Several affectionate of Amiya Kumar Bagchi have appeared since death on November 28, covering their notable achievements. Without a doubt, more surveys and evaluations of your work will appear in the next few days. Because it left, not only a set of writings, but a coherent and powerful work body that constitutes a great challenge for the ‘version received’ of the economic history issued by the centers of the Western Academy. What follows is just a letter comment.
For a strange irony, two months before the death of Bagchi, the Central Bank of Sweden awarded its “Nobel Prize in Economics” to three economists, Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (AJR), for their explanation of why some counters have pulmonary leg. This sustained Divergence between rich and poor in the theory of contradict standard economic growth, which postulates that market forces automatically eliminate such gaps and cause ‘convergence’. According to the Nobel Committee, AJR’s contribution is that they explain the gap by observing the “colonial Origins of comparative development ”, and the Social institutions Generated by that colonial government.
At first glance, these were the same groups in the center of Bagchi’s life. However, unlike Bagchi, the three winners of the award took out an impressively banal explanation (and implying or involuntarily racist). As they say, certain lands conquered by European settlers were less taxed by populated societies and tropical infections developed, developed and tropical infections; There, Europeans could migrate in size numbers and institute safe property rights and Western political institutions (“neoeuropea”) for themselves. In other less hospitable colonies, swarm of natives and infections, the colonizers were forced to come in smaller quantities and, therefore, instituted only extractive institutions. As a result of this ‘natural experiment’, as AJR called it, the first type of colonies (United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) ended the winners, winning the prize of lasting prosperity; The second lost guy and were sent to poverty. The title of Acemoglu and the recent Best-Seller of Robinson was Why nations fail.
However, Bagchi’s work revealed something very different: that the revenue transfers of the colonies played a critical role in the emergence of industrial capitalism itself in Western Europe and in the United States/Canada, and in the economies of the colonies. Thus, the ‘natural experiment’ had no scientific validity. And far from planting “inclusive” political institutions, the emergence of capitalism in the countries of the colonizing mother cools to the largest slave trade in history. In addition, Bagchi showed, with a simultaneous scan of coverage and detail wealth, the Ways In which colonies and semi -colonies were paralyzed. In your first important job, Private investment in India 1900-39 (1972), showed the impact of the British colonial domain on the general economic development of India, the sector sector. Ten years later, The political economy of underdevelopment (1982) extended their analysis of colonialism to neocolonialism and throughout the Third World. He says that thesis societies are “underdeveloped” “because their ability to strive to realize that this potential is affected by its internal social and political structure, and by the dominant effect of advanced capitalist countries that limit their chooo their chooo their chooo its choo limits its limit of their.” “” “” “” “ In doing so, it indicates the ways in which the people of the countries under the neocolonial government can undo this paralyzing and take their destiny in their own hands; Namely, changing their internal social and political structures, and thus developing their ability to resist the domination of advanced capitalist countries. We find that this work is particularly important, providing a lot of guidance on how to recover and analysis of internal structures. Despite having changed a lot in the last five decades, the essence of the argument there is still very relevant today.
Your last important work, Dangerous passage: humanity and the global ancestry of the capital (2005), is a unique survey of the entire race or capitalism. It is an economic history, but in the tradition of Karl Marx, it ignores the artificial divisions between economy, history, political science, sociology and anthropology. Therefore, it integrates the history of the ancestry of capital with the capital appeal to the ‘unlimited combat’, including fascism and war. The wide range of this account, going from, for example, Europe at the end of 15Th Century to India under the Mogoles in the 17Th Century to Japan in the 19Th The century, and from financial flows to demographic change to cultural influences, allowed Bagchi to discredit many dominant theories. In line with his previous works, he significantly highlights the role of imperistic exploitation in the divergent destinations of the ‘winners’ and the ‘losers’. Finally, he focuses on what happened with the Human beings That was under the domain of capitalism, both in imperialist countries and in oppressed lands. In this, it shows how workers’ struggles play a role in mitigating the sufferings of their class, and finally places their hopes in the fights Or people for a better world.
Today it is very difficult to find economists who speak in such terms. At one point, there were several economists who spoke in terms of political economy; And even if they were not in direct political activity, they observed that political economy not only from the angle of analyzing it, but also changing it. Such thought rarely occurs in isolation of broader political events, and in fact, in those days, the fundamental change was off, at home and abroad.
On a personal level, the loss of Bagchi brings to the mind two other losses, or Krishna Bharadwaj, who died in 1992, and Nirmal Chandra, who died in 2014. His styles of written expression were different: Bharadwajaj, the language or Thorajaj there was an imposition and humility; Chandra in a dry, sharp and discreet style; Bagchi with sweep and sometimes with “wild outrage”. Even if one differed with them, their writings are of political economy in the true meaning of the phrase. The three had grown up in a world in which people had fought revolutions and established new social systems; And they saw before them the terrible effects of the social system that prevails in India, which had just become accustomed to colonial domain. In different ways, they sought the reasons for that paralysis of human capacities and what should be done to undo it. One expects their writings to continue being read, considered, questioned and the tasks forward for a new generation, not for purely academic purposes, but as part of the world’s analysis to change it.
- “[I]In places where the disease environment was not favorable for European settlement, the cards were stacked against the creation of neo -European, and the formation of the extractive state was more likely. “Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson,” the colonial origins of comparative development: an empirical investigation, “working document 7771, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2000. ↑
- “Changes in the economic structure cannot be considered as completely indigenous processes. The same processes that led to rapid industrialization in these advanced capitalist countries and their foreigner led to stagnation or worse of underdeveloped countries.” – Ak Bagchi, “some international foundations of capitalist growth and underdevelopment”, Weekly economic and politicalSpecial number, August 1972. ↑
- He points out that this use was legal before Paul Baran, in HISIS Growth Political Economy (1962), and in fact, Bagchi’s title remembers Baran’s, just like his songs. ↑
- Of the epitaph of Jonathan Swift, translated by Yeats: “Swift has sailed at his break;/ Wild outrage there/ he cannot lacor his chest./ Imitation he if you dare you,/ World Traveler; He/ served human freedom.” ↑