This book provides a good introduction to Bangladesh, appearing amidst a spate of recent works on the country after decades of its comparative neglect in the academic and journalistic literature. It is unique among, and yet complementary to, other recent volumes, since, as a strategy for introducing Bangladesh to readers unfamiliar with the country, the author has organized the book by focusing on its political, economic, and social development.
In a developmental perspective, Bangladesh has become something of a poster child for the global capitalist economy, with its dynamic, yet troubled, garment industry, its highly developed NGO sector, as well as its status as the place where microfinance, thanks to the Grameen Bank, was pioneered with reputedly great success as an approach to dealing with mass poverty. Thought once to have hopeless prospects for economic development, Bangladesh has made considerable economic strides, despite its political culture, which dismays many observers with its endless dysfunctionality and resulting “illiberal democracy” (p. 76 and elsewhere). Lewis also stresses that Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority country where Islamic extremism, while not absent, has failed to date to achieve broad popular appeal, and in that respect it deserves attention, given that the Islamist phenomenon is so often a matter of great concern elsewhere.
The author has marshaled such a large amount of factual material throughout that the work can serve readers as a historical reference book for the periods it covers. He begins with a profile of the Bangladeshi state, drawing from a long-standing emphasis in the Bangladesh literature on the importance of patron-client relationships in the structure of the state system. There follows a concise history, and then a chapter on politics, providing a particularly useful discussion of patronage and politics in Bangladesh's efforts at state-building, again bringing together much recent literature on this topic. Lewis argues that vertically organized patron-client relationships mitigate against the development of horizontally organized institutions and thus “opportunities for collective action” (p. 100), and shows how this problem affects issues of national identity and both the formulation and implementation of state policy.
There ensues a whole chapter on “non-governmental actors and civil society” (pp. 109–36), a uniquely valuable part of this book. The chapter analytically describes the careers of “nonstate actors” that operate at the nexus of state and society. It alludes to BRAC—formerly known as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee—one of the largest and most variegated NGOs in the world, and the Grameen Bank as primary, albeit not the only, examples of nonstate actors that, according to Lewis, have driven the growth of civil society in Bangladesh. Noting that the civil society concept has received great attention over the past several decades in the scholarship on political development, he employs the data and the debates on the expansion of civil society in Bangladesh to illustrate the importance of the growth of nonstate institutions in developing countries and the need for scholars to study them carefully.
In passing, one might wish that, in discussing the Grameen Bank, Lewis might have credited the Comilla project of Akhter Hameed Khan, which he mentions elsewhere, with originating the application of microfinance in Bangladesh—something that Grameen founder Muhammed Yunus himself acknowledges. The author summarizes several lines of criticism directed against microcredit as an approach to poverty alleviation. But he might have also mentioned challenges, beginning to surface around the year 2000, to the widely accepted claims that microcredit institutions have been hugely successful in assisting women to emerge from poverty.Footnote 18
There follows a chapter on the transformation of the Bangladesh economy in response to globalization, notably involving the spectacular rise of its garment industry and lesser-known shrimp-farming enterprises. The penultimate chapter covers the nation's ecological issues as these relate to its low-lying deltaic geography, large population, and resource base. Both chapters are comprehensive and thorough in their scope and analysis.
As an introductory text, this book will be most useful for development and other policy professionals anticipating first-time assignments in Bangladesh and to academic social scientists planning research visits there. But it can also well serve to introduce Bangladesh to university students who have good backgrounds in history and the social sciences and are taking upper-level courses on South Asia.
