Amiya Kumar Bagchi

Earth-grab by corporate feudalism and how to go about resisting it

The need for a new economy is great and the obstacles are many: growing inequalities within and between nations and regions, new complicity between corporations and non-democratic political regimes and failure of workers worldwide to make common cause. There are alternative models, indicating that a more egalitarian approach does not necessarily reduce living standards. Environmental degradation cannot be addressed by a technological fix: the threat to our long-term survival is pre-figured in the impact of climate change and corporate rapacity on the land and sea resources of the indigenous minorities who live as humanity has lived for most of its existence. A 10-point plan for a follow-up to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals is suggested, but it will work only if solidarity networks can be built across divides of ascribed race, religion and nominal income levels, to express the will of the people in place of the government representatives who are prepared to gamble the future of humanity for corporate profit and power.

Governance—National, corporate and international: The Indian context1

Governance and Markets Governance in a general sense covers the webs of permissible behaviour of institutions and components of a society possessing a body politic. The relation of the body politic to institutions of society became a matter of serious analysis and debate from the time markets began to dominate exchanges of not only goods but also assets and means of production, that is, from the time capitalism began to emerge as the dominant mode of production in Europe. The functions of the state as a body related to, but not simply embedded in, the social matrix were canonically theorised by Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century and Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth.

Book Review: C.A. Bayly, Vijayendra Rao, Simon Szreter and Michael Woolcock (eds), History, Historians & Development Policy: A Necessary Dialogue:

The book emerged out of the engagement of three of the editors, Vijayendra Rao, Simon Szreter and Michael Woolcock in the World Development Report 2006 of the World Bank, which was devoted to the theme of ‘equity and development’. Since the typical programmes and recommendations of the World Bank have rarely served the causes of either equity or development, some parts of the book, and especially the introduction by the editors, bear marks of that unnatural conception. Before I turn to an analysis of those marks, let me say that most of the chapters on straight history, such as those by Chris Bayly, Richard Smith, Sunil Amrith, Stephen Kunitz, David Vincent, Tim Harper, Paul Warde and Keith Breckenridge are useful for summarising and underscoring the lessresearched parts of the discourses and histories of actual development, stretching from those of the First Nations of North America, to the actual history of progress of literacy in England, the neglect of public health in India, and the reasons why a rich endowment of natural resources has often proved so detrimental to many developing nations, including those in Africa. The birthmarks start from the subtitle of the book itself, ‘A Necessary Dialogue’ between historians and policy-makers. The need is not for a dialogue but for educating the policy-makers so as to instil in them a degree of literacy in history. Most economists now, under the malign influence of the US and British establishment, diffusing through the rest of the world, get their graduate and postgraduate degrees without having ever studied the actual history of economic or human development of any country, or the works of the classical political economists in Europe or the USA, when those regions were becoming the dominant economic powers in the world. As Wallerstein pointed out, before the nineteenth century, the discourses in the three major disciplines in the social sciences, namely, political economy, political science and sociology were all idiographic, that is, highly contextual.1 But with the triumph of liberalism as the winning political creed of the ruling classes in Europe and North America, they were turned into nomothetic disciplines on the pattern of basically Newtonian mechanics, possessed of eternal truths, independent of time and space. The triumph of free trade and the ‘civilising’ missions of the European powers had given them the right to preach what they considered to be good for the natives in Asia, Africa and the Americas, and therefore there was no need to contextualise issues relating to economic policies. The typical discourses of neoclassical economics and modernisation theory in political science and sociology, favoured by the World Bank and similar organisations following the tenets of the Washington Consensus, follow the tripartite, ahistorical division between the three disciplines.

Indian Business History

Can business history, as the history of men (rarely, women) in business, be an autonomous discipline, in the sense that it is separable from the history of the economy (or economies) in which the businessmen operate, the social relations in which they are involved, the attitudes to other people that they come to inherit, nurture or change, or from the political dispensation which regulates their lives or which they aspire to regulate? I do not believe that it can be so separated. At the same time, however, there is room for writing such histories provided that the scholars are careful to specify the political, social and macroeconomic settings in which the target group operates. The close relationship of economic and business history was recognised by the founding fathers of business history, such as the British economic historian Thomas Ashton.1 Ashton did not emphasise the relation between business history and political or even social history, presumably because in the British case, the basic political structures did not change radically after the revolution of 1688, establishing the supremacy of the Parliament as the institution symbolising the power of moneyed landlords, bankers and merchants. In the Indian case, there is a complication that there were basic changes in the political arrangements governing the country between the eighteenth century and 1947, and again another basic change on 15 August 1947. Political and social relations are important for businessmen in respect of access to markets, information, credit, technology and political patronage. Even among some students of economic and business history there is an illiterate belief that capitalism and capitalists have thrived without political patronage. There is, of course, a difference between particularistic patronage and a general bias towards favouring those Review Article

The Mutuality of Private and Public Credit: the Rise and Decline of Public Credit

This essay deals with the issue of the rise of the public credit system across space over the last four centuries and its recent decline in the last two decades. It highlights how the capitalist system and the public credit system reinforce each other, the fonner offering loans in times of distress, and the latter rendering its fiduciary responsibility. The paper contends that the switch from the fixed exchange rate regime to its flexible counterpart signals the fall of the public credit system that gathers momentum during the Reagan regime in the I 980s, culminating in the Bush (Junior) administration. The same trend takes off during the Raj iv Gandhi regime in India, speeds up in the early l990s reaching its peak in the current BJP led administration. JEL Classification : E44, E62, F20, N20.