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Title page p. Title page
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Introductory Notes p. Introductory Notes
Gyaraspur to Hansi Town p. 1
Hanthawaddy to Hardoi Tahsil p. 26
Hardoi Town to Hatia p. 51
Hazara District to Hazaribagh District p. 74
Hazaribagh Subdivision to Hilsa p. 99
Himalayas, The to Hissar District p. 123
Hissar Tahsil to Hopong p. 155
Hoshangabad District to Hoskote p. 179
Hospet Town to Huzur Tahsil p. 204
Hyderabad State p. 227
Hyderabad City to Indi Taluka p. 308
Indore State to Indur District p. 333
Indus to Jaipur Residency p. 357
Jaipur State to Jais p. 382The Daughter
BY A. S. RAMAN
(Rendered by the author from his Telugu play)
I
(The gossip of a small crowd at a street corner)
"Have you heard the news? The princess has been missing since the morning!"
"Who can trace her out, if she runs away from the palace."
"That is why she is almost imprisoned in the place."
"But she will escape from the prison one day. You don’t know her strength."
"Why? She has already escaped!"
"As rumor will have it?"
"What do you mean? The king himself has set out searching for her."
"I also hear that he has given her up for lost."
"Obviously she is under the spell of some supernatural powers. What do you say?"
"No, my dear friend, she is simply seeking refuge in human nature against the background of nature. I know her."
"This is a painters vision."
"She used to say that her home is somewhere in those realms where life is just a dream, realms beyond time and space. Now she has flown away."
"This is a poets vision, isn’t it? This escape is nothing but a frantic attempt to fulfil the purpose of her youth and beauty. That seems to be the plain truth."
"Ah, there you are! Now I remember how weirdly she used to cry at the sight of young handsome Buddhist monks"
"Hush! Don’t lead us to the gallows"
II
(Twilight. Vihar garden. Bhikku Ananda is plucking flowers. Princess Maitreyi is playing with an antelope. The moon is peeping at the eastern horizon.)
Ananda: (To the flower) O Flower! Why do you quiver so?
Maitreyi: Oh! You speak to flowers!
Ananda: Why not? I know their language.
Maitreyi: Why don’t you understand me, then?
Ananda: O Flower! Where is the seat of your smile?
Maitreyi: In the greed of your eyes. (Looks up) O Star! Where is the source of your glow?
Ananda: In the ashes of your hopes. (To the flower) Let your petals droop to dust and teach my eyes just to see.
Maitreyi: O Streamlet! Where is the voice of your song? Is it in the throb of my heart? Let the sands of desert stifle you, my heart is tired. O Moon! Where are your kisses? Ah! They are in the vanity of my dreams.
Ananda: (Cries out all on a sudden): Sister! Sister!
Maitreyi: Don’t frighten my antelope with your cries.
Ananda: (Turning to the Princess) Why not go back to your palace? Night is sharpening her claws.
Maitreyi: O Night! Come on and plunge this Vihar in darkness.
Ananda: (To the flower) Sister, we can’t live here any longer.
Maitreyi: Why not?
Ananda: (To the flower): Now this garden seems to be haunt of vultures.
Maitreyi: (Screams) Ah! Ah!
Ananda: Oh! (Runs to her) What is the matter?
Maitreyi: A bee has stung me! See how my lip bleeds! (Shows the lip)
Ananda: Kiss the flower and your bleeding will stop (Gives her a flower)
Maitreyi: No. There are thorns in it. You Bhikkus are completely devoid of all feeling, you breathing stones! Even if the sky falls or the earth quakes, you remain unperturbed.
Ananda: Like a rock against the flow of the tide, eh? And you?
Maitreyi: I die if the flower falls.
Ananda: No use pining for a flower that fades with the sun.
Maitreyi: I weep with it, I wither with it. Oh! what a wretched life!
Ananda: Wretched life! Whose?
Maitreyi: Human life. Oh! I refuse to live! How I wish to fly away!
Ananda: Whither?
Maitreyi: Into the jaws of Death.
Ananda: Does the process of life stop with death? You go out, just to enter again, don’t you?
Maitreyi: But my heaven is in the grave.
Ananda: No. It is on earth. Death is very easy. Life is almost impossible. How far have you fought out the battle of life, Princess?
Maitreyi: Battle! What do u mean? Where are my enemies? I see none.
Ananda: Anybody can kill a visible enemy.
Maitreyi: What about you? Have you not been scared away by the fact of life? Are you not living on dreams like a coward?
Ananda: Yes, I am a coward, so long as you fail to see the inner struggle in me. (Maitreyi closes her eyes). Don’t fear, my child! Who are you?
Maitreyi: (With eyes closed) A vulture. She has been chasing you all these days. And now you are caught. She will dance with you on the edge of the cloud. She will take you into the realms beyond the skies. She will teach you the meaning of your heart. (Opens her eyes). You see my gaze! Is it not as deep as the valley between the cloud and the lightning?
Ananda: My child!
Maitreyi: I who am determined to throw you into the abyss!
Ananda: Abyss! Where is it?
Maitreyi: Abyss of the world.
Ananda: You want me to fall into it once again?
Maitreyi: No. It will swallow you Ananda, how do you live in a desert?
Ananda: Is Nature a desert?
Maitreyi: There is Love in Nature everywhere, which seeks fulfillment in openess with her beloved. The lotus bathes in the Ganges, wears fresh petals, smiles through quiverings, and invokes dawn, just to melt away in the caress of sunshine. The wave swells to its crest, and through a wild wooing, seeks to kiss the cloud. The streamlet flows on, weaving her dreams into a song of lyric cadence, till it merges into the bosom of the ocean.
Ananda: So what?
Maitreyi: So the place you would like to live in is not Nature, but some unknown dreary desert. (Kissing the antelope) This is yours, isn't it?
Ananda: Yes, Let him have free breath. Do not smother him with kisses.
Maitreyi: It is the sigh of my love.
Ananda: It is the breath of my life.
Maitreyi: So your life is in my hands. Anand, is it so easy to part with a thing which you love most, when once you happen to possess it?
Ananda: He is my darling!
Maitreyi: And I too –(kisses the antelope). Anand, let me tell you the strange dream that I had last night.
I saw a mountain floating on the swinging surface of the ocean. There was none in that part of the world–absolutely none, not a trace of life, except the smile of the moon. The whole atmosphere was calm and serene, in spite of the wail of the wave and whisper of the breeze. I was alone on the peak. Suddenly appeared in the east, some silhouette that had the features of my Anand, and it was slowly moving towards me. I too ran up to embrace it. But with a clenched fist and a twisted brow, it shouted, "Who brought you here?" "Anand! Anand!!" My heart throbbed. "I! I! Your Death! With these words, it gave me a knock on my head. I tumbled into the sea. But I was not drowned at once. A lotus had already spread her peals as if to receive me. I lay on her breast for some time. I was safe, I thought. No. The silhouette began to throw stones at the lotus, till the poor flower was completely sunk. And with it, I too sank…..Oh! What a hideous dream!
(Ananda silent)
Don’t be silent.
Ananda: Who says that I am silent? Don’t you hear the cries of my soul?
Maitreyi: Cries! Why?
Ananda: I remember the words of my sister: "So long as there is woman in this world, no war can be won." This has been the burden of her song.
Maitreyi: And I say: Woman gropes in the abyss of life. Man alone shall save her. Anand, I am a petal dropped from your heart. Do you leave me to the worms?
(Ananda silent)
Oh! Speak on, Anand. What do you see in my heart? Don’t you find yourself enthroned there? Anand, let me love you. Don’t stem the tide. Let it flow on, till it breaks at the touch of the shore. Anand, am I not the ideal of your love? Let me tell you the whole story of my life.
Ananda: No. I know it. I have been your biographer.
Maitreyi: Oh! Yes, the bee plays hide-and-seek with the flower.
Ananda: Princess, it is getting dark, go back to your palace.
Maitreyi: Oh! Palace! Where is it? Is it not in the inmost depths of your heart? Speak on, Anand.
Ananda: I wish you had been born dumb.
Maitreyi: Anand, just touch me, I will shrink into a breath, and dwell in your heart, as the source of the smile in your eyes. Anand, let me realise my nothingness in your arms. You are my body, and I, a mere soul. A soul without body is a ghost, and a body without soul is a corpse. So let me make you human by merging into you.
Ananda: Adieu.
(Moves away; the antelope follows him)
Maitreyi: (Dreamly) Anand, you see how my heart beats to the rhythm of your step.
III
(Dawn. Princess Maitreyi is lying unconscious).
(Enter Bhikkuni Gotami with a basket of fruits in her hand)
Gotami: Oh Princess! (Softly touches Maitreyi who wakes up as if from a dream) What has happened to you, Princess? Why do you look so abandoned? You are very tired. Take some fruits, won’t you?
Maitreyi: I cried for the moon, cried and cried, till I forgot what I was crying for. Tell me which way leads to that temple?
Gotami: Which temple? There is no temple nearby.
Maitreyi: The temple in which I found him enshrined. Tell me, sister, which way is it?
Gotami: How can I tell you about things that I don’t understand? I know only one temple and that is the one which we all live, and only one God and that is the one that we all are.
Maitreyi: When I cannot get a thing that I covet most, I simply deify it. You have never coveted such a thing?
Gotami: Nothing except my own life.
Maitreyi: You want to live long?
Gotami: Yes. At least long enough to understand the purpose of life.
Maitreyi: To live is the purpose of life, isn’t it? It is quite simple.
Gotami: To live? For one’s own sake, or for others? That is where the purpose of life seems to lie.
Maitreyi: I don’t understand you.
Gotami: How can a princess understand a nun?
Maitreyi: Sister, how can I possess one whom I love most in the world?
Gotami: By loving those whom your lover loves. That’s all, isn’t it?
Maitreyi: No, sister. Just tell me what sort of penance can make me acceptable to gods.
Gotami: Where are they? I know none. Do they live in air, or on earth? But gods or no gods, penance must be performed, if one should live in the memories of those whom one loves most. And perfect penance consists in self-effacement.
Maitreyi: How can I attain to self-effacement?
Gotami: Through service and sacrifice.
Maitreyi: Sister, don’t you take me with you? I am desolate here.
Gotami: Why not, Princess? But you may feel out of place in our Vihar. Let’s go.
(EXIT)
IV
(Dawn. A corner in the Vihar. Ananda is worshipping a broken idol of the Buddha.)
(Enter Bhikkuni, Gotami and Princess Maitreyi)
Ananda: (In an ecstasy) Sister! Sister! Victory is mine!
Gotami: So at last you have won.
Ananda: Yes, now there are no enemies in me.
Ananda: (Stares at Maitreyi) It is you! You have come here again.
Maitreyi: You are worshipping an idol that has no face.
Ananda: Yes, an ideal has no face.
Gotami: Ananda, spread that Krishnajin first.
(Ananda spreads the Krishnajin)
Take your seat, please.
(Maitreyi sits down; the to her, and lies on her lap).
Maitreyi: I am thirsty.
Gotami: Anand, is there any honey in the Vihar?
Ananda: Yes.
(EXIT)
Maitreyi: I can’t relish honey. Let me have only that which quenches one’s thirst.
Ananda: Water will do for us.
Maitreyi: For me too, that is enough.
Gotami: I wonder. You area princess, aren’t you? Plain water is of no use to you.
(Enter Ananda with honey)
Ananda: Take it. Quench your thirst first.
Maitreyi: Ananda, I am content now, I don’t want any honey.
Ananda: Did you go home or not?
Gotami: Oh! You seem to be good friends.
Ananda: (To Maitreyi) Are we? (To Gotami) Where did you meet her?
Gotami: In the garden. She was lying unconscious.
Ananda: She might have fallen into a trance.
Gotami: When I woke her up, she smiled and bowed to me.
Ananda: Maitreyi, you thought that you could go home alone, with that perturbed mind and palpitating heart?
Gotami: Let her take some rest. I will send word to her parents.
(Enter a Horseman)
What is the matter, sir?
Horseman: I am in search of our princess.
Gotami: (To the Princess) Maitreyi………..
Maitreyi: Oh! You are not tired of this vain pursuit!
Horseman: The Queen, your mother, is on her death-bed.
Maitreyi: I wish her all that I wish for myself.
Horseman: She seems to have almost wept away her life.
Maitreyi: Now you may go.
(The Horseman sheds tears)
Won’t you obey our princess?
Horseman: As it pleases you!
(EXIT)
Maitreyi: You are your mother’s last desire.
Maitreyi: Can’t you accommodate me here?
Gotami: Can you live here at all? This is not a palace and you are a princess.
Maitreyi: Let me live here, as the princess of flowers. Let me lie on the lap of nature. Let me leave the seen and love the unseen. The seen are my worst enemies. Let me enjoy the unheard melodies of life.
Gotami: What can you do here?
Maitreyi: Let me understand the message of peace hidden in the whisperings of the breeze, and the rhythm of life lilting on the ripples of the streamlet.
Ananda: (Rapturously) Ah! Ah!
Maitreyi: Ananda, don’t you love me even now?
(Ananda kisses her on the brow)
Ananda: Oh! Sister! Here is my daughter. I have created her.
Maitreyi: Yes, sister, I am his creature.
Ananda: No. You are my creation. I am proud of you.
Gotami: My child, you have spurned the life of a princess! What a noble heart!
Ananda: Bow to the Arhat, my darling.
(Maitreyi prostrates herself to the idol of the Buddha)
Ananda: Now you may love me.
Maitreyi: My father! (Bows to him)
Ananda: Love me and love those that I love, afflicted humanity! Love them alone, because my heart is lost to them. Love them in thought, word and deed.
(Enter the King)
Gotami: Welcome sir.
King: My child! (Embraces Maitreyi)
Maitreyi: Sir!
King: Call me father, kiss me.
Maitreyi: Do not capture me.
King: What do you mean? Your mother is dying. Let us go home.
Maitreyi: Where is home?
King: Our home, the palace.
Maitreyi: No. Here is my home, my heaven.
King: (Smiling) You naughty child!
Gotami: Maitreyi, why not save your mother’s life?
Maitreyi: (To the King) Are you not my foe?
King: I am your own father.
Maitreyi: But I am not your daughter. I cannot return to those that claim me all for themselves. I am daughter not to you alone, but to these mute poems of pity, the birds and the beasts, to these crystals of tears, the stones, to these love-iron lasses, the palm-trees in the desert! Let me love them all. Nature is my mother. God is my father.
King: Alas!
Maitreyi: Don’t weep. You are a king. Find your heaven among the souls entrusted to your care. Bring them up as your own children. Your daughter is their, not here.
King: Am I dreaming?
Maitreyi: No. Your eyes are open.
King: What is a dream, if not that which one cannot possess?
Maitreyi: Go home, and live like a king, father of your subjects. They are your children. Love them and you will love me.
King: (Shedding tears) Adieu!
(EXIT)
(Gotami, Ananda and Maitreyi chant in chorus – "Om Mani padme hum.")
V
(Same as the opening Scene)
"We are all beggars."
"Do you hear? We, are all beggars, he says."
"Sheer blasphemy, isn’t it? He always blames entire humanity for what he is."
"And we must be proud that we are beggars."
"Why, please?"
"This is another fool to take fools seriously."
"What, old man, are we really beggars?"
"I say, don’t bother him."
"None of us is poor. How can we called beggars?"
"But what has poverty to do with begging? There are beggars among the rich as well as the poor."
(Enter a little girl in rags)
"What do you want, my child?"
The little girl: Your faith that we are all of the same family, only this much. I claim from you.
"What did I tell you, my boys? Now listen to this wise little girl."
"She seems to be some princess in disguise. Beggars don’t walk with a straightened back, do they?"
The little girl: I am a beggar, Don’t take me for anything else. Why do you feel ashamed of being a beggar? Your own princess is a beggar now."
"What! Princess turning beggar!"
The little girl: Yes, the princess is begging from door to door, just to feed the beggars. Now do you understand why we beggars walk with a straightened back?
CURTAIN.
#113, December 21, 2006
Contemplating American History in an Age of Globalization
I want to talk today about historical interpretation in the United States. There are a couple of reasons for doing this. One is that in my discussion with the two students who very graciously showed me around the Forbidden City, Yujie Chen and Xia Zhiling, I learned that many academics in China now look at the period of the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States as a period from which they can learn a great deal about transformations going on in their own society as it goes through the great changes that are so evident in Beijing today. Whereas before, Chinese academics (and those determining the curriculum in schools and colleges) may have wanted to focus more on the period of the American Revolution, perhaps wanting to learn about what creating a new society would be like in the aftermath of a great transformation of power away from colonial and other elites, such commentators and academics are now more interested in seeing what the effects of rapid economic and political growth on American society were like as a means to understand more fully such changes occurring in China today.
This is good news for me, as this period is the one in which I specialize. But, beyond this, there is something to learn about the writing of American history itself from this new-found interest among Chinese scholars in the Progressive Era. The point is that Americans also look at the past through the lens of the present, and decide what kinds of events are important and how they should be interpreted as a result of their own predilections and political disposition. What this means, hopefully, is that the study of American history should be less intimidating for you students, because it is open to interpretation; indeed, it is more important that you intervene in these debates and develop your own interpretations than that you get it right in accordance with the currently favored historical interpretation.
Henry George
I want to start, then, with Henry George – and the publication of his important work, Progress and Poverty, and then talk about how the work has been treated by historians since. What I am going to do, essentially, is provide a historiographical reading of Henry George and his text, and this means basically providing an account of how interpretations have changed over the years since its publication in 1879. [This is basically the kind of thing that you need to do as you come to write a thesis about any topic. You will need to know what has been written about that particular topic and how debates about it have changed over time, so that you are then in a position to develop an original thesis.]
Anyway, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty is widely acknowledged to have been one of the most influential texts of the nineteenth century, and certainly the most widely read economics text in the United States. From the time of its publication on, it provided the theoretical underpinnings for much of the progressive reform that occurred in the last two decades of the 19th century, and it became the most significant counterpoint to Marxian socialism. In addition, it provided the basis for Anglo-American utopian literature and the movements that grew out of them, influencing Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (the third best-selling work in the United States behind the Bible and Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth and Commonwealth, and Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Columns, and Progress and Poverty also became the economic backbone for much of Fabian socialism in Britain. Finally, Henry George’s influence in Ireland, Australia, Russia (especially on Tolstoy) and India, was great, his theories about land reform and taxation provided an impetus to anti-colonial and reformist movements. And considering that Progress and Poverty was a work of economics, and not the easiest read by any means, its popularity is really quite stunning.
One of the reasons for the popularity of this economics text was that it re-imagined the world in a more positive way than economists had tended to do previously. Where before there was a sense that economics was a dismal science and that societies were trapped within certain environmental or class-bound limits – so that, if one were a Thomas Malthus one would believe that disease and famine would place a limit on population growth, or if one were a Karl Marx, the growing immisseration of the poor would lead to a social revolution – after Henry George, there was a clear sense of possibility within the American capitalist system. Most Populists and many Progressives in the United States, therefore, were inspired by and referred back to Henry George.
So Progress and Poverty was an important work and Henry George was crucial to the development of social thought in the Progressive era. Given this, I want to take a look at how he has been viewed over the years and what historians have done with his work.
Political and Intellectual History
Most history before the 1960s tended to be political and intellectual in nature, focusing on political elites and political philosophers. Such historians, then, paid considerable attention to Henry George, along the lines I have just outlined, linking him to Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal. They made comparisons between George and Marx’s economic systems, and they recognized George for his considerable contribution to Anglo-American political economy and for, they argued, helping to establish an American way of looking at the world.
Intellectual historians asked whether his idea was correct that Land Reform would bring about all the changes that were needed in society and end poverty? Karl Marx certainly believed that George was utopian, and that any such reform would merely shift the focus of attention to other methods of exploitation tied to industrial capitalism. What George contributed, however, was a way for liberal and working-class radicals to think about bringing about reform of capitalism that didn’t lead down the road of revolution. It created the possibility of capitalists even seeing that some of their actions were self-destructive leading them to reform themselves – to some extent.
The merits of George’s analysis shouldn’t really detain us. What is important is the way he was viewed and the way this reflected a particular set of historiographical practices. The point here is that historians tended to focus on politics in a very narrow sense, and George’s influence was examined in terms of its impact on the political elites and their policies. He was seen as a precursor of reformist politics that led through agrarian reform of the Populist era (the 1880s through 1896), through urban reform leading up to World War One, and the New Deal in the 1930s. He was almost always viewed exclusively in American terms, even while he clearly had an influence on Irish Land Reformers and British Fabian Socialists.
As long as the New Deal system remained intact and economic growth continued in the United States, in other words until the middle of the 1960s, Henry George would receive some attention as an architect of that liberal welfare state, providing an ideological foundation for American society that was similar to but not as great obviously as Marx’s foundation for Communist ones.
Social Historians
In the 1960s, Social History emerged in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, fashioned around the work of English radical historians who were (in many instances) breaking from their Communist past in reaction to revelations about Stalinist Russia. These historians and the American historians who followed them tended not to want to focus on individual thinkers and politics narrowly defined, but wanted to look at the social milieu out of which such thinkers emerged. Intellectual and political history went into decline significantly, as positions in history departments across the United States were given to social historians, and those intellectuals from the past came to be viewed less in their own terms, than in terms of how they reflected certain social trends of the period in which they lived.
A shift occurred in writing, then, away from analysis of people like Henry George to the social movements themselves, and the descriptions of these movements were grounded not so much in the ideas of the intellectuals, but in the ideas of the people at the grassroots level – people whose impulses were reflected in rather than inspired by the ideas of the intellectuals.
As a result, Henry George, along with his work, all but disappeared in the minds of American historians – along with John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Ignatius Donnelly and a host of others who had been seen as the founders of modern American liberalism. He remained a source of comment in that he reflected what many American historians considered the uniqueness or exceptionalism of their society. Social historians were uncovering a great deal of ethnic division in the working classes, arising out of the high levels of immigration to the United States, and this (some would claim) accounted for the fact that the working classes tended not to come together in a revolutionary fashion, or even to develop a strong labor or socialist political party (because they were so divided among themselves), and also accounted for why ideas like those of Henry George would remain more fashionable than the more revolutionary ideas found among supporters of Karl Marx in Europe.
Ironically, then, while the Political Historians had been more American in their emphasis, focusing on American political traditions and institutions, they had remained somewhat international in their focus and their discussion of transatlantic political traditions, Social Historians, who highlighted the workers who were coming to the United States from all over the world, approached them in ways that made them seem very narrow and American – at least politically – using their heterogeneity and diversity to define them as such.
The limitations of Social history gradually became apparent to many. Each group was being studied in great detail, but the totality remained unexamined or un-interrogated. Many historians began to look for ways to get a better sense of the whole picture of American history and to do this some turned to Comparative History.
Comparative History
Essentially, this involved comparing American history with other nations’ and societies’ histories, and this came into vogue in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
While Comparative history led to some interesting work, the overall result was to largely reaffirm what was already being suggested in the work of Social Historians. Often historians compared the United States with different countries in a bifurcated way – in other ways comparative history was split between those works that made racial comparisons and others that made class comparisons. Those that made racial comparisons did so by contrasting the United States with other former slave societies, allowing the American historians by and large to argue that American slavery and racial codes were less harsh and more malleable – providing the soil out of which the Civil Rights movement could grow, and which therefore could be seen as a logical extension of American traditions and history. Other historians, meanwhile, compared American labor relations with those in Europe and found that American class relations were less fractious than those in Europe. Such findings were made in spite of the fact that many European radicals had been under the impression that the revolution would occur first in the United States, since it was the most developed industrial nation, and that American workers were more radical than those in Europe. This was partly why many of the world’s radicals, from Trotsky to Jose Marti to Indian Marxists like M.N. Roy, were to be found living in cities in the United States prior to returning to participate in the social upheavals in their countries of origin. No comparative historians managed to think about class and race relations together, in ways that would allow them to really question the interpretations and vision created by Social historians.
And still Henry George remained out of the picture in comparative studies. Most of the emphasis was on comparing social systems or social groups rather than on intellectuals, so focusing on work like Progress and Poverty remained uncompelling to these historians.
Internationalizing American History
Historians once again took note of Henry George, when scholars started to call for an increased awareness of linkages and connections between different societies, what came to be known as “Internationalizing American History.” For example, Daniel T. Rodgers, in Atlantic Crossings (published in 1998) recognized Henry George’s critical contribution to European social thought, and this was very much a part of this trend.
This sense of the need to understand how the United States fit within world history reflected changes occurring in American society in the 1990s. Once again, historiographical developments reflected the social context in which they emerged. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, many in the United States came to believe that one system – theirs – had won, and that globalization and capitalism would henceforward proceed hand in hand. The sense grew also that historical writing now needed to be more global and so historians needed to look for the roots of such a development in American History.
However, as I summarized this trend in an article called, “Making the World Safe for American History,” these historians seemed to assume particular kinds of global trajectories based upon unexamined assumptions of what they considered to be the fundamental elements of American history. As a result, they tended to be very Euro-American in their focus, not recognizing that ideas and movements were not always emanating from Europe and America and then influencing the rest of the world – a Eurocentric practice that fit very comfortably alongside old fashioned views of European imperialism that it had brought so much benefit to the poorer regions of the world.
What tended to be missed was what anti-colonial and postcolonial historians had already been focusing on for many years. Many things tended to be overlooked in these sanitized histories like the fact that much of the capitalist growth was a product of things like the Atlantic Slave trade and slave-produced commodities, like the forcing of opium onto the Chinese for the benefit of the British Empire, and so forth, and that indeed there was, as Henry George, had pointed out in 1879, a significant on-going connection between so-called progress and the poverty on which it was founded and on which, in many instances, it depended.
And given this alternative historical reality to the ones most Americans historians were fostering in their project of Internationalizing American history, Henry George becomes an even more compelling person than he had ever really been envisioned as being before. For, his economic theory was based on his attempt to examine the roots, not of poverty in industrial society alone, but of all societies, especially colonial ones. His own concern for poverty emerged from his experience as a sailor on the ship called the Hindoo in 1855, prior to the American Civil War, when he witnessed bodies of Indian peasants floating down the Hooghly River near Calcutta in the wake of a famine that he later argued, correctly, was not the result of some demographic pressure placed on the land by overpopulation, as claimed by Malthus, but rather was the product of the misguided policies of the British rulers.
Indeed, one of Progress and Poverty’s most important contributions lay in its assault on Malthusianism, which George believed was one of the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of combating poverty. Thomas Malthus’ Essay on Population had persuaded many liberally inclined intellectuals to rethink their commitment to policies of amelioration, such as the English Poor Laws. Malthus had argued that, “population tended to increase faster than the means of subsistence, [so that] workers were inevitably condemned to lives of privation. Wars, diseases, and famines operated to check population growth and therefore could lessen pressure on resources and arrest declines in wages. In contrast public benevolence to the poor, such as relief offered through the poor laws, eventually made conditions worse [according to Malthus] because it encouraged the poor to have more children and helped them to stay alive. In Malthus’ words, the poor laws ‘may be said therefore in some measure to create the poor which they maintain.’”[i]
In the chapter of Progress and Poverty entitled “Inferences from Facts,” George endeavored to show how the philosophy of Malthus had been developed around certain misconceived inferences from the fact of Indian and Chinese poverty. India and China had become the testing ground for Malthus’ “Essay on Population” because historians had endeavored to make the histories of India and China conform to Malthusian theory. But lands of great potential like India and China had been turned into wastelands of poverty and famine, George asserted, not because of overpopulation, as Malthus had claimed, but because of particularly harsh social conditions. These oppressive social conditions had had a long history, George felt:
In both countries great natural resources are wholly neglected. This arises from no innate deficiency in the people, for the Hindoo, as comparative philology has shown, is of our own blood, and China possessed a high degree of civilization and the rudiments of the most important modern inventions when our ancestors were [no more than] wandering savages. It arises from the form which the social organization has in both countries taken, which has shackled productive power and robbed industry of its reward.
After a long description focusing on the system of oppression in India, George ended with the question, “Is it not clear that this tyranny and insecurity have produced the want and starvation of India; and not…the pressure of population upon subsistence that has produced the want, and the want the tyranny?(95-96)[ii]
If things were bad, as George claimed, under the Rajahs who had ruled India they were to become immeasurably worse under British Colonial Rule. George turned to the authority of Macaulay’s essay on Lord Clive, which had described the “enormous fortunes…rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness.” Indians, Macaulay had averred, “have been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this.”(97-8) If Macaulay only touched on the horrors of East India Company rule, Edmund Burke’s “vivid eloquence” painted a more complete picture, with “whole districts surrendered to the unrestrained cupidity of the worst of human kind, poverty-stricken peasants fiendishly tortured to compel them to give up their little hoards, and once populous tracts turned into deserts.”(98)
While George noted that this “lawless license of early English rule” had been restrained and had given way to “the just principles of English law,” nevertheless, he noted, “With increasing frequency famine has succeeded famine, raging with greater intensity over wider areas.”(98) George laid out the traditional view, in order to refute it, thus:
Is not this a demonstration of the Malthusian theory?… Does it not show, as Malthus contended, that, to shut up the sluices by which superabundant population is carried off, is but to compel nature to open new ones, and that unless the sources of human increase are checked by prudential regulation, the alternative of war is famine? This has been the orthodox interpretation.(98)
But George disagreed with this orthodoxy. The reasons for the famines lay in the nature of English colonialism, regardless how ordered and fair colonial rule was intended to be:
The millions of India [he said] have bowed their necks beneath the yokes of many conquerors, but worst of all is the steady, grinding weight of English domination – a weight which is literally crushing millions out of existence, and, as shown by English writers, is inevitably tending to a most frightful and widespread catastrophe. Other conquerors have lived in the land, and, though bad and tyrannous in their rule, have understood and been understood by the people; but India now is like a great estate owned by an absentee and alien landlord. A most expensive military and civil establishment is kept up, managed and officered by Englishmen who regard India as but a place of temporary exile; and an enormous sum…is raised from [an impoverished] population….is drained away to England in the shape of remittances, pensions, home charges of the government, etc. – a tribute for which there is no return. (98-9)
George ended this passage by quoting Florence Nightingale: “We do not care for the people of India. The saddest sight to be seen in the East – nay, probably in the world – is the peasants of our Eastern Empire.” “The real cause of want in India has been, and yet is,” George concluded, “the rapacity of man, not the niggardliness of nature.”(101) While Malthus blamed the poor for their misery, George argued instead, “that everywhere the vice and misery attributed to over-population can be traced to the warfare, tyranny, and oppression which prevent knowledge from being utilized and deny the security essential to production.” This fact was obvious, he claimed, “with regard to [both] India and China.” It was clear also in the case of the potato famine in Ireland, which had brought so many laborers to the United States.
What we find in Progress and Poverty, then, is that the British Empire, India and China had been placed front and center in the establishment of a new progressive economic theory. For the dichotomy of poverty and progress to become lodged in the American reader’s imagination, an understanding of the conditions of the poor in India and China was required. Without George’s grappling with India and China there could be no refutation of Malthus; and without that there could be no new and coherent progressive economic system. Without the stark descriptions of British land practices in India there would be no easily proven, widely accepted example (especially once the Slave Power in the American South had been vanquished in the Civil War) to show the dangers of rent and monopoly; and without that there would be no justification for the State to introduce its “Single Tax” on rent, thereby transgressing laissez-faire convention for the benefit of capitalism.
This focus on India and China was why Progress and Poverty’s influence would extend beyond the Atlantic world. Amrita Lal Roy, who came to live in New York City for three years in 1885, immediately saw the significance of Henry George’s work. For Roy, its significance lay in its consideration of the global predicament of poverty. As a result, he thought, Progress and Poverty had “startled the whole civilized world” and it held out “hopes of a bright future to millions of suffering men who have for centuries been offered as a sacrifice to a heartless philosophy.” This text, whose genealogy as I noted can be traced back to India, would return there in Amrita Lal Roy’s carpetbag, and receive considerable coverage in his published travelogue.[iii] It would also make its way back to India via other more circuitous routes, through the influence of the Irish Land League among Indian nationalists and through Count Tolstoy’s correspondence.[iv] George continued a long correspondence with Leo Tolstoy, who came to believe that the American “had formulated the next article in the programme of the progressist
Return to Malthus?
The world has been shaken quite considerably since 2000 and the triumphalism that seemed to be embedded in Americans’ historical writing during the 1990s has been shaken. One area where this is clear is in the growth of communalism, nationalism, and identity politics around the world leading to the disaster that has occurred since 9/11, most particularly in Iraq. But, in addition to this there has been a transformation resulting from an end of the kind of economic optimism fostered by Henry George, and an apparent return to the more Malthusian vision of a world of limits. Great expansion of wealth and industrialization may continue to occur across the world, but there are two features to it that would have to be considered fundamentally un-American in nature.
The first is the degree to which we have moved from the American Century to perhaps a Chinese one – with the domination of the global economy shifting across the Pacific – potentially leaving the United States behind. In the United States this means that there will be attempts from different groups to find ways to hold on to its position, even in some self-defeating ways through isolationism – by keeping immigrants out and through economic protection.
The second reflects the resurgence of what might be called neo-Malthusianism. Many now believe that whatever growth occurs will happen at a price. It is doubtful whether the minerals and other resources that made possible the industrial, commercial and information revolutions of the last two centuries will remain available for too much longer; in addition there is the question of whether, with global warming, we can afford to continue along the same direction we have been going. For American society, this means that there will continue to be considerable conflict around issues of the environment, as some people endeavor to grab for the last available resources, while others try to control and ration them. On global terms the problems will likely arise as the United States either opts out of climate controls (as with the Kyoto Treaty), or, when it doesn’t do so, appears to be stopping others reaping the benefits of the kind of behavior that made the United States wealthy in the first place.
In light of such things, understanding Henry George and Progress and Poverty seems more pressing. On the one hand, the world may appear to have passed on from George and to have returned to Malthus. And in a world that has moved on from Colonialism and imperial domination, a Malthusian theory may no longer simply appear to be just an economic rationale developed to protect entrenched elites – as Malthus’ economic theory so clearly was.
But such developments will not be entirely at George’s expense. There is the more fundamental question of whether we can survive as a species and this must further unite us in a global endeavor – something that Henry George would have understood. Moreover, while we may now be confronted by a world of limits, these are limits, as George would have quickly pointed out, of our own making. We also have not moved on from the fundamental question asked by George. Is progress necessarily progress for all? Might it be dependent on the poverty of the many? May Progress also ultimately be our undoing?
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[i] Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 91.
[ii] George here cites a lengthy passage from Rev. William Tennant’s “Indian Recreations” (1804) to illustrate his point.
[iii] Amrita Lal Roy’s essay on British India, “English Rule in India” (vol. 142, 1888), pp. 356-70, appeared in the same issue of The North American, as one of George’s essays on Ireland. Lal does not mention meeting George, however.
[iv] For the impact of George on the Irish Land League, see Geiger, The Philosophy of Henry George, pp. 56-62.
[v] Life of Henry George, p. 514; see also Robert V. Andelson, “Introduction,” in Andelson, ed., Critics of Henry George (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979), p. 15. For Tolstoy’s influence on Gandhi, see his bibliography.
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