Fischer-Tiné, Harald

RERO DOC Digital Library

Indian development but also Britain’s economic inter-ests including the welfare of British capital in India.These policies hurt the interests and aspirations of In-dian business. The argument of the book is that the In-dian bourgeoisie, when it acquired sufficient economicstrength, became more vocal in challenging British pol-icy in India that had been inimical to it all along.The battle intensified in the interwar years. It wascomplicated, however, by three developments. First,until World War I India was valued by the empire forits commercial importance; after the war India becamecentral to military strategy. The shift favored some In-dian industries, such as steel, but the positive effect wasneither deep nor lasting. Second, London and Delhi,the two axes deciding British policy in India, disagreedfrequently, which made business response to the stateambiguous at times. Third, the relationship of businessto Congress leadership was fraught because the Con-gress was subject to divergent pulls on economic issues.Mohandas K. Gandhi’s preference for village crafts andJawaharlal Nehru’s preference for Soviet-style indus-trialization were not mutually compatible, and neithervision allowed a large role to capitalist industry. But alllobbies, including the rising Left, agreed on protectionfrom foreign trade and capital, and this suited Indiancapitalists. They tolerated, even supported, Nehru’s so-cialism at the cost of dissension in the ranks. Little didthey realize that while battling the monster of colonial-ism, they were helping to create a new monster. By the1970s, the socialistic state had grown so big and so re-strictive that it stifled the bourgeoisie.Much of the ground covered in the book has beencovered in the already quite large literature on the sub-ject. Nevertheless, the book has a refreshing quality. Ittells its story directly, without jargons or polemics, andat times with insight. It is well researched too. For ex-ample, the two world wars and strategic considerationsare dealt with more thoroughly and convincingly herethan in other general treatments of the business historyof late colonial India.The conceptual framework adopted, however, is dis-putable. In Lockwood’s neo-Marxist dependency-typeanalysis, the British Empire is seen as a state run byforeigners and working to serve foreign interests. In-dian capitalists were compelled to challenge the dom-ination. True, disagreements within the Congress or be-tween London and Delhi add complications, but notenough to change the story. This story has been toldbefore by leftist historians and pro-Congress ideo-logues in India. Lockwood recounts it better but doesnot change it. Is he persuasive?Critics would argue that the narrative is flawed. Wecan neither define the empire unambiguously as a for-eigner-ruled state nor can we understand capitalist at-titudes without studying market conditions. In an al-ternative story, the empire mattered to capitalists notonly as a state but also as an integrated internationalmarket for commodities, labor, and capital. Indianbusinesses wanted the empire as long as this market-place served them. Few, if any, Indian merchant of thenineteenth century regretted colonial rule, becausethey profited from the connections forged by the em-pire. Bombay’s merchants exported cotton to Liver-pool, sold opium and cotton yarn in Hong Kong, andimported textile machines and foremen from Man-chester. Calcutta’s Marwari merchants, who includedthe nationalist Ghanshyam Das Birla, were dependenton the custom of the European managing agencyhouses. The collapse of the world economy in the in-terwar period ended many of these relationships. Itweakened the Europeans, empowered the Indians, andreduced the value of globalization for all. An alterna-tive approach to business attitude toward politics wouldshow how the empire once helped Indians make moneyand then stopped doing so. This alternative is not dis-cussed in the book.TIRTHANKAR ROYLondon School of Economics and Political ScienceAPARNA VAIDIK. Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encoun-ter and Island History. (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan.2010. Pp. xvii, 282. $89.00.Aparna Vaidik’s monograph presents a longue dure´ehistory of the Andaman Islands from the late eigh-teenth century to the end of the colonial period in the1940s. Mainly due to the fact that the islands were usedby the British as a penal colony for almost a century,there has been no dearth of scholarship on the historyof this isolated archipelago in the Indian Ocean. EarlierIndian nationalist historians have tended to focus onthe fate of Indian elite “revolutionaries” incarceratedin the infamous cellular jail of Port Blair during the1910s and 1920s, some of them even celebrating the An-damans as a mukti tirth or “freedom’s pilgrim site” inmemory of the sacrifice and heroism involved in India’sindependence struggle. By contrast, most recent stud-ies, such as British historian Clare Anderson’s LegibleBodies: Race, Criminality, and Colonialism in South Asia(2004), The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prison-ers, and Rebellion (2007), and Subaltern Lives: Biogra-phies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (2012) or Satadru Sen’s monograph DiscipliningPunishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the An-daman Islands (2000), have focused largely on the sub-altern victims of the penal regime established by theRaj. Both authors are strongly influenced by Fou-cauldian ideas of the archipel carce´ral. Unlike bothgroups of scholars Vaidik wants to “undo the shackles”(p. 5) resulting from the fixation of island historians onthe penal regime in the period of high imperialism. Sheseeks this liberation from hegemonic scholarly accountsby two means. First, she places the colonial history ofthe Andamans in a wider temporal framework, thus do-ing away with the aura of naturalness from the archi-pelagos “carceral” career. Second, and obviously in-spired by the huge body of recent scholarship on the“tensions of empire,” Vaidik attempts a mapping of theAsia 1169AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2013“internal inconsistencies, asymmetries and contesta-tions inherent in colonialism” (p. 5).The first two chapters depart most clearly from Sen’sand Anderson’s work. Vaidik starts by tracing the his-tory of the image of the Andamans as home of anthro-pophagous “savages” that emerged from the early mod-ern period onward. She subsequently situates theBritish annexation of the islands in the context of Brit-ish naval policies in the Indian Ocean and argues thatthe discourse of civilizing savagery deployed to legiti-mate colonial conquest only served to cloak the realgoals of British imperialism. Neither the ambition to“uplift” dark-skinned cannibals nor the desire to founda penal colony for Indian convicts led to the incorpo-ration of the Andamans into the British Asian empire,but rather a more far-reaching strategy to dominate theIndian Ocean. The goal was to establish coaling stationsand naval bases in strategically important places thatwould serve to protect British trade interests by sup-pressing piracy and keeping European rivals at bay.Chapter three discusses the difficulties of “openingup” the islands for commercial use. According toVaidik, the very isolation that rendered the Andamansattractive as a site for a penal colony posed logisticalproblems, making the islands unattractive from an eco-nomic point of view. A variety of “natural” factors rang-ing from the climate to the unruly nature of the ab-origines was responsible for the failure of the initialproject of turning the archipelago into a self-sufficientcolony.However, chapters four to seven reconstruct the es-tablishment, development, and decline of the penal re-gime in great detail and thus run somewhat contrary toVaidik’s initial claim of shifting the historiographicalfocus away from the obsession with “disciplining pun-ishment.” Moreover, many of the issues discussedhere—such as the problem of labor extraction—havealready been treated exhaustively in Sen’s work. Thatbeing said, it must be positively noted that Vaidik dis-plays a great sensitivity for the loopholes of colonialnetworks of power, and as a result Imperial Andamanspresents a much weaker colonial state than DiscipliningPunishment. She interrogates the Foucauldian para-digm deployed by Sen and Anderson by placing a stron-ger emphasis on the successful subversion of colonialpolicies by subaltern actors and highlighting the agencyof the convicts including putatively disempoweredgroups such as low-castes and women (pp. 145–156).While the author has definitely produced an inter-esting and important island history based on sound em-pirical research, she is only moderately successful inachieving the ambitious revisionist goals she has set forherself. My slight disappointment with the book henceresults mostly from the hiatus between the objectivesarticulated in the introduction and the rather conven-tional fare that is actually delivered. The poor copy-editing and unusually high number of typos in Vaidik’svolume certainly do not improve this mixed impression,although this should probably be blamed on the pub-lisher and not on the author. There are, however, sev-eral criticisms that go a bit deeper. Firstly, the authorlacks, at times, critical distance from the sources andthus reproduces colonial stereotypes. Therefore, theway in which Chinese laborers and their opium “ex-cesses” are presented (p. 123) seems somewhat prob-lematic to this reviewer. Moreover, it is hard to under-stand why a study that wishes to break away from boththe “Indocentrism” and the fixation on colonial penol-ogy that have hitherto structured most of the researchon the Andamans should devote barely ten of its 200-odd pages to the aboriginal Andamanese. The fact thatthe indigenous population was decimated to the vergeof extinction is mentioned in a single paragraph (p.130). Sen’s new book, Savagery and Colonialism in theIndian Ocean: Power, Pleasure, and the Andaman Is-landers (2010), remedies this lacuna.To be sure, Vaidik’s study has some important pointsto make and certainly deserves to be read by scholarsof colonialism, “oceanic history,” and penal history.Yet, whether her approach is indeed suited to replacethe “inadequate and in many ways problematic cate-gories” (p. 189) used in the existing studies on the An-damans is open to debate, not least because she remainsindebted to those categories herself.HARALD FISCHER-TINE´Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,ZurichOCEANIA AND THE PACIFIC ISLANDSIAN W. MCLEAN. Why Australia Prospered: The ShiftingSources of Economic Growth. (Princeton EconomicHistory of the Western World.) Princeton, N.J.: Prince-ton University Press. 2013. Pp. xiv, 281. Cloth $35.00,e-book $35.00.In a series of articles written over many years, Ian W.McLean has addressed the dual questions of how Aus-tralia attained high levels of prosperity less than a cen-tury after European settlement and why it has since re-mained amongst the wealthiest of nations. Althoughthis book is not a comprehensive study of Australianeconomic history, it builds on this earlier body of workand brings together his answers to these questions. It isengagingly written, helped by the minimal use of tech-nical material and the creation of counterfactual sce-narios in several places. Most important of all isMcLean’s impressive use of the comparative approach.While arguing that Australia’s path of development hasbeen strongly shaped by international influences—im-migration, investment, trade, and political institu-tions—he interrogates closely its performance relativeto that of other specific nations to tease out nationaldifferences as well. These are appropriately selected inmost cases: the role of differences in land ownershippatterns and political institutions with Argentina, or thegreater connection of Canada’s timber and grain indus-tries to manufacturing than Australia’s wool and min-ing. However, New Zealand might have featured morestrongly in the comparative story.1170 Reviews of BooksAMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2013

Aparna Vaidik. Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

RERO DOC Digital Library