The ways of empires

Review of Rana Dasgupta’s “After Nations”

This new splendid and beautifully-written book by Rana Dasgupta has as its title After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order. The idea, briefly sketched in the introduction and in the last chapter, is to look to the shared future of humankind which would not be constrained by the system of nation-states. Dasgupta finds the current system incapable of dealing with the problems of human movement (migration), ecological challenges, and increasing wealth inequality. He believes that the technological power and reach of a dozen of mega companies will undermine the system from within and even put the survival of the species at risk. The solution lies in conviviality, mutual cooperation, respect for the nature, and the new relationship between individual, the state, God (religion) and the planet. These themes that belong to political philosophy are, as I mentioned, developed only in the first, and the last and rather short, parts of the book. I have no particular insight on these relationships and my review will follow a different course. I am aware that it might skip some of the ideas that Dansgupta and perhaps other commentators might find most compelling or important, but I think that the book is rich enough that it can sustain several possible ways to look at its main themes.

For me, most of the book is, in reality, about the ways the nation-states were created, how they became empires and what ideas they used to justify (or to explain to themselves) their dominion.

Dasgupta looks at four such ideas: God and Europe or medieval France, property or England, law or the United States, and nature or China. To each is dedicated a chapter. The ones on property and law perhaps resonate the most with us today; perhaps they do so because the Anglo-American thinking has come to define the West and to be influential worldwide.

The chapter on England places the rise of English capitalism within a global economy of plunder. This is not a new perspective. In effect, as Dasgupta writes in Preface, the facts and even ideas in the book are not new: it is the narrative, the historical story-telling, the threading of the facts, that is new. The English, and later British, society is seen as having developed on two historical tracks: the first historical track was oligarchic expansion to the rest of the world where the East India Company, whose income at one point equalled 15 percent of British GDP, and similar company running Africa, were used to enormously enrich a small minority. That minority controlled the state and were shareholders in the companies (one-quarter of Members of Partliament were shareholders). They despoiled not only the rest of the world and most notably India through deindustrialization of its textile production and China through Opium Wars, but despoiled too, or were equally indifferent to the fate of the domestic population. To quote Adam Smith, on the former: “It is a very singular government [merchant companies] in which every member of the administration wishes to get out of the country, and consequently to have done with the government as soon as he can, and to whose interest, the day after he has left it and carried his whole fortune with him, it is perfectly indifferent though the whole country was swallowed up by an earthquake.” Regarding the latter, British population lost access to communal lands, were forced to sell their labor and were stamped (in many cases laterally on the body) by the epithets of idleness, laziness and stupidity when they refused to play according to the system and to be herded, free of almost any right, into factories or poor houses. They were politically ignored and economically oppressed.

Reading Dasgupta’s, and similar books that abound today, one cannot but be totally struck how the contrary narratives of the British rise and the Industrial Revolution, some “crowned” by the Nobel Prizes, succeed in almost completely erasing the aspects of domestic and foreign terrorism, enslavement, beatings, outright piracy, compression into Navy services, enclosures, fabulous enrichment of political elites, military suppression of revolts, famines and executions under the beautifully sounding title of “Glorious Revolution”. “The Glorious Revolution —Sangupta writes--inaugurated the modern state in its raw form: an undemocratic commercial machine that unleashed terror at home and abroad” (p. 113). Eliding this truth is like describing Soviet industrialization and Great Terror by studying Moscow parades. But nobody has received Nobel Prize for that. Well, perhaps the Stalin prize…

The second track appeared only in the latter part of the nineteenth century when material prosperity of the people began to be seen as necessary in order to wage victorious wars. Political rights ensued. They were not, Dasgupta argues, obtained though revolution and even less through threat to the elite; rather, they were voluntarily conceded by the elite to insure its continued rule: in order to have a well-fed and reasonably educated population capable of winning mass warfare. This particular explanation of democratization will be, I think, important when we consider today’s situation that, according to Dasgupta, shows many similarities to the “first track” evolution of the British empire. The rich in the United States and the West are able to thrive, basing themselves on the global economy, regardless of what happens in their hinterlands, that is to the rest of the population in their own countries.

The American imperial system was based, Dasgupta writes, on law, or perhaps more accurately on “law-ification” (or legitimation) of whatever profitable practice is. The American chapter opens with the European encounter of (native) American populations when practices of enslavement, conquest of land, and mass coercion had to be placed in a seemingly legal framework. It begins, as is well known, with Spanish or rather Catholic attempts to draw some rules for the relations between Christians and the “savages”. Dasgupta’s story telling is very persuasive and the reader is left with contradictory feelings. On purely instrumental grounds, introducing some, however at first sight unjust, rules to govern the relations between the oppressor and the oppressed is preferable to not having any rule at all. And indeed many times in history the oppressors dispensed with any reflection on, or justification of, their behavior: they thought they did not need it. On the other hand, the hypocrisy of these ostensible “rules”, invented rough-and-ready not just to justify the already committed exactions, but to placate conscience of the oppressors and perhaps to make future transgressions of elementary human norms even more likely, is a hypocrisy elevated to such a high degree that one instinctively recoils from it.

Dasgupta puts John Locke’s famous, and otherwise commonsensical, treatment of property as emerging from the mixing of human labor with nature in that context: having been motivated by the need to explain Europeans’ usurpation of land from the native populations (including in Africa). The latter are considered as non-existent, that is, they are not considered as ever having interacted productively with nature but just living off of it. And in light of that of not having the right to the land where they live. It is a snapshot picture of the world where the “undesirable” inhabitants are simply brushed off, the nature is pristine, and the first person to have had an active interaction with it is indeed… the colonist.

The basis of the American empire rests on law or “law” (such as just described). Internationally, it enters the scene with the Paris Peace Conference and the emergence of the United States as a global power. The creation of the League of Nations consecrates the idea of the world being as it were “geometrically” and legally divided into the pieces of land controlled by different governments that in turn represent nations. The birth of the United Nations after the Second World War, the Cold War, modernization theories and the like are all explained, or discussed within, this new-found framework of nation-states.

This world is now, according to Dasgupta, coming to an end because of the inability to deal with the challenges that I mentioned in the beginning. But before I discuss that part, it is worth mentioning Dasgupta’s explanation of Chinese imperial tradition and its present reach. Differently from the other three, it is centered on the control of nature. China is an immense continental empire bisected by rivers on whose control the survival of the population, and thus of the Empire, depends. China, Dasgupta’s writes, exports today the same need to control, use and exploit nature—both minerals and crops—to the rest of the world. It is a new look at the Belt and Road Initiative: BRI is not only the inheritor of the historical trade between the Middle Empire and Europe, but of Chinese practice since time immemorial of having to deal with vagaries of nature in order to survive. China’s current mineral exploitation of Africa is simply a continuation of imperial policies now applied to the rest of the world and not only to the imperial core. The British and Chinese empires thus become similar: both depend on external projection of their domestic practices: commercial and oligarchic society of England to the pillage of colonies and enslavement of colonized peoples, and hydraulic society of China to the pillage of natural resources elsewhere.

To return to the question I asked before: is overcoming of the first-track society in today’s West possible? One has to remember that Dasgupta thinks that such a society (of indifference to the poor) was overcome in Britain only when the rulers needed heathy youth to fight wars. Reasoning by analogy, what world force today’s US elite to concede more power to “commoners”? It is difficult to see what forces may play that role, especially as technological advance, as Dasgupta insists, is ever less dependent on people. If wars can be waged not only by drones (as we have discovered in the Russia-Ukraine war) but by web circuits, satellites and robot-warriors why would the elite need happy and healthy populace?

Rather than seeing the transcendence of the system of nation-states by some vague communality, I tend to think that it is the symbiotic relationship between the state and the techno-feudal (as it is called) elite that appears to be the most likely outcome on the horizon. The state will not perish. Nor would the nation-state system. The state is an extraordinary flexible and powerful tool because it is the only (at least so self-proclaimed and thus believed by many) legal source of coercion. Rather than face the nation-state upfront and try to overthrow it, would it not make more sense for the new technocratic elite to take it over, insinuate themselves in it, and combine in their own personae both the appeal to the legal right of the state to force others and the ability to do so that their technological mastery allows them to exert?