Tag: 17th century

India: Deep History

In his lectures, Professor Amartya Sen, the Harvard Nobel Prize in Economics winner, mentions Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India. Wheeler wrote, while reporting on the excavation of the Indus Valley Civilization (of India), that the plumbing and sewerage were advanced, in some ways surpassing modern equivalents.

Sen’s larger point is that history is characterized by phases of rise and fall and not just classes and class struggles à la Marx.

Consider the following depiction of the East India Company, from The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (also subtitled The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire) by William Dalrymple.


On 28 August 1608, Captain William Hawkins, a bluff sea captain with the Third Voyage, anchored his ship, the Hector, off Surat, and so became the first commander of an EIC vessel to set foot on Indian soil.

India then had a population of 150 million — about a fifth of the world’s total — and was producing about a quarter of global manufacturing; indeed, in many ways it was the world’s industrial powerhouse and the world’s leader in manufactured textiles. Not for nothing are so many English words connected with weaving — chintz, calico, shawl, pyjamas, khaki, dungarees, cummerbund, taffetas — of Indian origin. It was certainly responsible for a much larger share of world trade than any comparable zone and the weight of its economic power even reached Mexico, whose textile manufacture suffered a crisis of ‘de-industrialisation’ due to Indian cloth imports. In comparison, England then had just 5 per cent of India’s population and was producing just under 3 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods. A good proportion of the profits on this found its way to the Mughal exchequer in Agra, making the Mughal Emperor, with an income of around £100 million,* by far the richest monarch in the world.

The Mughal capitals were the megacities of their day: ‘They are second to none either in Asia or in Europe,’ thought the Jesuit Fr Antonio Monserrate, ‘with regards either to size, population, or wealth. Their cities are crowded with merchants, who gather from all over Asia. There is no art or craft which is not practised there.’ Between 1586 and 1605, European silver flowed into the Mughal heartland at the astonishing rate of 18 metric tons a year, for as William Hawkins observed, all nations bring coyne and carry away commodities for the same’. For their grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power — a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word ‘mogul’ ever since.

By the early seventeenth century, Europeans had become used to easy military victories over the other peoples of the world.

* Over £10,000 million today.

Think of the larger point: what you just read is the story of Indian de-industrialization and its negative results. Ask yourself whether American de-industrialization is something of an echo of this, as manufacturing is offshored.

Education and “Chaos”: The Example of Climate Change

Students will have heard on read descriptions of “chaos theory” which try to capture the phenomenon that a small change “here” or now might involve a mega-change somewhere else or later on or both. In other words, tremendous turbulence could arise from overlooked minutiae in some other region or domain. Chaos here does not mean lawless…it means lawful but in surprising ways, like a pendulum swinging from another pendulum where the laws of pendular motion are still in effect but the motions are “jumpy.”

This can be described as follows:

Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics focusing on the study of chaos—states of dynamical systems whose apparently-random states of disorder and irregularities are often governed by deterministic laws that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary theory stating that, within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization.

The butterfly effect, an underlying principle of chaos, describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state (meaning that there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions). A metaphor for this behavior is that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane in Texas.

Blaise Pascal (17th century) gives us the example of “Cleopatra’s nose.” Had her nose been longer, Pascal muses, she would presumably have not been so beautiful and this could have altered romantic entanglements and the behavior of rival Roman generals and world history might have moved along different pathways completely (recall Caesar and Cleopatra, the play).

All of this “strange science” applies to climate change.

In the Winter 2019/20 issue of Options, from the International institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, Austria headquarters), there’s a short piece that shows you how climate change has such “chaos-type” features which could “turbo-charge” changes already expected:

Will Forests Let Us Down?

Current climate models assume that forests will continue to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at their current rate.

A study by an international team including researchers from IIASA, however, indicates that this uptake capacity could be strongly limited by soil phosphorous availability. If this scenario proves true, the Earth’s climate would heat up much faster than previously assumed.

(Options, Winter 2019/20 issue, IIASA, page 5, “News in Brief”)

Students should glimpse something here that points to a “deep structure.”
Climate scientists and climate modelers at this time are trying to re-examine and re-jigger predictions to include overlooked details that could add “chaotic dynamics” to the predictions. Knowledge itself is evolving and if you add knowledge changes and revisions to model ones, you have to conclude that even with this fantastic level of human ingenuity and scientific intricacy, we “see the world through a glass, darkly” because the facts, models, chaos math, overviews, are themselves in “interactive flux.”

Two Kinds of Extra Understanding: Pre and Post

We argue here in this proposal for an educational remedy that two dimensions of understanding must be added to “retro-fit” education.

In the first addition, call it pre-understanding, a student is given an overview not only of the field but of his or her life as well as the “techno-commercial” environment that characterizes the globe.

Pre-understanding includes such “overall cautions” offered to you by Calderón de la Barca’s 17th century classic Spanish play, Life is a Dream (Spanish: La vida es sueño). A student would perhaps ask: “what would it be like if I faced this “dreamlike quality” of life, as shown by the Spanish play, and suddenly realized that a life of “perfect myopia” is not what I want.

Hannah Arendt warns similarly of a life “like a leaf in the whirlwind of time.”

Again, I, the student ask: do I want such a Hannah Arendt-type leaf-in-the-whirlwind-like life, buried further under Calderón de la Barca’s “dream state”?

But that’s not all: while I’m learning about these “life dangers,” all around me from my block to the whole world, humanity does its “techno-commerce” via container ships and robots, hundreds of millions of vehicles and smartphones, multilateral exchange rates, and tariff policies. Real understanding has one eye on the personal and the other on the impersonal and not one or the other.

All of these personal and impersonal layers of the full truth must be faced and followed, “en face,” as they say in French (i.e., “without blinking”).

Call all this pre-understanding which includes of course a sense of how my “field” or major or concentration fits into the “architecture of knowledge” and not in isolation without connections or a “ramification structure.”

Post-understanding comes from the other end: my lifelong effort, after just about all that I learned about the six wives of King Henry VIII and the “mean value theorem”/Rolle’s theorem in freshman math, have been completely forgotten and have utterly evaporated in my mind, to re-understand my life and times and book-learning.

Pre-and post-understanding together allows the Wittgenstein phenomenon of “light falls gradually over the whole.”

Without these deeper dimensions of educational remedy, the student as a person would mostly stumble from “pillar to post” with “perfect myopia.” Education mostly adds to all the “fragmentariness” of the modern world and is in that sense, incomplete or even disorienting.

Education in this deep sense is supposed to be the antidote to this overall sense of modern “shapelessness,” to use Kierkegaard’s term.