Although this is an economic imperative, it also brings along with it certain political and cultural transformations. Guha draws directly on Marx’s theory in this regard, and his summary statement reads like an introduction to the Moor himself:
This [universalizing] tendency derives from the self-expansion of capital. Its function is to create a world market, subjugate all antecedent modes of production, and replace all jural and institutional concomitants of such modes and generally the entire edifice of precapitalist cultures by laws, institutions, values, and other elements of a culture appropriate to bourgeois rule.20
We should note that the transformative urge has two distinct components for Guha: the economic, which pushes capital to expand into the world, create a global market, and then supplant antediluvian economic forms that stand in its way; and the politico-cultural, which refers to the construction of bourgeois norms and practices in areas where capital takes root. We will have more to say on this distinction later in the present chapter, and a great deal more in chapters 4 and 5. For now, it is enough to underline that Guha is aware of this distinction, and seems to suggest that the two dimensions should be coextensive.
The propulsive force of capital’s self-expansion has some important consequences. The first of these is that it creates an interest in overthrowing the ancien régime. In the orthodox Marxist account, which Guha takes for granted, early modern capitalists found their expansion blocked by the feudal nobility’s political and cultural dominance. Feudal lords used their influence within the state to enact legislation that obstructed the further consolidation of capitalist production. Thus, through the use of state levers, premodern economic forms were kept artificially alive—the protection of noble privileges, the grant of monopoly rights to particular merchants and regional lords, the numerous price and quantity controls allowed to guilds, and so on. The fact that such obstacles were encountered by the vast majority of capitalist economic units generated a corresponding consciousness around a collective project, both political and cultural—a project to seek state power in order to fashion juridical structures aligned with the needs of the multiplying capitalist enterprises and to push aside the class of nobles kept on life support by the state’s protection. This is the sense in which capital’s universalizing drive created, for the nascent bourgeoisie, an interest and motive to launch a political struggle against the feudal order.
Another consequence of capital’s universalizing drive was to complement the interest in initiating a political campaign with the capacity to effectively wage the campaign. Drawing again on his reading of Marx, Guha argues that it is
[this universalist] drive which, as Marx argues in The German Ideology, makes the emergence of “ruling ideas” a necessary concomitant of capital’s dominance in the mode of production and enable [sic] these ideas, in turn, to invest the bourgeoisie with the historic responsibility to “represent” the rest of society, to speak for the nation.21
In other words, the emergent bourgeois class is able to rise above its sectional outlook and build upon its common interests with other classes—especially workers and peasants—to forge a collective political project against the ancien régime. Its interests are successfully represented as universal interests—indeed, at the moment of struggle, they are universal, inasmuch as they are the condition for the furtherance of the interests of its allies.22 This is the basis for bourgeois hegemony in the antifeudal struggle. Having achieved this popular hegemony, it mobilizes the broad political coalition of allied classes against the feudal monarchy in order to replace it with the new bourgeois order.
THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS
The dynamic described in the preceding section was, for Guha, most clearly captured in what he calls the “comprehensive character of the English and French revolutions respectively of 1648 and 1789.”23 Apparently he takes the social analysis of these revolutions to be uncontroversial. Despite their central place in his analysis, he expends little effort in explaining their origins; nor does he defend his interpretation of their significance. He seems to take the interpretation he offers as apodictic. This generates a stark imbalance in his presentation of the contrast between the European bourgeoisie’s rise to power and that of colonial capital. While the latter is described in great detail, the former is relegated to condensed and rather cryptic statements. Nevertheless, the main elements of Guha’s analysis are clear enough. To encapsulate his views, he approvingly quotes Marx’s characterization of the revolutions as having heralded “a new social order, the victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal ownership, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of the rule of landowner over the domination of the owner by the land, of enlightenment over superstition,” and so forth.24 The bourgeois revolutions thus represented nothing less than a complete social and cultural revolution. Guha considers three aspects to be central to their significance.
Dismantling Feudal Landed Power
The revolutions were launched by the bourgeoisie in order to dismantle feudal agrarian relations. This follows naturally from the premise that capital is propelled to expand its zone of operation. In predominantly agricultural economies, as long as the peasantry remained in possession of its land and was subject to feudal rent, capital would come up against hard limits to its expansion. The central task in 1640 and in 1789, therefore, was to eradicate feudal lordly power. It was only with the abolition of feudal property that the bourgeoisie could fulfill its historic mission—to overturn the rule of the landowner, create a national market, overcome localism, forge a national community, and so on. The critical place of this element of the classic revolutions emerges even more clearly when Guha explains the reasons for Indian capital’s failures. Above all for him, the roots of failure lie in the compromises made with landed classes, so that instead of overthrowing them, capital acceded to their continued rule in the countryside.
Securing Hegemony over the Antifeudal Coalition
Even though the bourgeoisie was committed to overthrowing feudal power, it could not do so alone. It was still a minor actor in the broader political landscape, lacking the means to assault the dominant order on its own. Hence, it had to bring other classes—primarily the peasantry, but also subordinate urban classes—to its side. It could do so either by various authoritarian and coercive means, or by soliciting their consensual participation. Guha maintains that one of the crowning achievements of the bourgeoisie in the great revolutions of 1640 and 1789 was that it secured broad-ranging consent to its leadership. This is an important part of his argument: he regards a central contrast between the bourgeois revolutions and the Indian nationalist movement to have been that elite leaders in the former movements secured compliance from subaltern classes through consent, while those in the latter could do so only through coercion.
Guha contends that the leaders of the bourgeois revolutions achieved consent by genuinely accommodating subaltern interests within their political programs—an instance of capital’s universalizing tendency—though he does not detail what those concessions might have been. What he seems to have in mind is peasants and workers being won over on the promise to dismantle seignorial power, and, equally important, the promise of political liberties. The effectiveness of bourgeois leadership issued from the fact that the concessions they made were real, not empty slogans. Their assumption of leadership thus had a genuine basis: “it was initially as an acknowledgement of the connection between its own interests and those of all the other nonruling classes that the bourgeoisie had led the struggle against feudalism and established its hegemony over the peasantry.”25
The bourgeoisie, then, acquired social consent to its leadership through recognition of subaltern interests. The reliance on consent, as against coercion or discipline, is what Guha takes to be the defining characteristic of political hegemony. He often discusses hegemony not only in terms of consent, but as the ability truly to represent the interests of others, to “speak for” other classes; in the bourgeois revolutions, he writes, “the
