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Colonialism, Capitalism and the Discourse of Freedom

Part of: Labour History and the Case against Colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2009

Gyan Prakash
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In the history and historiography of labour servitude, the ideology of modernity and progress looms large. Thus it was with bitter irony that a British officer described the miserable condition of a labourer in late nineteenth-century colonial India: “Steam, the great civilizer, has not done much for this man, although the railroad runs within a few hundred yards of his door.” The persistence of the miserably poor existence was bad enough, but truly appalling was the fact that the introduction of modern industry had not set the labourer free. The poor labourers, or kamias as they were called locally, had seen modernity whizz past them without carrying them along in its journey to progress and freedom.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 41 , supplement S4: “Peripheral” Labour? Studies in the History of Partial Proletarianization , December 1996 , pp. 9 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1996

References

1 India Office Library and Records (IOL): Proceedings of the Government of Bengal, Scarcity and Relief Department, January 1874, File 13–76, Letter from the Officiating Collector of Monghyr.

2 Bihar State Archives (BSA): Proceedings of the Government of Bihar and Orissa (Land Revenue), November 1919, Nos 6–10, Report by W.H. Lewis.

3 Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966), pp. 391–421Google Scholarpassim.

4 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations (1776; New York, 1937), pp. 80, 364–367Google Scholar. International Review of Social History 41 (1996), pp. 9–25

5 Genovese, Eugene, Rebellion to Revolution (Baton Rouge and London, 1979), p. xiiiGoogle Scholar.

6 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, I: An Introduction, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York, 1980). p. 85Google Scholar.

7 Davis, The Problem of Slavery, pp. 30–31.

8 Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass., 1982)Google Scholar.

9 Davis, David Brion, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), p. 15Google Scholar.

10 Weidemann, Thomas, Greek and Roman Slavery (Baltimore and London, 1981), pp. 15–31CrossRefGoogle Scholarpassim.

11 Schlaifer, Robert, “Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer to Aristotle”, in Finley, M. I. (ed.), Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies (New York, 1960)Google Scholar.

12 Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, pp. 15–16. Here it is worth mentioning the well-known argument of Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff that in African societies the opposite of slavery was not freedom but “belonging”. See their “African ‘Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality”, in Miers, Suzanne and Kopytoff, Igor (eds), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, 1977)Google Scholar.

13 Thus Tom Brass, after making the reasonable argument that capitalism is not opposed to unfree labour, ends up endorsing the concept of unfreedom as a condition outside of its historical context of emergence so as to assert the superiority of his self-described Marxist interpretation over the the palpable idealism of my alleged “symptomatically postmodern outside-of-discourse/language-there-is-nothing view”. Thus he invokes the notion of “de facto unfreedom”, distinguishing it from the “ideology of unfreedom,” to defend the concept of unfreedom as a form independent of its historical conditions of existence. As a result, Marx gets dragged in to vindicate the representations of capitalism and colonialism through appeals to a supposedly “materialist” notion of unfreedom. See Brass, , “Some Observations on Unfree Labour, Capitalist Restructuring, and Deproletarianization”, International Review of Social History 39 (1994), pp. 255–275CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 IOL: Bengal Revenue Consultations, 16 August 1774, No. 442, letter from the Provincial Council at Patna to Warren Hastings, dated 4 August 1774. For a more detailed treatment of this process, see Prakash, Gyan, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 142–148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Colebrooke, H. T., A Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions (Calcutta, 1801), II, pp. 321–340Google Scholar.

16 Report from the Indian Law Commissioners (hereafter ILC), 54–55, in Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, 1841, 28 (262), Slavery (East Indies).

17 For examples of the regard shown for “voluntarily entered” bondage, see ILC, Appendix II, No. 73. pp. 318–320.

18 On these oral traditions, see Prakash, Bonded Histories, ch. 2.

19 See ibid., pp. 162–169.

20 Buchanan, Francis, An Account of the Districts of Bihar and Patna in 1811–12 (Patna, [1936]), II, p. 556Google Scholar. For Bhagalpur, , see his An Account of the District of Bhagalpur in 1810–11 (Patna, 1939), p. 46Google Scholar.

21 ILC, pp. 44–47.

22 Ibid., p. 14; Appendix II, No. 75, p. 322.

23 Government of Bengal, Bengal Zillah Court Decisions, Lower Provinces (Annual Series), 1854, p. 57; 1856, pp. 1–2.

24 IOL: Bengal Judicial Proceedings, 17 March 1859, No. 290.

25 Ibid., 27 September 1855, Nos 62–63.

26 IOL: Bengal General Department Proceedings (Miscellaneous), November 1887, File 153 and 172, “Annual General Report, Patna Division; 1886–87”.

27 Government of Bihar and Orissa, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the District of Gaya. 1911–18 (Patna, 1928), p. 64Google Scholar.

28 Thus a report from the 1870s concluded that the “half-enslaved kamia form the landless day-labourers of these parts. For the sake of a few rupees, a man will bind himself and his family to work for a year, on the understanding that […] the debts of the father do not cease with his death, but are inherited by the son. Thousands of these debts are never paid, and the landlord claims for generations the work of his dependents.” Cited in Hunter, W. W., A Statistical Account of Bengal (London, 1877; rpt. Delhi, 1976), XII, p. 72Google Scholar.

29 O'Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteers: Gaya (Calcutta, 1906), p. 153Google Scholar.

30 Government of Bihar and Orissa, Revenue Department (Revenue Department) Proceedings, November 1919, Nos 6–10.

31 Government of Bihar, Revenue Department (Land Revenue) Proceedings, July 1941, Nos 1–4.

32 Hall, Stuart, “When was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit”, in Chambers, Iain and Curti, Lidia (eds), The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London and New York, 1996), p. 250Google Scholar.