A Crisis of Classical Political Economy in Assam

Tea War ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 81-114
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Liu
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Initial Failure ◽  
Migrant Families ◽  
Assam Tea ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Colonial Government

This chapter discusses the initial failure of British colonial officials to profit from tea in colonial Assam from 1830 to 1860, and presents a reexamination of classical political-economic principles. After colonial schemes to lure “free migrant” families from China failed, the bureaucrat W. N. Lees implored the colonial Government of India to dispense with liberal Smithian ideals and instead embrace the “colonization” schemes of Edward G. Wakefield, drawing upon historicist, paternalistic theories that were popular in the late nineteenth century. This debate introduces classical political economy's concept of “value” as a key category for the rest of the book. The chapter then recounts how, starting in the 1860s, officials legalized penal labor contracts that prevented migrant Indian workers from leaving employers under threat of prosecution. During the last decades of the century, the system shepherded nearly half a million migrant workers into Assam, a boon of cheap and immobilized labor critical to the industry's success. Assam tea thrived, in other words, based upon an economic strategy that stood opposed to the principles of liberalism espoused at its outset.

12. Critical Political Economy

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan W. Cafruny ◽  
J. Magnus Ryner
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Monetary Union ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter examines European integration from the perspective of critical political economy. It first situates the belated arrival of political economy in integration studies within the context of the division of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century. It then considers the crisis of the Bretton Woods system and how it served to revive the study of political economy through the establishment of a subdiscipline of international political economy. It also explores the key strands of political economic analysis as they were imported into the study of the European Union, focusing on the ‘varieties of capitalism’ perspective, neo-Marxism, and regulation theory. Finally, it discusses from the perspective of critical political economy the causes and consequences of the economic and monetary union as a case where such an approach seems particularly useful, along with Eastern enlargements of 2004 and 2007.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asiya Siddiqi
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
High Court ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Government ◽  
Colonial Government

Among the old manuscripts stored at the High Court of Bombay is a set that consists of the petitions of insolvents who were bankrupted by the financial crisis that gripped Bombay in the 1860s. The government had no wish to see the traders and merchants who were the lifeblood of the economy languishing in prison. Starting in 1828, the British colonial government had introduced a serious of acts for the relief of insolvent debtors. This set of insolvency petitions and related documents contains a wealth of information on the lives of Bombay’s inhabitants, both men and women, from a wide range of economic classes. This study explores how people’s lives were shaped by different aspects of colonial Indian society, including law, finance, trade, literacy, religion, and occupation. It reveals the workings of the complex and dynamic economic and social relationships among Bombay’s people in the late nineteenth century.

Democratic Institutions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumit Ganguly ◽  
William R. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Political Agitation ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
National Congress ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Democratic Principles

This chapter looks at Indian democratic institutions. Contrary to popular belief, the British did little or nothing to promote the growth of democratic institutions in India. Instead, Indian nationalists from the late nineteenth century onward successfully appropriated liberal-democratic principles from the United Kingdom and infused them into the Indian political context. Under the influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi in the 1930s, these beliefs and principles were disseminated to a broad swath of India's population via the Indian National Congress, the leading nationalist political party. As this was occurring, the British colonial regime was losing few opportunities to thwart or at least contain the growth of democratic sentiment and practice in India. The Indian nationalists can justifiably claim that each step toward self-rule and democratic governance was the result of sustained and unrelenting political agitation against authoritarian colonial rule.

Expulsion of “Undesirable” Chinese from the Philippines, 1883–1898

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-178
Author(s):  
Jely A. Galang (贾杰理)
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Political Security ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Colonial Government

Abstract “Undesirable” Chinese – vagrants, undocumented migrants, pickpockets, beggars, drunkards, idlers and the “suspicious” – were considered “dangerous” by the Spanish colonial government because they posed a threat to the financial and political security of the Philippines. Mostly belonging to the laboring classes, these unemployed and marginally employed individuals were arrested, prosecuted and punished for violating policies relating to registration, taxation and migration. While other forms of discipline and punishment were meted out to these “minor” offenders, the state deemed it necessary to expel them from the colony. This paper explores why and how “undesirable” Chinese were expelled from the Philippines between 1883, when the first expulsion order was issued, and 1898, when Spanish rule ended. Set in the broader political and socio-economic context of the late nineteenth century, it examines the actors, institutions and processes involved in banishing these offenders to China. Using previously underutilized archival materials, it interrogates the relations that emerged among various entities such as the state, the leaders of the Chinese community in Manila, private businesspeople, and Chinese “criminals” in terms of the expulsion process.

Anti-Sinicism: Roots in Pre-industrial Colonial Southern Africa

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen L. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Negative Feelings

Abstract With the Chinese presence on the African continent being perceived and portrayed as a new global phenomenon there has been a concomitant, albeit sporadic and nuanced, emergence of an aversion to things Chinese, gradually permeating popular consciousness. In a postcolonial world these anti-Sinitic or Sino-phobic sentiments are crudely reminiscent of the late nineteenth century colonial cries of the “yellow peril”, which culminated in acts of exclusion and extreme prohibition that singled out and targeted the Chinese in the various colonies across the Atlantic and Pacific including South Africa. This article, however, proposes to trace the genesis of some of anti-Sinicism to a pre-industrial period by considering developments in colonial Southern Africa. It will show how in the early Dutch settler and British colonial periods at the Cape, when the number of Chinese present in the region was miniscule, negative feelings towards the Chinese as the “other” were already apparent and evident in the reactions to them prior to the arrival of the large numbers which came to America, Australasia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

SETTLERS, THE STATE AND COLONIAL POWER: THE COLONIZATION OF QUEEN ADELAIDE PROVINCE, 1834–37

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN LESTER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Cape ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The One ◽  
Colonial Government

Queen Adelaide Province consisted of some 7,000 square miles of Rarabe Xhosa territory annexed by the British Cape colonial government in May 1835 during the Sixth Frontier War. The province was held only until the end of 1836 when it was abandoned under pressure from the imperial government, but it represented the first British attempt to extend direct control over a large body of formerly independent Africans. No such ambitious scheme had ever been attempted before in the Cape, and no such scheme was to be attempted elsewhere in Africa until the late nineteenth century.Given its short-lived nature, Queen Adelaide Province has not been extensively analysed in any of the prominent histories of the eastern Cape. However, while the treatment is brief, its significance has been widely recognized. This early, temporary colonization of Xhosa territory has served as a lens through which to view colonial extension in the eastern Cape as a whole. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century settler histories of George Cory and George McCall Theal, the annexation of Queen Adelaide Province represents a temporary advance within a much broader colonial progress. One episode in the epic attempt to extend colonial civilization across ‘Kaffraria’, expansion within the province was unfortunately thwarted by misguided Cape and metropolitan philanthropy. In W. M. Macmillan's liberal critique of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the disputes over the province between the land-hungry settlers, the strategically-minded Governor D'Urban and the humanitarian Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, are again viewed as part of a much broader struggle. But rather than Cory's struggle between civilization and savagery, this is seen as a contest between malicious and benign conceptions of colonialism. The province represents an early collision between, on the one hand, evangelical and humanitarian versions of cultural colonization that guaranteed Xhosa access to their land (a kind of trusteeship that Macmillan advocated for his own times) and, on the other hand, the practice of colonization founded upon settler-led conquest and dispossession.

The Shift toward Secular Ideology

2021 ◽  
pp. 273-298
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Following the rise of the state, religion served to legitimate societies’ institutions, practices, and unequal distributions of income, wealth, and privilege. However, emerging capitalism and its expanding bourgeoisie in Western Europe challenged the Catholic Church’s monopoly on truth and meaning, opening space for secular legitimation. The science of political economy increasingly evolved as a principal body of social thought legitimating inequality. This transfer from religion to political economy begins with the mercantilists and is mostly complete by the end of the nineteenth century. Political economy’s principal inequality-legitimating doctrines include the utility of poverty, the justice of the invisible hand, the Malthusian population doctrine, the wages-fund doctrine, and the trickle-down thesis. Most of these doctrines take on more of a patina of “natural” science in the late nineteenth century when the neoclassical revolution in economics attempted to sever economic science from morality and politics and express itself technically with calculus.

Robert Sutherland Rattray and Indirect Rule

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-84
Author(s):  
Montgomery McFate
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Administrative System ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Indigenous Institutions ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Indirect Rule

This chapter begins with a description of how Captain Robert Sutherland Rattray, an anthropologist working for the British colonial government in what is now known as Ghana, may have averted a war between the Ashanti Empire and the British colonial government. This chapter offers a brief discussion of the origins of European colonial expansion and the various modes of European rule. Indirect rule is described as an administrative system, which (in theory) used indigenous institutions for governance. This chapter then explores how implementation of foreign policy creates a variety of knowledge imperatives, including the need for empirical, scientific research (instead of the impressionistic research of untrained administrators) concerning African social, political, economic and legal systems and the relationships between them. Lacking the requisite information, the mutual incomprehension between British colonial officers and the African societies they encountered resulted in a variety of unanticipated cultural disjunctions. Three disjunctions of indirect rule are then discussed, including the dangers of exporting western models, the problem of self-defeating policies and third, the tyranny of the paradigm.

Native Foreigners and the Ambiguity of Order and Identity: The Case of African Diasporas and Islamic Law in British Cameroon

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 97-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harmony S. O'Rourke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Legal Regimes ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Colonial Government

Abstract:In 1947, the colonial government in British Cameroon established an Islamic court in the Grassfields to try cases involving the region's Muslim population, primarily comprised of Fulani and Hausa diaspora communities that had settled the area since the late nineteenth century. Colonial debates over the creation and purview of the court reveal uncertainties that permeated Indirect Rule's legal categories of native and non-native, or tribe and race, which were to be governed by customary and civil law, respectively. Comparing legal regimes in British Cameroon with Northern Nigeria, the homeland of “native” Hausa and Fulani, shows that Islamic law sat uneasily across the divide between customary and civil law. With the importation of the court to the Grassfields, where Fulani and Hausa transformed into “native foreigners,” the delineation between customary and civil law was rendered even more obscure, illustrating that it could never neatly correspond to constructions of race and tribe.

Renegotiating the empire, forging the nation-state: The Georgian case through the political economic thought of Niko Nikoladze and Noe Zhordania, c. 1870-1920

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Brisku
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Prime Ministers ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
History Approach ◽  
Political Economic

This article begins with an observation of a contemporary and yet reoccurring political dilemma that small nation-states face with respect to larger states in being either inside or outside of supranational political entities regarding political and economic asymmetries. Employing an intellectual history approach, the article explores this dilemma with reference to the Georgian nation in late-nineteenth century Tsarist Russia and the early twentieth century, when that territory briefly became a nation-state: It explores this through the language of political economy articulated in the thoughts and actions of two founding Georgian national intellectual and political figures, the statesman Niko Nikoladze and Noe Zhordania, who was one of the first prime ministers. It argues that conceiving of the nation(state) primarily in economic terms, as opposed to exclusively nationalist ones, was more conducive to the option of remaining inside a supranational space.

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