Marx’s picture of pre-colonial India rested on largely fanciful claims about its economy.
Evidence
Modern research shows that each of the props of Marx’s general view of India – the self-sufficient village community; the hydraulic state; the unchanging nature of the agrarian economy; absence of property in land – was at least partially fanciful. Research in all these areas is still far from adequate, but the available evidence suggests that the village economy was often much more integrated in larger networks of exchange and appropriation than was hitherto realized; that the small dam, the shallow seasonal well and the local pond built with individual, family or co-operative labour were at least as important in irrigation as the centrally planned waterworks; that property in land and stratification among the peasantry was far more common than was previously assumed; and that agrarian technology was, over the centuries, not nearly as stagnant. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 482
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the Orientalism-debate literature (Said) and the famous Asiatic mode of production controversy in historical materialism.
Related
- Marx’s Indian writings were conjectural, not theoretical (similarity 0.84)
- Marx characterized idyllic Indian villages as foundations of Oriental despotism (similarity 0.83)
- Marx’s colonial writings were conjectural speculation, not worked-out theory (similarity 0.82)
- Marx’s dispatches on India require contextual scholarship, not summary dismissal (similarity 0.82)
- Marxist historians made theoretical Indian history possible beyond rulers and religions (similarity 0.79)
- Anti-imperialist historians of India contradict the portrayal of Marx as an Orientalist (similarity 0.78)
- Indian criticism of British colonial economics predates Marx. (similarity 0.78)