Priya Satia writes in Aeon
In the mid-18th century, advanced areas of northwest Europe and east and south Asia enjoyed roughly comparable life expectancy, rates of consumption, and potential for economic growth.
This is nonsense. Advanced areas were found around important ports and Capital cities. Both the cost and the standard of living was significantly higher precisely because of the global maritime trade conducted by the naval powers of the Atlantic seaboard. As for 'potential for economic growth', it is obvious that Europe's was far greater. South Asia didn't have even the potential for political independence let alone growth.
But around 1800, in what scholars call the ‘great divergence’, the power and wealth of the West suddenly and dramatically eclipsed that of India, China and the Ottoman Empire.
This is foolish. Naval expeditions and conquests in the New World had resulted in great wealth being concentrated in the hands of the Spanish and Portuguese over the course of the Sixteenth Century. During this period, profits made on 'Black Gold'- i.e. dark skinned slaves as being a valuable commodity to be transported across oceans- gave rise to the notion of the natural inferiority of non-Europeans. It is true that Aztec silver and Inca gold initially inflated the Chinese and Indian economies but the 'gravity model' of trade had changed. Though trade can benefit all, those who control trade routes and shipping and insurance and finance have run-away 'endogenous' growth though this may attract predators or parasites. Still, if there is an incentive for continuing technological innovation and the country remains militarily secure at home and abroad, there can be sustained growth of a type which causes demographic transition and a virtuous circle of rising productivity.
When did it became clear that the West had won? The conventional date is 1683- after which the Ottomans were increasingly on the defensive. However, the only thing that mattered was trans-oceanic naval power and an industrial base sizable enough to pay for its maintenance by capturing gains from trade.
The British in particular found vindication for their expanding empire in ideas of cultural and racial superiority.
Such ideas had been thoroughly vindicated by the Portuguese and Spanish in the sixteenth century though, no doubt, their legal and theological underpinnings developed over the course of the fifteenth.
Scholars from Edward Said to Kenneth Pomeranz have done much to discredit such theories and to reveal their importance in motivating and justifying British conquest in Asia.
No. Neither was that stupid. They knew that British Imperialism was motivated by commercial and geopolitical considerations. The Brits sometimes gave up territory because there seemed no way to make a profit on ruling darkies. However, they might later decide they needed to hold it to prevent some other party getting hold of it.
European colonialism in Asia and the New World itself helped to propel the divergence between Europe and Asia – securing European access to unprecedented riches and coercively secured markets and resources.
Back then, all resources were coercively secured. If you couldn't fuck up people who wanted to take stuff from you, you didn't get to keep that stuff. The Ukrainians understand this.
Still, some scholars continue to rummage through the vast terrain of ‘culture’ in search of an explanation for European ascendancy.
They are RACISTS! They call me a brown monkey behind my back! Some of them have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately.
Most influential of late is the theory (popularised especially by the economic historian Joel Mokyr) that the Enlightenment fostered a unique culture of sharing both the knowledge and the microinventions – or ‘tweaks’ – that drove the British industrial revolution.
Mokyr is a silly fellow. All that mattered was that the fishermen of the Western Atlantic seaboard slowly but steadily got to a position where they could cross oceans and circumnavigate the globe. Suddenly, land Empires- which tended to turn their backs on the Sea because it was difficult to control maritime mercantile communities- began to lag behind. There's a reason Peter the Great went West to learn about ship building. Japan too began its rise by building up its navy. China and South Korea have now overtaken Japan to take the top and second spot as ship builders. India will remain poor or middle income because it neglects ports and shipping.
The idea that knowledge-sharing was a particularly European trait would have surprised the Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith as he observed the world in that moment.
No it wouldn't. He thought darkies were stoooopid. How else could you explain the great gains his people were making in their lands?
Concerned about Britain’s aggressive pursuit of empire, he presumed that the universal capacity for knowledge-sharing would ultimately right the wrongs of colonialism. Noting in An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) that South Asians were not reaping benefits from the discovery of the Americas and suffered ‘every sort of injustice’ at the hands of Europeans, Smith remained sanguine that the sharing of knowledge and improvements that commerce produced would eventually put all nations on an equal footing and compel them into mutual respect.
What Smith wrote was quite different-
The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. Their consequences have already been very great; but, in the short period of between two and three centuries which has elapsed
Smith correctly identifies the rise of the West to the Fifteenth Century. Priya thinks it happened around 1800.
since these discoveries were made, it is impossible that the whole extent of their consequences can have been seen. What benefits or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those great events, no human wisdom can foresee. By uniting, in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another's wants, to increase one another's enjoyments, and to encourage one another's industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial. To the natives however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned. These misfortunes, however, seem to have arisen rather from accident than from anything in the nature of those events themselves. At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries.
Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another. But nothing seems more likely to establish this equality of force than that mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements which an extensive commerce from all countries to all countries naturally, or rather necessarily, carries along with it.
In other words if non-Europeans develop kick-ass navies and armies, then Europeans won't be able to fuck them over. Priya thinks the more powerful will be sweet and nice to weaklings provided those weaklings are well-informed. Incidentally, this is why a tattooed thug won't rape you if you tell him you went to Collidge.
We know that history did not play out that way. Why not? Why didn’t knowledge-sharing equalise the world?
Because knowledge isn't power. Smith said there must be an 'equality of courage and force'- in other words, the other party can cause you real damage if you try any rough stuff. Knowledge doesn't matter. The clever weakling gets his head kicked in.
Was Smith too generous or naive in believing that it had cultural purchase beyond Europe?
Priya is putting words in Smith's mouth. Smith was aware that some smart native Chieftains or monarchs could adopt Western technology quickly enough and show enough 'courage and force' to trade with Europeans on equal terms. The question was would such polities remain cohesive and economically viable? Might not the successor of the Chief prefer to plunder his own people and live in luxury? His 'Force' would melt away because there would be no money left to pay for weapons or soldiers. 'Courage', at this Court, would have been replaced by sycophancy.
Smith didn't have a solution to this problem. We don't care. Nobody really reads him anyway. It is obvious that you need a professional army which can be quickly expanded when required. But that also means following sensible fiscal policies.
Smith’s naivety in fact lay in his presumption that the emerging political inequalities that he observed would not also shape the spread of knowledge.
Knowledge costs money. Countries which wanted to rise militarily could hire instructors and send a few of their cadets abroad to acquire any type of knowledge. In this way they would have 'force' as well as 'courage'. By contrast, even if every slave got a fucking PhD, they would still have been whipped if they weren't picking enough cotton.
Like liberal thinkers today, he imagined that knowledge-exchange somehow transpires regardless of power relations.
Liberals today have shit for brains. Smith was Scottish and sensible enough.
In reality, in the 18th century, as now, power shaped knowledge-sharing everywhere.
No. Money did. If you had the money you could get as much knowledge as you wanted. But to hang on to your money required 'force' and 'courage'. But you can hire courageous people to kick ass on your behalf so, ultimately, only money mattered. Smith's point was that robbery can make you rich in the short run but you soon run out of people to rob. Trade, particularly if you can capture more and more of its 'gains', is the way to go.
In Britain, for instance, government offices engaged in military supply often prohibited contractors from patenting their inventions: a patent would slow the spread of innovation to other contractors and thus slow the production of urgently needed supplies.
This strategy failed. People with knowledge in their heads could easily jump on a ship to somewhere else.
While the British government thus abetted the sharing of know-how within Britain, it actively stifled such sharing abroad.
Then it lost the 13 colonies. Also, smart peeps kept going off to Germany or Russia or wherever.
British industrialists copied Asian textiles and pottery without scrupling over ‘intellectual property’,
there was no such thing at that time.
but could rely on their government to minimise the threat of colonial competition with their own manufactures.
No. The government could not seal the borders because there were a lot of little ports through which contraband of various sorts- French brandy, Dutch lace- was brought in. Anyway, it was British or Dutch ships which brought in Indian or Chinese manufactured items. Generally they didn't compete directly with native produce and the excise duty paid on them came in useful.
In 1737, for instance, English iron manufacturers urged prohibition of bar-iron manufacturing in America, fearing that it would stimulate manufacture of iron goods there and ruin English ironworks and iron manufactures, depopulating the ‘Mother Country’. In 1750, they ensured that legislation allowing duty-free imports of American bar iron at once prohibited American iron-manufacturing, explicitly to prevent creation of a war machine there. Such inequities fuelled anti-British sentiment in America.
America had the 'force' and 'courage' to get rid of Mad King George. Incidentally, though technologically innovative, their Universities were markedly inferior to those of Europe till almost the end of the nineteenth century. By then, as the Civil War proved, America had greater military potential than any country on the continent.
In India, old, rather than new, manufacturing industries caused concern. British colonial officials strove to strangle local gun-manufacture and block Indian access to British gun-making knowledge.
How did they get to be 'colonial officials'? Was it by conquering the territory in question? In that case, they were merely following the traditional indigenous practice of controlling the availability of weapons. Ranjit Singh had plenty of European soldiers of fortune and thus could field a kick-ass army. Sadly, he was succeeded by an infant and his Kingdom fell apart. But his Sikhs did very well under the Brits because they had 'force' and 'courage'.
They did so out of an understanding that arms-making lay at the heart of industrial progress.
It didn't then and doesn't now. The Afghans were and are good at gun-making. They scarcely have an industrial base.
The result was South Asian dependence on British guns, fuelling Britain’s industrial take-off while undercutting India’s industrial potential.
Why is India still so shit at gun manufacturing? Government policy is one answer. But maybe Indian entrepreneurs just don't like the things.
Eighteenth-century Britons perceived the connection between war manufacturing and industrial development, especially in the West Midlands.
But Indians didn't because Whitey cruelly refused to share this nice nice Knowledge. That's why Indians thought manufacturing had no connection with industry.
In a 1752 petition, the West Midlands town of Birmingham boasted that ‘above 20,000 Hands’ were employed ‘in useful Manufactures, … greatly serviceable to the Government’. In 1795-96, an influential and powerful Quaker gun-maker of the town explained to his concerned fellow Quakers that there was no industrial work that did not in some way contribute to war.
This stupid woman wrote a stupid book about Quaker gun-makers. That's why she mentions this.
During the long wars against France unfolding then, military contracting dominated the town. The Ordnance Office took control of the arms industry, monopolising its output. From 1804 to 1815, Birmingham produced 7,660,229 arms and components. The town worked to quash any legislation threatening the gun trade. Townspeople knew that injury to arms manufactures would damage the entire West Midlands region, throwing a ‘considerable … portion of its population’ out of employment. The industrial downturn after the wars in 1815 confirmed their view. As late as 1857, opponents challenged John Bright’s parliamentary election bid on the grounds that his pacifism fit awkwardly in a town whose economy depended on the ‘paraphernalia of military metallic supplies’.
What this stupid woman is not mentioning is that Britain used lots of guns and canons to defeat France. If it hadn't, like India, it would have been conquered. Quakers didn't want to get fucked over by Frogs anymore than Anglicans.
Similar regional military-industrial economies existed in the Indian subcontinent. In the 16th century, arms sales constituted part of Ottoman-Mughal diplomatic business in India. Babur, the first Mughal emperor, brought Turkish firearms, which Mughal adversaries, the Rajputs and the Afghans, in turn adopted.
They had 'force' and 'courage' and enough money to get hold of useful knowledge to maintain their force. The problem is that their fiscal models were shite compared to that of the Brits.
Exchanges with the Portuguese and Egypt helped to establish the technology in the subcontinent. The Mughal emperor Akbar was deeply interested in firearm manufacture, and drew master gun-makers to his court.
His fiscal model was quite good. Turn agricultural surpluses into high value to weight handicrafts and use their sale to finance the Army and the extractive administration. But it was bound to breakdown because the revenue producing littoral could get a better deal from the guys who exported their handicrafts.
By the 17th century, the Mughals had state foundries and arsenals. From Malabar to Bihar, kingdoms across the subcontinent cultivated arms manufacture. Intensifying European involvement in Indian conflicts heightened demand for guns. Indian craftsmen also copied European firearms. Peasants of the Gangetic plains used cheap handguns made by local blacksmiths. Travancore, Kashmir, Rajasthan, Punjab and Sindh possessed sites of arms manufacture. Indian guns and gun parts were also sold in Persia, Oman and across the Indian Ocean. British military men noted the superior range and velocity of Indian matchlocks. European observers also praised Golconda muskets. Indian designs, the British recognised, were sophisticated and effective; subcontinental arms emerged from a rich and dynamic culture of technical knowledge.
Did you know that darkies were once able to make guns? Indeed, there was a time when they didn't spend all their time hanging by their tails from trees while eating bananas. Cruel White historians suppress these hidden histories of accomplishment so as to perpetuate their genocidal subjugation of coloured people. Moreover, some of those cruel White historians have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Ban them now!
The East India Company (EIC) – a commercial arm of the British state
There was no British state when it was set up.
– also sold British arms in the Indian subcontinent. To obtain trading privileges, they also presented arms as gifts. By the 1690s, the company exported nearly 1,000 tons of small arms per year for profit.
Priya is not aware that exporters try to earn a profit.
‘Hardly a ship came [in the 1760s] that did not sell them cannon and small arms,’ marvelled a colonel in Parliament. The French and British used arms deals as a proxy to challenge one another in the subcontinent. With each British success, EIC arms acquired ever more cachet, making them an ever more effective medium of diplomatic exchange. In 1815, the Board of Customs reported an annual export of 151,572 guns to South Asia, the Indonesian archipelago and China worth £103,463.
India still buys lots of guns. Priya does not approve. Guns are like dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! This causes neo-liberalism to occur. Do you know who invented neo-liberalism? It was White peeps. Not just any type of White peeps. It was White peeps with dicks!
To be sure, the British worried about arming their enemies. In 1765, for instance, the EIC’s Madras government urged steps to prevent arms from ‘falling into Hands who may turn them against Us’.
Priya is always handing out knives to muggers so they can use those knives against her.
The EIC also wanted to ensure that arms supplied to the trusted nawab (or governor) of Arcot did not reach ‘improper hands’.
Priya likes improper hands around her throat. Maybe that is why she believes that the fact that Britain became a big
As arms manufacture lay at the heart of progress, officials helped create the divergence between East and West
Methods of mass production and, from the 1820's, the 'percussion gun', gave Birmingham the lead. But, by then the industrial revolution was in full swing. India might have received about a sixth of its output. But this relative share would fall while Birmingham continued to expand and gain economies of scope and scale. The plain fact is that India had a comparative advantage as well as economies of scale in arms manufacture but never pursued it at any time. Indeed, after the Brits left, its relative strength declined greatly relative to China.
Does this mean the Nehruvian bureaucracy 'created the divergence between India and China?' No. India could have industrialized without a bit armaments sector. It chose to pursue foolish, virtue signalling, policies. Priya's parents ran away from it more than fifty years ago.
Colonial officials in particular feared that Indians would acquire knowledge leading to improved weapons-manufacturing.
What they feared was irrelevant. Only money mattered.
Facilitating or allowing the spread of knowledge of metalworking among South Asian colonials presented a simple danger.
It was irrelevant.
The ‘step from a knowledge of smelting Metals and the manner of casting them into certain forms to that of casting Cannon Shot and Shells is so inconsiderable that if the Natives once acquired the former art they would soon become Masters of the latter’, wrote a company official.
He was ignored. These guys were too stupid to keep the artillery out of the hands of the sepoys. They really weren't high IQ. But their fiscal model was better than any available alternative.
The EIC’s leadership likewise insisted that its ammunition laboratories at Fort William remain a mystery:
No Indian, black or person of mixed breed, nor any Roman Catholic of what nation soever, shall, on any pretence, be admitted or set foot in the Laboratory or any of the military magazines, either out of curiosity or to be employed in them, or to come near them so as to see what is doing or contained therein.
This was the European culture of knowledge-sharing.
It was either irrelevant or not implementable. Any Prince could get as much knowledge as he liked just by paying for it. The problem was that the thing didn't pay for itself. Nor, sadly, does whatever stupid shit Priya teaches.
Perhaps many polities had the potential for industrial growth, but imperial ambition, generating military commitments requiring mass levels of supply, ensured that Britain became the site of industrial take-off – and a global arms depot.
So, if you want industrial growth, all you need is a bit of 'imperial ambition'. Sadly, Portugal, which had the Empire, didn't have the ambition to have it which is why it didn't become the site of 'industrial take-off'.
In addition to its geological and geographical advantages, Britain had coercive colonial policies enabling jealous control of know-how.
No it didn't. Countries have all sorts of stupid laws which aren't implemented. The plain fact is that nothing could stop a British guy fucking off to work for any foreign prince. You can't control 'know-how' unless you restrict the movements of those who have it.
Eighteenth-century Britons believed in the government’s right and obligation to use its might to promote industrial prosperity at home and strangle it abroad.
Whereas people in other countries thought it was the government's right and obligations to suck off hobos in distant lands. Why did Britain industrialize sooner than any other country? Priya thinks it has to do with guns. It wasn't. The Navy mattered. It kept the home islands safe from invasion. That gave the Brits the edge over the Dutch and the French and so forth.
We too must recognise the way that war shaped the entwined industrial fates of Britain and its colonies, and the way that power always shapes knowledge-sharing.
No we mustn't. Industry requires investment which in turn requires profitable markets which in turn requires transport and financial services. Knowledge can always be bought from elsewhere but, if it is useless, you must defund that shite. Grievance Studies harms those it claims to champion. Cancel that shite.
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