Marx: The Future Results of British Rule in India

Memo to self: make the 210a students read this:

Karl Marx (1853),"The Future Results of British Rule in India," New York Daily Tribune (August 8): The political unity... imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph. The native army, organized and trained by the British drill-sergeant, was the sine qua non of Indian self-emancipation, and of India ceasing to be the prey of the first foreign intruder. The free press, introduced for the first time into Asiatic society, and managed principally by the common offspring of Hindoos and Europeans, is a new and powerful agent of reconstruction.... From the Indian natives, reluctantly and sparingly educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up, endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science. Steam has brought India into regular and rapid communication with Europe, has connected its chief ports with those of the whole south-eastern ocean.... The day is not far distant when, by a combination of railways and steam-vessels, the distance between England and India, measured by time, will be shortened to eight days, and when that once fabulous country will thus be actually annexed to the Western world.

The ruling classes of Great Britain have had, till now, but an accidental, transitory and exceptional interest in the progress of India. The aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it, and the millocracy to undersell it. But now the ... millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them, and that, to that end, it is necessary, above all, to gift her with means of irrigation and of internal communication. They intend now drawing a net of railroads over India. And they will do it....

I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. But when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry. This is the more certain as the Hindoos are allowed by British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude. for accommodating themselves to entirely new labor, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery. Ample proof of this fact is afforded by the capacities and expertness of the native engineers in the Calcutta mint, where they have been for years employed in working the steam machinery, by the natives attached to the several steam engines in the Burdwan coal districts, and by other instances. Mr. Campbell himself, greatly influenced as he is by the prejudices of the East India Company, is obliged to avow “that the great mass of the Indian people possesses a great industrial energy, is well fitted to accumulate capital, and remarkable for a mathematical clearness of head and talent for figures and exact sciences.” “Their intellects,” he says, “are excellent.”

Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labor, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.

All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?...

The devastating effects of English industry, when contemplated with regard to India, a country as vast as Europe, and containing 150 millions of acres, are palpable and confounding. But we must not forget... [t]he bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world — on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.

Comments

[Arun]

The point of this is?

[PeonInChief]

You might want to compare this, though, with Engels' writing on Ireland. Engels asserted that the colonialism/imperialism of England in Ireland had permanently deformed Ireland, and that capitalist development in colonial societies would not follow that of independent nations. Engels is probably the better historian.

[Bloix]

I would think that the point of reading this prophecy is to try to understand why it did not come to pass. The introduction of the railroad did not lead to industrialization. And the caste system remains deeply entrenched.

[MattYoung]

"The day is not far distant when, by a combination of railways and steam-vessels, the distance between England and India, measured by time, will be shortened to eight days,"

Karl must be reading my comments, but really, Karl, with that rhetoric you should be posting on the MoveOn.org site.

[PeonInChief]

For reasons that are entirely unclear, colonialism tends to reinforce caste distinctions--even as it often breaks down class distinctions. In some cases the reasons are obvious--black Cubans lost status during the US occupation (1898-1959) because the US brought its racism to Cuba. In other cases, though, it's less clear why it happened.

[Les Brunswick]

"out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways."

My understanding is that the British understood that this would undermine their own industries, and so they forbade the Indians from industrializing.

This reminds me of the critique that Trotsky made of Marx's theory. He said that capitalism's contradictions would not lead to its overthrow because the capitalists would spot what was happening and make reforms to prevent it from destroying the systm.

[Kevin Carson]

The problem with the paleo-Marxist analysis is their fetish (along with not only technocratic liberals like Chandler but Austrians who dogmatize about the superior efficiency of "roundabout" production methods) for unlimited economies of scale and centralization.

First: India was "developed" into a niche in the global economy that involved mainly extractive industries and agriculture, supplemented in neoliberal times with supplying sweatshop labor for exported Western industrial capital.

Second: This overlooks the possibility of any alternative model of industrialization besides what eventually became Sloanist mass production (a direct outgrowth of what Mumford called paleotechnic industry). Had not the capitalist state subsidized continent-sized railroad systems and industrial concentration, the new electrical machinery at the end of the 19th century might have followed the pattern described by Kropotkin and Borsodi, and most closely approximated in reality in the contemporary economy of Emilia-Romagna.

Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy that large-scale production without regard to demand (what we call "push distribution") is mandated by industrialism, and that the only alternative is backwardness. But absent the kinds of state capitalist/corporate economies built on the railroad land grants, tariffs and patents, the whole world today might be Emilia-Romagna.

What we have is the Sloanist model of extremely expensive, capital-intensive production with product-specific machine tools, maximizing capacity utilization to minimize unit costs, and worrying about how to make people buy the crap only afterward. What we might have had, instead, would have been an economy built around the decentralizing potential of electrical machinery, which put the small shop and the household economy on an even field with the giant factory. We might have had an economy of small-scale production for local use, integrating general-purpose electrical machinery into craft production and frequently switching between product lines in response to orders (on a lean/JIT model).

[The Raven]

Sound remarkably like Marx as a 1950s development economist. It's the other way around, of course; the development economists were indirectly influenced by Marx, and both groups were wrong.

"Not nature but culture."

[Julian Elson]

Well... compared to what?

The British did some things to modernize India. However, the states (Marathas, Mughals, etc) that would have ruled India absent British rule wouldn't have necessarily sat around twiddling their thumbs. On one hand, the British did have the technical know-how that might have made it easier for the Raj to construct railways and telegraph lines than it would have been for, say, the Maratha Confederacy. On the other hand, the British basically suppressed Indian industry so that Manchester could profit more. Also, independent Indian states would have had approximately balanced budgets. I believe British India ran something of a budget surplus, for the benefit of the exchequer.

[the idler]

"Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?"

No. But hey: No pain, no gain!

[purple]

Actually, Marx has a real prescient comment on China , predicting the importance of trade between California and Asia (in comparison to the Atlantic seaboard and Europe) for the US economy.

Bertrand Russell also notes the economic potential of India and China at the end of his "A History of Western Philosophy".

2 World Wars stifled the expansion of capitalism for about 50 years, much more than "Marx was wrong". However, I think we are at a point of breakdown in the capitalist system which may impede expansion for the next generation.