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Maria Bach, "Relocating Development Economics: The First Generation of Modern Indian Economists" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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E
Okay, hello everyone. Welcome to our episode on New Books Network podcast. In the South Asian History Channel Today we have Dr. Maria Bach, who's an historian of economics whose work lies at the intersection of how economists from erstwhile colonized societies produce their own frameworks for understanding development, political economy and global inequality. She completed a PhD in international political Economy at King's College London, where she studied the first generation of modern Indian economists, thinkers who thought about development economics long before it was formalized in academia, as we understand. Right. So welcome Dr. Mario Bhagavad.
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C
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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E
So my first question would be, what led you to write this book? And, and in this book I see you're dealing with two, I mean, overlapping concepts, obviously, and I understood that as I read your book. So. But at what point did you begin grappling with the idea of an Indian economics? And obviously we talked about this a while ago. And within this vast literature on South Asian history, what kind of texts or intellectual problems initially pushed you to think about this question? And then why use development economics as opposed to simply economics?
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C
Yeah. Thank you. I'll try and make it brief. Right. Not give you my entire life story, but. So I'm an economist by training. I studied economics at liberal arts college in Paris with a bit of mathematics, so much quite traditional economics, American education. And then with a kind of whooshed by one of my professors at this university. I went to soas, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, to do masters in Development economics because I was very interested in development economics in the sense that how our economy is developing differently in other parts of the world than the one that I'm from and where I live. And it. I had gotten interested in microfinance as an undergraduate, and so that's why I went to the South Asian subcontinent rather than the African continent, which I had initially thought I was interested in. And these are kind of just very broad ideas, right. But then I start at this master's my first week. I have Ben Fine, an economist that is quite well known, and he talks to us about the history of economics and how history of economics can actually push us to look at other kinds of models than just the dominant neoclassical ones. And if we understand the context within which they're conceptualized, theorized, invented, then we can better understand what the model can help us with, what it cannot help us with. And that just like blew my mind. And I was like, I want to do history of economics. And I ended up doing a master's thesis in history of economics. And I was there, I was looking kind of at the other direction than the one I end up writing about in this book, which is how do the classical economists think about India, the country, right. So Adam Smith, David Ricardo and then, you know, Karl Marx, the kind of anti classical economists wrote about India quite a lot. Right. They all wrote about India, Right. Without actually going to India, which is something I point out in the book quite a lot because this is quite an important fact. And so that thesis then led me to just be really, really interested in history of economics. I went to work a little bit in the real world for a little while and ended up getting into this PhD program, X King's College London, which is a multidisciplinary political economy, international political economy program with other thinkers like the ones like Ben Fine, Alex Kalinikos and so on. And I ended up with an international relations professor who was really, really great and was writing a book about contemporary India at the time. And then I had a South Asian historian as John Wilson as a second supervisor. Anyway, there during that first year of my PhD, I was, I was pushed to read Indian economists or Indian, I should say thinkers of the time, the late 19th century, that I was looking at to what was going on in India from the Indian perspective and just Indian perspective as in somebody from India living in India. Right. I'm not, you know, there are lots of different types of Indians in India as well. Right. But just the idea that there, it's not the British or someone else talking about India. And I come across Mahadev, Mahadev Ranade's work, Right. His essays on Indian economics. And I'm reading this book, it's not a particularly long book. Right. And it's, it's a lot of his speeches and journal articles that I kind of put together in a book after his death. Right. And I'm just, I just read this and I think. But there's stuff here like, why haven't I learned about this before? You know. Yes. I'm all the way in Europe and it's not a, you know, it's not, it's a famous book in India, but it's not treated as an economics text very much and so on. But. And I just thought this is where, this is where I should be at because this is not what people have done before. And in the history of economics, as much as some Indian colleagues of mine might not agree with me, but these economies are really marginalized in history of economics, Right. They're not marginalized in political thought in India. They're not marginalized in many other ways in society because they're Hindus, et cetera. But in economics, they're not really there at all. Right. And so that's how I came there. Right. And then perhaps I'll answer your last question about development economics rather than economics. I mean, definitely coming from development economics myself, of course I have a bias for it. But they are doing development economics. That's the whole point of the title, Middle Right. Relocating development economics. The idea is that lots of the ideas that come up in the 1950s in Latin America, which then is labeled as development economics, are actually coming originally from India in the first place, I. E. Because they're having the same ideas kind of in different time periods, but also because the Latin American economists are actually reading people like Ramachandra Dut. Right. So they're actually getting the sources from India. Right. And so my idea of relocating development economics is twofold in the sense that I relocate it's to earlier than we have before, but also to a different space. Right. And now. So how do I situate myself in this large literature on South Asian history? Yeah, it's large. It's not large on economics though, Right. They were. And it's getting much bigger now. And we're. I'm, I'm, I'm working a lot with colleagues in India who, who work on this to make it a much more established field. And now there's an Indian society thanks to several really excellent South Asian historians and economists in India. And I'm really thankful to be part of that community. But it's very, very new. Right. I mean, there wasn't a single conference in India, at least, that I could find out about, that I could go to as a PhD student to talk about the history of Indian economics. Right. It is particularly. It is very new. So I situate myself in that literature in the sense that I can grab a lot of great information from people like Manu Goswami, who is actually my examiner of my PhD. Right. And they, they have touched on lots of things that I've touched on, but they haven't placed them into the history of economics literature and haven't been as focused on their economic ideas as I am.
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E
That makes sense. And a while ago, you were also talking about global connections and your own historical actors. These Indian economists, you know, are never provincial or isolated. So they are shaped not only by imperial education, as you sort of demonstrate in your book, but also by wider global currents, you know, travel, political networks. And they're reading from, like, text from other places. So could you tell us more about the broader world of economics they were drawing from? And in particular, what I noticed is basically they're also inspired or reading or drawing from, you know, German and American traditions in particular. So why are these two traditions so influential at this historical moment?
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C
Yeah, so I guess there's a few reasons for this, and one being that they're. So the German and American traditions at this time were gaining momentum. And so these economists in India as elites had access, even though they were in a colony, had access to these traditions and these ideas. And so, yeah, they could get access to it. And then the second reason is really, well, so what are these traditions saying? Well, they're countries that are trying to catch up to Great Britain in terms of industrialization. So they're coming up, they're late comers to the industrialization. Right. Which is what India ultimately is too. Right. So we here, we have traditions that are economic thought traditions that are catering more to the Indian context than the British economists that the Indian elites are learning more dominantly in their, you know, imperial bachelor's and master's programs that they go through in India. But they also go to Britain. Right. Some of them to study London and Cambridge, for example. And so here we have economic thought that can help them better understand their own economic context and provide better solutions for the regress that they see all around them in India. So I think it's actually quite a. Yeah, I think it's the context that makes them these. These traditions more popular. And then, as I said, they're kind of Big enough that they have. That they travel, you know, all the way to India or all the way to Britain. You know, Nehruji spent most of his life in. Almost of his life, a large, large chunk of his life in Britain, right? So he got access to a lot of these thoughts, right?
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E
I mean, could you speak us, speak to us more about the economic transformations that are then taking place in late 19th century India which are driving this, you know, thinkers to articulate, like, economic ideas by drawing from German and American traditions? I mean, obviously there is this broad argument you just made about being, you know, late to industrialization. They're still trying to catch up, quote, unquote. So what are the immediate, then, material changes that are forming the backdrop to this intellectual tradition? And I understand there are regional differences as well.
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C
Right.
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E
So I was wondering if you could speak to us more about that.
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C
Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. So the kind of specific economic transformations, I guess, is one is on the kind of intellectual front. So we have to understand that in late 19th century India, the British kind of civilizing mission that we are colonizing India for its greater good meant that the British wanted to show that they were, in fact, bringing progress to India, right? And so they start publishing these reports, moral and material progress in India, every year as of 1861. And so they're kind of perpetuating. And I mean, I think we can all agree that it's propaganda, right, this idea that India is getting better and it's thanks to us, the British, that is. Right? And Niruji in particular was. So who's the older economist of the ones that I look at, right? He's just so. He finds this so problematic, right, because he's himself from an Indian family that isn't doing as well as it was in the past because of the East India Company. And so he's. He's saying, look, we need to debunk this myth about India being so rich. And he. Let's remember too, he spent a lot of time in London where Londoners would only see essentially the Indian, the rich Indians who had the money to come all the way to London, right? So when he, you know, makes a speech in 1871 and comes up with this, the first ever national income estimate for British India, it causes a scandal in London, right? Because they're like, how can India be so poor? We're supposed to be there to help the Indians, make them richer and prosperous, et cetera. And so that's on this intellectual kind of transformation, right, that Nuruji is trying to produce. And I think A lot of his contemporaries, like Wacha, for example, say in a letter to him, in fact specifically saying, well done, Niruji. You have managed to, you know, convinced the colonial administration and other kind of anti imperialists in Britain that India is indeed poor and the British need to do something about it. Right. And, or we need, you know, self government really is what they wanted, obviously in long run. So that's the intellectual front, obviously on the kind of physical, political and economic stance. There are more and more severe famines in the late 19th century and especially in the north, where most of the economists I look at are from the north, because that's where I'm kind of finding the archival sources. That's why I found most of the archival sources when I was a PhD student. And so that is really causing great concern about the fact that these are, you know, what emeritus sin today would say. Man made famines, right? In the sense that they're not getting enough grain, not because there isn't enough quantity of grain, which is what Ramachandra Dutt's big conclusion is. It's not the lack of food, it's the lack of access to food, right. This food becomes so, so expensive during years of drought that people can't actually buy food. Right. But and then the third thing, which is really like the second kind of material transformation is this, what is this deindustrialization they talk about now? This is where one has to be much more nuanced. And I think this is where Tinker Terry's work at LSE is so phenomenal, although he had so much backlash at the beginning, right, with his work. And he says, no, let's look at India as a complex, complicated, huge subcontinent and understand what was going on. And his work really tells us that there are pockets of industrialization in the Jew industry in particular. And then there are pockets of, yes, British owned industrialization in India. So that's actually not really helping the kind of average Indian, right? So you have, for example, Renade in Maharashtra who's seeing lots of kind of industrialization, although not enough, according to him, because he understands that there isn't enough everywhere in India. And then you have other parts of Calcutta where they're seeing more industrialization. So there, I think they exaggerated a little bit the industrialization compared to the work that we have access to today, Tinker Roy's research, because of course we have to understand that they're produced, they're in their own context with the lack of data that they had accessible to them. But there's definitely Something going on in the sense that Britain has won, you know, the competition game in the cotton industry and has such low prices that the Indian cotton industry just cannot compete. But we're talking about horse cotton, right? We're not talking about the kind of finer cotton and finer textiles and silk, for example, that India is still able to export to many parts of the world even in this period. So that. That industrialization. De. Industrialization is a little bit more complicated. But. But there is. There's obviously lack of employment in the industry overall. And there's a very dominant agricultural sector, which, if you look at, for example, the German school, Right. Is. That's problematic because you're supposed to have a balanced growth between agriculture and industry, because that's how you get good. You know, that's how you get effective progress. And I think there. Nobody's going to disagree with that, that the agriculture was highly dominant in India at the time. And it was very clear to the Indian economists that this was not going to bring them the progress that they needed and the kind of decrease in extreme poverty that was necessary for India.
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E
Yeah, I mean, and this is something that leads me to my question about, I guess, the industrial ideal. And this is something that I've been thinking myself through my own work for a long time. And when I was reading your work again, I confronted this whole thing about stadial theory that was sort of prominent, I guess, since Adam Smith's time. So what is this idea of historical regress that India is sort of. Or the Indian economists are basically sort of trying to work through? And why did the industrial ideal become so central to their thought? Was there a broad agreement among Indian economists that industrialization was the necessary route forward? Because in the immediate context, most of them, at least in northern and eastern India, from what I understand through your work, it's primarily agriculture.
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C
Right.
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E
And they are basically encountering the agrarian. So I was wondering, and you spoke a little bit about it, and I was wondering if you can articulate this more in terms of the relationality between industry and the agrarian, because both are being articulated from what I understand in the economic thought of these thinkers. So how is that sort of then fitting into the stereo theory, which is, as I just said, is coming from Adam Smith, probably.
- [18:49]
C
Yeah, yeah. So lots of questions there. Let me see if I can answer in a coherent way. So they definitely adopt this idea of stagal theory. And there are in the kind of intellectual history of South Asia that there are people like Char Karbati that have said that the Indian intellectuals from Bengal adopted this theory quite kind of. They just, they took it and said, yes, this is what we agree with when I'm trying to argue in the book, in the chapter on stages of civilization, is that Renati actually takes the theory and then adopts it to his context. Right. So he, he has these. So he doesn't let, let me say first, before I say it, he doesn't like clearly lay it out in one text over a few pages. This is me kind of re like putting together his ideas on it, having read all his work, the work in English, right, Which is the majority of the text that he published or that are published. And so he has these four stages using kind of biological metaphors. So ie, the human development. So he has a kind of a stage of an infant or a sage, of the very infancy stage. And then you have the child stage and then you have the adolescent stage and then you have the adult stage. And the idea is that the kind of the 1, 3 and 4 stages, so the infancy, the adolescence and the adult is something that you can find in the other stage of theory in Europe. But his idea of the child stage, and here I'm really, I mean, I'm quoting. He uses the fact that India was in a child stage and that India was, they were children. And that's not a very uncommon thing at the time, right. In any colony, especially British. Colisethat they were thought of as the children of the empire and they needed their British parents to, you know, advance their. And advance them along the path of development. Right. So this is, he's using kind of the same terminology that his colonizers are. And he says, okay, this child stage is regressive because we have a dominant agricultural sector, because we have extreme famines and we don't have investment in our industries and you know, we're dependent on this empire, so we don't learn how to run a government, et cetera. And that what's interesting then about the, the stages is not just the fact that there are these four stages, but actually, according to Renate, you can go up and down this chain of stages where he says chain of stages, which again, if you look at the intellectual history of this period, it's not very rare to see that idea of change of stages. And so as opposed to the European stage of theory, where you start at the bottom and then you go up here in India, Renadi and I think Nehruji uses this terminology too. Dut too. But Renati is much more clear about his idea of stages is that you can Go up and down. So India had been at the stage of adolescence before and had now regressed down to the stage of a child stage because of colonization. So this was kind of a stage that they'd been put into the stage by the colonizers. Right. Let me see. I mentioned there that this stage then had this very dominant agricultural sector and that what India needed then to progress to the stage of adult, to actually skip over the stage of adolescence. Right. Because they'd already been there. Right. And that meant, you know, political things too. Right. It meant self government. It meant a month, but it also meant industrialization. And yes, all the scholars that I look at, at least in the economics of the late 19th century. Right. We're not talking Gandhi yet. Right. Which thought very different things. Right. Which is actually why I finish in 1905, because that's when Gandhi starts to be involved in politics and so on and kind of complexifies the story a little bit, which is also. There are other historians working on that period, which is really interesting. But I stopped there just to kind of create a coherent picture of these particular economies. And they're all in agreement that industrialization is the right thing for India. And there really isn't much kind of criticism of why it could be bad. Right. Because. And it links to their idea of regress as well, because it's this idea, but we were industrialized, maybe not to the same mechanical level as Britain is right now and the way they want to go, but they were, you know, global suppliers of textiles in the past and they. And that's when they were much richer and they needed to return to that kind of the golden age of Indian history. And so industrialization was very key to their. To their thinking. Now, two things here. One, generally, we have to understand that all economic. Most economists in the history of economics are pro industrialization. I think there are very few people that don't think that industrialization brings about progress. Maybe today with the climate change, we're starting to. To kind of hack at that dominant idea. But we have to understand that it is a very, very kind of normalized idea in economics that we very, very rarely question. Right. So it is not bizarre that these Indian economists are thinking this to. In fact, it's. For me, now there are lots of Gandhian historians of Gandhian economics and may just, you know, may not agree with me here, but I think actually Gandhi is the one that's kind of more. The more exceptional one here in terms of that. Right. And. But yeah, and you have to that that's Linked to your last question, so I won't answer it now, but I think you can see where India's ended up now. It's not Gandhi, right? It's not Gandhi in economics. Right. So, so industrial. Now, one, that's one point in this industrialization. We have to just. There is a caveat, caveat to this idea of returning back to some golden age. Right. I think that's very, it's very important to think about the fact that these are nationalists, right? They are called the early nationalists. They are, they are fighting for self government. Well, you know, what later then become independence. Right, the independence movement. And so of course it's a very useful political tool to talk about India being really, really, really great in the past. And it's the Brits that have produced this, you know, this mess, this regression that we're in. And so we have to think about a path that we, where we united and where we. So it's a political tool, right, that they're using. And I'm. And so to some extent, of course, they're exaggerating this golden age in Indian history. We all do it. Most countries do this. We're doing it right now in Europe, right, where we're talking about, you know, free immigration. Europe was so amazing, you know, so this is. So of course we have to take that with a pinch of salt right now. I'm not saying that that doesn't mean then that the Brits didn't produce some of the regress that India had or most of the regress that India had. I'm just saying that it's history. We have to understand that these are political activists that they're, they're, they have goals with what they're saying and their research like anybody. So of course the industrialization that they saw in the past was maybe exaggerated, but that again, it's not to say that they weren't right at the fact that India probably did need industrialization and practice perhaps needs it even today.
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E
Right, thank you so much for that answer. So my final question is what is the afterlife of this intellectual tradition then? I mean, both for the discipline of economics and for post colonial India.
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C
Yeah, so this is where I was kind of getting at with the Gandhi and economics. Right. I think we have this kind of a little bit of a blip in the economics with Gandhi coming in and he's very successful at, you know, producing a movement along with many others, of course, talking about the fact that India should have a completely different kind of development and so on. And I think in Some ways it perhaps unites India. But then you see, and I already realized this during my PhD, but now more than ever since, there have been more books about economic thought in postcolonial India. I mean the books that I now read today about economics in post colonial India, I mean it's almost like reading some of the Indian economists from the late 19th century that they have very, very similar ideas about what India needs, what it does not need, what kind of policies should be put in place. Of course there are, there are slight differences because economics has moved on, you know, from the late 19th century to 50 years later when India becomes independent. But I think a lot of the ideas from this first generation of modern Indian economists has lived on in India and almost more so after you started to open up your economy. Because these economists were not socialists, right? You have to understand that the late 19th century was pretty anti socialist. It was only Nehruji that was kind of part of the socialist movement because he saw that they listened to his fight for independence for self government. So he took them as allies not because he thought that socialism was the answer, but because they were, they rally, you know, they, they gave him spaces to speak about the need for self government in India and so on. So they're, I think a lot of these ideas live on a lot. And it's not, in some ways it's not so surprising because you have to, you know, I think of their thought as, you know, they're raised in a colonial with colonial education. So they're kind of, you know, spoon fed British economic thought, which you know, we all are to some extent. Right. And you know there's, now we talk about the Americanization of economics too. But I mean Americanization comes, you know, also comes from Britain and originally to some extent. So, and so they have a lot of this kind of dominant thought in their thought and then they have these little kind of iterations at the margins, right of so okay, we take this part of the development, you know, the idea of development, but then we push at the boundaries and say like Renard, we have a different stage of development right now, stage of civilization. And Ramachandra Dutt who analyzes the rural areas to understand what's going on during famines in India and so on. So they're, they're kind of adapting their thought to their local context, but they still have a lot of the dominant ideas that were around in the late 19th century because they were elites access to lots of different ideas that are across the world. And that is perhaps why some people think of me as a kind of global economic historian in the sense that what I'm trying to do. And that's why I sometimes get a little backlash sometimes from Indian scholars where I'm on this more international level, I'm not working in India. And so I'm trying to say, okay, these economists are marginalized on the international level. I'm not saying. Saying that they're, you know, necessarily marginalized in India. Right. I'm saying that on the international level, we have this, you know, fight for ideas. And these Indian economists are not even, you know, anywhere near the fight to get any kind of space to be heard, at least not today. Right. And that's what I'm trying to fight against. And so they are, yeah, they are kind of using a lot of the dominant ideas, and that's perhaps to some extent because they believe in them, but also because they realize. And this is where one of the key ideas or key questions I have as a kind of intellectual historian of historian economics is how is knowledge produced? And. And how is knowledge produced in different contexts? Right. So these are Indian elites that are fighting against really strong voices in Britain that have, you know, established, to some extent, established economy, political economy departments or at least established political economists. And they realize they have to understand their thought first and prove to the audience that they understand them first, and then they can maybe add a little bit of their ideas at the end. Right. And you see this in lots of the speeches that they make right at the beginning. They're all like, oh, thank you for your Western education. And then by the end of it, like, okay, let's throw out the Western education and let's think about our context. You know, so they're using rhetoric and political strategies in persuasion. Right. And I think that, you know, that's why my education in an international political economy department has pushed me to look at theories of how knowledge is produced. And I specifically use Michael Baktin, a Russian theorist, to understand what he theorizes as dialogilism. Like that knowledge is produced in dialogue the way we're talking to one another. You know, I have one definition of a word, you have another definition. And we're trying to meet in the middle, right? So, yeah, these ideas live on. And I think that's why it's even more important that I hope more and more in India. Well, at least in India, but it should be everywhere, but at least in India, that economic students are taught that here are these economists, and they were avant guardis. They were trying to fight against a very dominant economic school that they clearly saw was not productive for them. And I mean, now I'm not sure if this book has come out yet by an American historian on the title that I saw was like the Apostles of Cambridge. Emeritus Sen and his other Indian classmates at the time, they'd ordered PhDs at Cambridge. And they came and this was like in what. What would it have been like when it was the 20th century, right. Later than my period. And they were the same. They come to Cambridge and they go. But none of this stuff applies to us. Like, none of these theories work for us, you know, and it's. And I think. I think unfortunately, countries like India and others are. Are confronted with this all the time because we have this dominant economic school worldwide, and it's kind of imposed on all of us, all the same textbooks. And now with English becoming so dominant, and it just doesn't. It doesn't do any of us any good, you know.
- [33:17]
E
Perfect. Thank you so much.