GEOGRAPHY 380 Geography of Asia Spring 2009 Glassman Lecture #3, January 13

1. GEOGRAPHY 380Geography of AsiaSpring 2009GlassmanLecture #3, January 13

2. Critical Theory • Interpretations of the world are “motivated” • Necessity of reflexivity: how do interests (including one’s own) shape interpretation and the production of knowledge?

3. The Issue of Uneven Development • Rich-poor gaps between countries • Rich-poor gaps between individuals • Gaps between urban and rural regions

6. Development Theory • Attempts to explain development patterns • Attempts to prescribe development policy • What kind of development? for whom?

7. Mill on India and colonialism • “Thus far, [I have spoken] of the [neo-British] dependencies whose population is in a sufficiently advanced state to be fitted for representative government. But there are others which have not attained that state, and which, if held at all, must be governed by the dominant country, or by persons delegated for that purpose by it. This mode of government is as legitimate as any other, if it is the one which in the existing state of civilization of the subject people, most facilitates their transition to a higher state of improvement.” (1962, 345-6)

8. Mill on colonialism and trade • “But though Great Britain could do perfectly well without her colonies…there are strong reasons for maintaining the present slight bond of connexion…It at least keeps the markets of the different countries open to one another, and prevents that mutual exclusion by hostile tariffs, which none of the great communities of mankind, except England, have yet outgrown.” (1962, 342)

9. Mill on the need for despotism • “The state of different communities, in point of culture and development, ranges downward to a condition very little above the highest of the beasts…a people in a state of savage independence, in which everyone lives by himself, exempt, unless by fits, from any external control, is practically incapable of making any progress until it has learnt to obey. The indispensable virtue, therefore, in a government which establishes itself over a people of this sort is, that it make itself obeyed. To enable it to do this, the constitution of the government must be nearly, or quite, despotic.” (1962, 38-9)

10. Mill on enforced industrial labor • “Again, uncivilized races, and the bravest and most energetic still more than the rest, are averse to continuous labour of an unexciting kind. Yet all real civilization is at this price; without such labour, neither can the mind be disciplined into the habits required by civilized society, nor the material world prepared to receive it. There needs a rare concurrence of circumstances, and for that reason often a vast length of time, to reconcile such a people to industry, unless they are for a while compelled to it. Hence even personal slavery, by giving a commencement to industrial life, and enforcing it as the exclusive occupation of the most numerous proportion of the community, may accelerate the transition to a better freedom than that of fighting and rapine.” (1962, 40)

11. Liberalism and neo-liberalism • Mill as liberal • The “new” liberalism • Liberal feminism

12. Marx on British colonialism in India • “What we call [India’s] history is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.” (1977, 332)

13. Marx on Britain’s tasks in India • “England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating--the annihilation of the old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia…It is notorious that the productive powers of India are paralysed by the utter want of means for conveying and exchanging its various produce…The British having broken up this self-sufficient inertia of the villages, railways will provide the new want of communication, and intercourse.” (1977, 333-4)

14. Marx on colonialism and liberty • “All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and peoples through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation?” (1977, 335)

15. Marx on the bourgeois epoch • “The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world--on the one hand the universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies…When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink nectar but from the skulls of the slain.” (1977, 336)

16. Marxism and neo-Marxism • Classical (Eurocentric) Marxism • Maoism as a form of neo-Marxism • Marxist-feminism

17. Akamatsu’s “Flying Geese” theory • All countries in Asia are following along same path of development, but are at different stages in the process • Japan is the regional economic and technological leader, guiding the rest • The state plays central role in the development process • The process is leading to the formation of an Asian Co-prosperity sphere

20. Institutionalist approaches to development • Keynesianism • Japanese and East Asian theories • Akamatsu’s theory • Recent institutionalist theories: the East Asian “developmental state”

21. Views from the periphery • Latin American theories of underdevelopment (structuralism, dependency theory) • World systems theory • “Asian” views of development • “Drain” theories (cf., dependency theory) • “Small is beautiful”; Gandhian (localist) alternative development • State-led industrialization (cf., structuralism) • Maoism (cf., dependency theory) • Southeast Asian dependency theory • World Social Forum (internationalist) alternative development (cf., world systems theory) • Global South feminisms