Manas Chakravarty: Andre Gunder Frank, Asia's champion

WATCHWORD

Most of us labour under the belief, drilled firmly into us at school, that while Asia, including India, was no doubt a great and rich civilisation at some point in time, that was quite some time ago, and our continent has been going steadily downhill ever since.

We have also been brainwashed into believing that Europe has been the fountainhead of progress and capitalism, into whose hallowed portals we have only recently received admission. But if Andre Gunder Frank was right, those beliefs are pure hogwash, and Asia has been the fulcrum around which the world economy has always revolved, except for a brief and aberrant interlude in the last couple of hundred years.

Andre Gunder Frank (1929-2005), political economist par excellence, polemicist, and professor of economics at a dozen or so universities across the world, lost his battle with cancer last Saturday. He lived life to the full, achieving what most of us would take several incarnations to pull off.

He was one of the founders of dependency theory, a brilliant world systems analyst, a researcher and teacher in development economics, history, political science and sociology, and an ex-Communist and radical. As if that was not enough, Frank also found the time, during his younger days, to work as a janitor, to dig ditches, to lay railroad tracks, to work as a waiter and as a salesman.

But it was during the last decade of his life that Frank started the work that will interest all Asians. Convinced that the Eurocentric view embraced by most historians was fundamentally flawed, Frank produced his masterpiece, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, to redress the balance.

This book showed how, contrary to received wisdom, it was Asia that was the centre of the world all through the period from around 1500 BC to AD 1800. We had the world's highest standards of living, its finest commercial enterprises, its most sophisticated forms of government, and the best infrastructure.

What's more, we were the most advanced in terms of commercialisation of the economy and had markets in land, labour, produce and in credit. Capitalism was born here. Why is it, asked Frank during a debate with economist David Landes, that the British East India Company commissioned ships to be built in India until 1830 and imported ships from India at the time?

Because Indian naval technology was better. In 1750, with two-thirds of the world's population, Asia produced four-fifths of the world's GDP. As Frank put it so forcefully, "every piece of evidence that there is about per capita income, about consumption levels, about longevity, about mortality rates, about whatever you wish to bring up, it's clear that Chinese production and income was substantially higher than that of Europe until 1750 and 1800. And, in fact, until 1750 it also was in India".

How then did those devious Europeans get the better of us? Frank says Europe used the gold and silver from the rape of the New World to "buy itself a ticket on the Asian train."

American gold paid for Chinese silk, Indian cotton, and Southeast Asian spices. Frank also has an ingenious explanation for the decline of the East. He says that the increase in trade and the inflow of gold and silver created a polarised society with very rich and very poor people, a society that lacked the incentives for the technological development of the Industrial Revolution kind.

Other factors responsible for Asia's fall were the weakness of the state, and colonialism""we all know about the weavers of Dhaka, who had their thumbs cut off. In contrast, Japan, which avoided these problems, became the first Asian country to bounce back to power, clearly seen from the defeat they inflicted on the Russians as early as 1905.

But Frank wasn't merely a chronicler of past Asian greatness""he was also a prophet of Asia Reborn. The twenty-first century, he predicted, will also be the Asian century. If the Asian economies can keep growing at their current scorching pace, it won't be long before we snatch back our place in the sun from the West, to which it has briefly been lost. Frank would have loved to see that happen.

manas@business-standard.com