Try intuitive sense instead

The author is a well-known academic who has specialised in economic history. This book is perhaps intended to be a summation of his worldview acquired over his life's work. It certainly appears that way because the reader is left with the unmistakable impression that it is a well-conceived collage around a central theme.

That theme, of course, is open to question because it limits itself to the capital-versus-labour (K vs L) view of history that we owe to Herr Karl Marx. There is much to commend that classification in the longish tale of human endeavour. But one must also ask if it was not a product of its times. As such how useful is it to divide the world in this manner""Believers versus Unbelievers, Christians versus Heathens etcetera?

Does it serve a purpose any longer, even from the point of view of writing history? Should what was intended as the intellectual garb for a political manifesto forever remain the frame of reference for analysing history? Has nothing new crept into the peripheral vision of historians?

This is not to say that Mr Bagchi is not asking a valid question, namely, that capitalism may have brought prosperity as measured by GDP, but how much has it contributed to human development which, in a different genre, would be termed happiness?

The answer, I would have thought, would by now have involved two other inseparable ingredients of capitalism: technology and organisation. Alas, both are missing from Mr Bagchi's discourse. The result, I am afraid, is that it will not make any sort of intuitive sense to those born in the last quarter of the 20th century. In that sense, the book is well past its sell-by date.

It hardly needs pointing out that capital by itself would not have done what it is supposed to have done, either to people or their habitat. History is replete with instances when those with less capital but better technology and organisation triumphed over those with the opposite endowments. Whether it was the Indus Valley Civilisation or the Battle of Britain, it was always better organisation (Indus) and superior technology (radar) that made the difference. Mr Bagchi does not feel compelled to take these two into explicit recognition in this book.

But even if he were to be allowed that luxury and we confine ourselves to a view of capital as money or finance capital, the fact remains that human progress is a consequence of surpluses. One may feel rotten about the way it was extracted""labour exploitation, deforestation, conquest or whatever""but how sensible is it to suggest that a surplus is good only if the manner in which it is extracted or used is good? Mr Bagchi says that there is virtually no difference between producing 19 and 20 million tonnes of steel, except maybe in the use to which the extra million is put: hospitals or concentration camps?

Finally, there are two things that intrigued me about this book. The first is that the copyright vests with the original publishers, Rowman and Littlefield. What makes an author part with his property in this fashion?

The second is the use of the word "proleptic". Mr Bagchi uses it to describe a certain European view of history. But prolepsis means "pleasant anticipation". Is that what the author really means?

PERILOUS PASSAGE
MANKIND AND THE GLOBAL ASCENDANCY OF CAPITAL

Amiya Kumar Bagchi
Oxford University Press
Price: Rs 695; Pages: xxii + 425