Tag: class conflict

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 Hegemonial Struggles

Dominance by Design, by Professor Michael Adas, is a very “intellectually useful” overview of the American thrust towards world domination by force, whether through the backdoor (covert means) or through the front door (invasion of Iraq in 2003, etc).

Michael Adas is the Abraham E. Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

“Long before the United States became a major force in global affairs, Americans believed in their superiority over others due to their inventiveness, productivity, and economic and social well-being. U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to “civilize” non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. As an integral part of America’s national identity and sense of itself in the world, this civilizing mission provided the rationale to displace the Indians from much of our continent, to build an island empire in the Pacific and Caribbean, and to promote unilateral—at times military—interventionism throughout Asia. In our age of “smart bombs” and mobile warfare, technological aptitude remains preeminent in validating America’s global mission.

Michael Adas brilliantly pursues the history of this mission through America’s foreign relations over nearly four centuries from North America to the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. The belief that it is our right and destiny to remake foreign societies in our image has endured from the early decades of colonization to our current crusade to implant American-style democracy in the Muslim Middle East.

Dominance by Design explores the critical ways in which technological superiority has undergirded the U.S.’s policies of unilateralism, preemption, and interventionism in foreign affairs and raised us from an impoverished frontier nation to a global power. Challenging the long-held assumptions and imperatives that sustain the civilizing mission, Adas gives us an essential guide to America’s past and present role in the world as well as cautionary lessons for the future.”

(Harvard University Press, 2009)

The whole issue of hegemonial struggles (as opposed to left-wing emphasis on “class struggles”) is very eye-opening in terms of achieving a more comprehensive understanding of the newspapers and history books themselves.

For example, Paul Kennedy’s book, “The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism: 1860-1914” (1980) is a very important book in giving us this layer of reality which complicates the parallel layer of globalization forces from 1870-1914.

Globalization narrowly speaking is about econo-technical changes unifying prices and other economic variables, while hegemonial struggles involve the struggle for mastery by rival countries or blocs.

This book gives an account of the rivalry between Great Britain and Germany in the period leading to the First World War. It gives readers a thorough comparison of the two societies, their political cultures, economies, party politics, courts, the role of the press and pressure groups, and so on.

Hegemonial rivalries between nations, blocs, empires are a key “motor” in world history and globalization and this rivalry are entwined at all times. Holistic education is partly the understanding of how entwining governs the world around us, in all areas.

Movies as a Parallel University: Cola Wars Movie

The 1961 fast-paced comedy, One, Two, Three starring James Cagney is extremely informative in a certain way if you get beyond the farcical and “manic-jocular” tone and atmosphere.

The story takes place in West Berlin. Communism and Nazism are still “in the air,” although Germany has of course been defeated in 1945.

C.R. “Mac” MacNamara (James Cagney) is a high-ranking executive in the Coca-Cola Company, assigned to West Berlin after a business fiasco a few years earlier in the Middle East (about which he is still bitter). While based in West Germany for now, Mac is angling to become head of Western European Coca-Cola Operations, based in London. After working on an arrangement to introduce Coke into the Soviet Union, Mac receives a call from his boss, W.P. Hazeltine, at the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. Scarlett Hazeltine, the boss’s hot-blooded but slightly dim 17-year-old socialite daughter, is coming to West Berlin. Mac is assigned the unenviable task of taking care of this young whirlwind.

The undiscussed and “latent content” of this zany comedy is very serious.

There are three fundamental choices for a country:

  1. Class war (Communism, Eastern Bloc, Russia).
  2. Race war (Nazis, Germany, fascism).
  3. Cola war (Coke versus Pepsi, USA, business civilization).

The implicit message of the movie, which constitutes a kind of ultimate political science lesson, is that cola wars (i.e., corporate competition for sales and profits and markets worldwide) is the best choice, no matter that it seems manic and empty, since the alternatives on the list of three options are impractical nightmares which lead to calamities and historical catastrophes.

The basic book describing the cola wars factually is: The Cola Wars: The Story of the Global Battle between the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, Inc., J.C. Louis & Harvey Z. Yazijian, Everest House, October 1, 1980.