A historical sociologist and leading exponent of world-systems analysis, Ravi Palat has made it his mission to show how the world-systems perspective can advance our understanding of historical formations and dynamics past and present.Footnote 1 With the rise of global history, a wealth of fascinating studies now documents how societies outside Europe contributed to the forging of capitalism and charts how local encounters shaped the capitalist values and institutions that have gradually but inexorably engulfed the world. Yet many of the most influential of these challenges to Eurocentric triumphalism nevertheless accept the underlying teleologies of capitalist modernity. In deploying concepts like divergence, core and periphery, or proto-industrialization, Palat argues, they are universalizing the specific characteristics and dynamics of capitalism. But capitalism, however powerful in the long term, is just one world-system among many that have flourished and contended throughout human history. Applying capitalist-inflected terms of analysis to noncapitalist societies obscures alternative paths of social evolution and state formation that are instructive not only for our historical understanding of the forces in play in earlier eras, but also for a more incisive critique of really-existing capitalism.
In The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, Palat sets out for us one such alternative. Starting like Braudel from human-environmental relations, he unfolds a story of how a region of polities enriched and consolidated by the bounties of wet-rice cultivation experienced an “industrious revolution” of small-scale craft production in which different states and ecologies were knit together by “commercialization without capitalism.” In southern India and its neighbors, the requirements and affordances of wet-rice farming shaped state finances, social relations, and tenurial patterns, and supported high levels of small-scale commodity production, local specialization, and trade. Trade by sea and by land operated at many scales, involving every kind of good from precious spices, fine muslins, or New World silver to grain or plain cloth for local processing.
How did this web of commerce differ from its European counterparts? Asian merchants lacked the power and leverage of their European peers for two reasons, Palat argues. One relates to the small scale of commodity production and the key role of peddlers in both local and long-distance trade, preventing merchant monopolies. In addition, the tax base of the rice-based economies was sufficiently ample and reliable that rulers did not, unlike their counterparts in Western Europe, depend on loans from financiers and merchants to finance their wars and thus felt no need to guarantee their protection abroad.
What happened, then, when first the Portuguese, then the Dutch and British erupted into the Indian Ocean? These encounters in the Indian Ocean world and the nature of their impact on Asia and Europe have been the object of intensive research for decades and have come to new prominence with the rise of global history as a critique of Eurocentrism. Works like Riello and Roy's How India Clothed the World powerfully demonstrate the contributions of Indian expertise to shaping Britain's Industrial Revolution,Footnote 2 yet they also chart a process of Indian decline that appears inevitable and suppose an early penetration of capitalism that Palat, applying a rigorous definition to capitalist accumulation, locates much later. By shifting attention back to the period of 1250–1650, when the Indian Ocean world-system took shape and reached its zenith, Palat provides a rich account of the characteristics, resilience, and resources that powered its growth, often giving it the upper hand in negotiations with European companies or states, and enabled its economies to resist the penetration of capitalism for two centuries or more. He is thus able to argue for the rice-based pattern of evolution in the Indian Ocean region as an alternative path of true historical significance, rather than a historical cul-de-sac.
Much of Palat's argument about industrious revolution and commercialization without capital, originally developed during his doctoral work in the 1980s, will come as little surprise to those of us who have for some years been making similar arguments about the rice-based economies and commercial networks of early-modern East Asia. But Palat is the first, as far as I am aware, to present the subcontinent in these terms. This permits a stimulating triangulation as Palat disentangles the trajectories and interactions between the rice economies of South and East Asia and the dry-grain economies of Europe.
Compared to the abundance of historical documentation for China, the subcontinent offers sparse resources to historians of material life. Palat's ingenious marshalling of tricky sources, from temple inscriptions to travelers’ tales, allows him to tell a bold story linking ecology, technology, caste and kinship, production and politics, peddlers and princes, rice farmers, cotton weavers, and nomadic horsemen. His book is invaluable as a pioneering materialist analysis of the statecraft and material resources that knit the Indian Ocean states into a world-system. It provides an indispensable foundation for understanding the ensuing periods of interaction that captivate global historians, and it paints a convincing picture of an alternative, powerful, and long-lived world-system that should stimulate better debates about the dynamics of early-modern and contemporary capitalism.
The introduction to The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy would be an ideal addition to undergraduate reading lists on global history. The rest of the book, densely argued, sometimes repetitive, and lacking maps or chronological tables, is better suited to specialist readers.
