defining land and labour as commodities is still, in
fact, underway. Land reform laws
eliminated Zamindar property rights and produced a profusion of small private
holdings. Social movements continue to
demand legal redefinitions of property rights.
Labour laws pertain primarily to heavy industry and workers’ rights in
the informal and agricultural sectors remain subjects of on-going contestation
and legal revision. Rural markets for
land and labour are today, as they were a century ago, bound up tightly with
the local power of landed elites and high status social groups, whose role in
law making is most visible inside Indian states but increasingly visible at the
national level as well. The lowest
status social groups have little landed property and mostly work for higher
status employers, as the market value of their labour continues to decline
compared to the value of land, as poor land becomes poorer compared to rich
land, and as finance capital exerts increasing control over land and
labour. [Harriss-White 1996; Yanagisawa
1996; Atchi Reddy 1996]
In this light,
it seems that Indian commercialisation evolved into Indian capitalism without
causing a drastic disjuncture in the composition of the social structure,
allowing many old elite groups to retain substantial control over commodity
production and exchange. Political
disjunctures, which mark the history of British imperialism and Indian
independence, also mark this evolution, as Indian commercialism changed over
time in a changing Indian landscape as well as in commercial spaces that escape
the confines of Indian national territory. The long period of British rule
composed a long transition from pre-modern Indian commercialism to contemporary
Indian capitalism, during which modern institutions came into existence that
continue to exert substantial influence on social relations of economic
development. [Dirks 2001; Ludden 1993; Metcalf 1995; Washbrook 1981, 1989,
1994]
Commercialisation transforms human experience by establishing
commercial transactions in settings where markets had previously been absent or
unimportant, most notably in villages where the privatisation of land
eliminated customary rights to sustenance for landless families, who depended
increasingly on informal contracts, indenture, and various forms of bondage and
trafficking. One dramatic example of
this dilemma appeared in 1981, when researchers found over four lakh low caste
labourers from poor villages in northern Bihar working on rich farms in
Ludhiana and Hoshiarpur districts of Punjab, where recruiters also brought
Chhotanagpur tribals for employers who bid for them at auction. Though this
illegal trade had ceased by 1991, Punjab farmers were still advancing huge sums
to bring Biharis to work in their fields, and officials who found workers held
in bondage had them released to local authorities.[15]
[Singh 1995]
Commercialisation has included enrichment and destitution, for
families, localities, and regions.
Though some progress in reducing the aggregate burden of poverty
occurred before 1990, most rural Indians still hover near the poverty line,
most precariously in poor regions where capital investments are meagre, as in
dry farm regions from eastern Maharashtra south to Rayalaseema, where the
limitation of the green revolution to irrigated land is apparent and the
contrast with prosperous Punjab could not be greater, and where, in 1997-8, two
hundred poor farmers, burdened with huge debts to plant cash crops (mostly
cotton, but also tur dal and other pulses), committed suicide when faced with crop failure,
foreclosure, and destitution.[16] When crop prices crashed in 1997, farmers
mortgaged their land to moneylenders, and then drought, floods, and pests killed
their crops.[17] Farmers killed themselves by drinking
pesticide, a symbol of the green revolution that left them behind.
Social disparities amidst commercialisation have appeared more clearly
as scholars have more often applied a gender lens to the study of change. Land
ownership remains a male preserve in South Asia, and even more so, the
management of land as commercial property.
The same privatisation of property that made village workers dependents
of landed families turned even women in landed families labourers working for
men inside patriarchal legal systems where the market value of female labour as
children, wives, mothers, care givers, and wage workers increasingly defined
their position in society. This entailed profound social change, which occurred
over many decades and variously in different locations, but always operated
inside gender ideologies that evoke traditional values and social norms to
regulate change within parameters that hold patriarchal power in place. Thus, commercialisation also appears in the
gendered lens of social research as one dynamic process among many others that
comprise historical trajectories of Indian capitalism today. [Agarwal 1992,
1994; Banerjee 1989, 1995; Borthwick 1984; Boserup 1970; Clark 1993; Greenough
1982; Kabeer 1994; Kapadia 1997; Krishnamurthy 1989; Mies 1982; Mitra 1981;
Omvedt 1980; Prasad 1988; Sangari and Vaid 1989; Scott 1999; Sharma 1985; Shiva
1989; Thomas 1988; Weekes-Vagliani 1980]
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[1] Diverse intellectual
histories inhabit standard definitions of “capitalism,” as in the following
online sources. American Heritage Dictionary: "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."
[2] The Oxford English
Dictionary gives 1854 as the date of first usage for “capitalism,” in the
phrase “the sense of capitalism.” A
second set of early usages appeared in 1884, when A.Douai wrote, “This
institution of private capitalism is of a comparatively recent origin,” and
another author referred to “a loophole for capitalism to creep in upon the
primitive Christian communism.” Thus
from its English beginning, the term “capitalism” represents ideas, values, and
institutions juxtaposed to others, most immediately, “socialism” and “communism.” The OED defines
“socialism” as “a theory or policy of social organization which aims at or
advocates the ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land,
property, etc., by the community as a whole, and their administration or distribution
in the interests of all.” The term
“socialism” appears in 1837 in specific opposition to the privatization of
property rights, as in the phrase “Christian socialism.” The OED
indicates that “socialism” as “a state of society in which things are held or
used in common” had appeared by 1879 to describe primitive “tribal”
economies. The OED defines
“communism” as “a theory which advocates a state of society in which there
should be no private ownership, all property being vested in the community and
labour organized for the common benefit of all members; the professed principle
being that each should work according to his capacity, and receive according to
his wants.” This usage appears in 1843,
and by 1850, was a “ political doctrine or movement,” as in Karl Marx and
Joseph Engels, Communist Manifesto, which appeared in English that year;
and by 1866, also represents the idea of “simple village communism,”
characterized by the co-ownership of property, which “appears to be an older
institution than individual ownership” was also in circulation. Thus, the term
“capitalism” appeared originally to represent a novelty and innovation, in
contrast to “communism” and “socialism,” ideas associated with ancient, archaic
societies as well as with contemporary politics and futuristic schemes.
[3] Jawaharlal Nehru formalized this idea in 1930, when he announced that,
“the great poverty and misery of the Indian People are due, not only to foreign
exploitation in
[4] “Memoirs Relative to the State of India,” in Selections
from the State Papers of the Governors-General of India, edited by
G.W.Forrest, Volume II.
[5]
Robert Bruce, Historical View of Plans for the Government of British India
and Regulation of Trade to the East Indies and Outlines of a Plan of Foreign
Government, of Commercial Economy, and of Domestic Administration, for the
Asiatic Interests of Great Britain.
[6]
Javier Cuenca Esteban, "The British balance of payments, 1772-1820:
[7]
British Parliamentary Papers. Reports from Committees, 1847-1848. Volume
9. "Report from the Select Committee on the Cultivation of Cotton in
[8]
Department of Statistics, Government of India, Inland Trade (Rail and
River-borne) of
[9] Morris D. Morris, "The Growth of Large-Scale Industry to 1947," in The Cambridge Economic History of India, volume II, c.1757-c1970, Dharma Kumar, editor, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 569, 576, 609.
[10] US Department of Commerce, Special Consular Reports, No.72, British India, with notes on Ceylon, Afghanistan, and Tibet, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1915, p.9.
[11] 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
[12] A Historical Atlas of South Asia,
Joseph E. Schwartzberg, editor, Chicago:
[13] J.F.Richards and E.P.Flint (R.C.Daniels, editor), Historic Land Use and Carbon Estimates for South and Southeast Asia, 1880-1980, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Experimental Sciences Division, Publication No. 4174. Data are available on the internet.
[14] For data on thirteen countries in South and Southeast Asia, 1880-1980, see J.F.Richards and E.P.Flint (R.C.Daniels, editor), Historic Land Use and Carbon Estimates for South and Southeast Asia, 1880-1980, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Experimental Sciences Division, Publication No. 4174. Data from this study is available on the internet.
[15] Manjit Singh, “Bonded Migrant Labour in Punjab Agriculture,” Economic and Political Weekly, 32, 11, 1997: 518-19; and see Manjit Singh, Uneven Development in Agriculture and Labour Migration: A Case of Bihar and Punjab, Shimla, 1995.
[16]
[17] Muzaffar Assadi, “Farmers’ Suicides: Signs of Stress in Rural Economy,” Economic and Political Weekly, 33, 14, 1998: 747-8.