Of human bondage

With his book Capitalism and Slavery published in 1944, Eric Eustace Williams, former prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, had firmly placed the role of the slave trade at the centre of global wealth creation. In the present surcharged debate on Black Lives Matter, that book, which argued for the centrality of slavery in the rise of the Industrial Revolution, has once again become the thesis for a new generation of scholarship.

That this reference peppers the book Capitalisms: Towards a Global History edited by Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip Menon was expected. Each of the essays seek to present a history of capitalism from a non-Eurocentric and non-American perspective. “The ways in which the West shaped the global emergence and expansion of capitalism, is a well-established fact… . Too little emphasis has been put on how the non-western world influenced developments in Europe and framed the unfolding of global capital”. 

In constructing this history, it does seem inevitable that the role of the transatlantic trade in humans should be considered in some detail. Slavery did not just affect Africa, but the Indian subcontinent, China and West Asia too. These questions are addressed in both the first chapter, “Silver, Globalisation, and Capitalism” and the next, “New World Slavery in the Capitalist World Economy”. 

The authors of both essays deeply examine the role of the predominantly African slave trade in the spread of capitalism. But thereafter, this energy is not evident in the examination of other regions, including India, China and Southeast Asia. It is here that a more detailed examination of this trade was warranted. For instance, the European powers were clearly the main players in this trade from the 17th century onwards but many of them were also capturing these trade routes from older feudal powers in Asia including those from India and Southeast Asia. These earlier trader-rulers often tolerated and encouraged this trade in forced human labour. To what extent the development of alternative forms of capitalism were facilitated by these trades may need to be examined in the alternative accounts of capitalism.

This is particularly so with reference to the massive silver and gold trade networks that spread out between Europe, Latin America and Asia from the 16th century onwards. It was a period in which traders often measured specie and humans in the same scale of valuation. “The greatest London slave trader of the first half of the eighteenth century, as well as member of Parliament and director of the Bank of England Humphry Morice frequently instructed his (ship) captains to purchase slaves as they arrived (in Africa). 

Capitalisms: Towards a Global History 

Author: Kaveh Yazdani,  Dilip M Menon (eds)

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Pages: 380

Price: Rs 1,495

 

But instead of sending them (to America), in most letters, Morice insisted the captain should sell all the captives on the Gold Coast to the Portuguese in exchange for gold”. It was more profitable. 

It is such detailed work on forced labour that could have been significant. In China “under the Mongol rule, by 1291, the population in North China dropped by half. Among those who survived millions were enslaved”. In the two chapters on India, the respective authors explore in detail the development of merchant capitalism in contrast with the rise of industrial capitalism till as late as the 19th century, but hardly trace this aspect which was one of the mainstays of trade between India and Africa. 

It is a rich analytical compendium, otherwise. Mr Yazdani, who teaches economic history at University of Bielefield, Germany, and Mr Menon, Mellon Chair of Indian Studies at Centre for Indian Studies in University of Witwatersand, Johannesburg, South Africa, have provided a synoptic view of strands of capitalism across the globe. 

Histories of capitalism are a fraught exercise, to put it mildly. Instead of being captured in the debate, the book examines the variegated experiences. The chapter on India notes that it was easy to acquire wealth but was difficult to pass on to the next generations and so little was invested in the creation of fixed assets. “Merchant capital was institutionally weak and property rights were vested not in individuals but in corporate and community groups, making capital less supple and less available for industrial development”.  The chapter “One-Off Capitalism in Song China” surveys an often overlooked period before the Ming dynasty. 

Turning the spotlight to Southeast Asia, the chapter concludes that it was the emergence of commerce that created the centralised states of Burma, Siam and Vietnam between the 15th and the 18th centuries. It has implications. “...[F]ully half of the population of Southeast Asia, for example, became either Muslim or Christian during this time period, which changed many local attitudes about everything, for gender relations to politics and from sexual moralities to the nature of commercial exchange itself.” 

Considering that the centre of global capital has evidently shifted to Asia in this century, it is important to integrate the history of this region into the broader global history of capitalism.