entire structure of feeling, in the wake of bourgeois rule, was reorganized around modern citizenship and secular politics.
Having secured its rule in Western Europe, capital could not rest easy in its new domain. The new industrial masters fanned out into the world, searching for new avenues of profit. In much the same way that capital had established itself in the folds of the feudal economy, it now established beachheads in the New World and Asia. The Conventional Story predicted that the arrival of capitalists on the shores of these lands should set in train a process rather similar to that experienced in Europe. Finding local precapitalist social relations an obstacle to its ceaseless hunt for profits and markets, capital was expected to slowly drive out the local rulers and act as a solvent on local economic relations. That this process would occur under the auspices of formal colonial rule did not alter the fundamental direction of history. Colonialism would serve as the handmaiden of historical progress; if anything, it would enable an acceleration of the dynamic, as the European bourgeoisie would use the levers of state power to hasten the modernization of the local economy. As local economic relations morphed into modern capitalist ones, the colonial world would begin to be organized around modern political practices as well. The independence movements that drove imperial powers out of the South were the first real expressions of this political form, but it was also instantiated in the emergence of trade unions, political parties, and, of course, formal democratic institutions.
The upshot of the Conventional Story is that capitalist modernization was a global phenomenon, albeit one whose spread was temporally and spatially differentiated. Even though the colonized world came to it later, there was little doubt that it would track the grooves laid down by the advanced world. The engine that drove this process was constituted by industrialism and modern economic practices, and the accompanying political and cultural transformation was part of the package. This was capital’s universalizing mission, as conventionally understood. It endowed the modern era with a recognizable Zeitgeist. This carried an important implication: namely, that it is possible to slot practices and even forms of consciousness into their appropriate places in the progression from premodern to modern. Europe showed the developing world a rough picture of its own future. Thus, if social agents in the latter regions were found to have exhibited forms of consciousness that did not conform to modern expectations, then it must be because they had not been fully subjected to the cleansing effect of capitalist relations. The cure, at least in part, would be simply to wait—to allow capitalism to do its work and imbue the agents with a modern orientation. Thanks to capital’s ceaseless quest for hegemony, there would be a slow, but quite certain, global convergence around characteristically bourgeois forms of cultural and political reproduction.
THE SUBALTERN STUDIES RESPONSE
A central concern of the Subaltern Studies collective has been to reject central components of the Conventional Story, whether in Marxist or liberal guise. Much of their theorizing about the colonial and postcolonial world can be understood as a double movement—the rejection of core propositions of this orthodoxy, followed by an exploration of the implications of this rejection for our broader understanding of the colonial world and, more generally, of the Global South. And just as the Conventional Story begins with a thesis about the agent driving forward the modernizing project, so too do the Subalternists. The core arguments are summarized in the following two theses about the peculiarities of capitalism in the East.
The Specificity of Colonial Capitalism
• Thesis 1: A Nonhegemonic Bourgeoisie
The first source of the colonial world’s divergence from the European trajectory is the character of its bourgeoisie. It is not that no capitalist class existed in the East. Rather, it is that the bourgeoisie under colonialism was either unable to, or chose not to, secure a leading position for itself in the struggle against the ancien régime. This is true for capitalists from the metropole, who went to the colonies under the patronage of the Europeans, as well as for local entrepreneurs who grew to maturity under colonial rule. These bourgeois classes, of course, exercised a great deal of power. But they did not take up cudgels against dominant landed classes of the ancien régime. Instead, both segments of the bourgeoisie accommodated to the interests of the latter, thereby incorporating them into the modern political order. The result, Chakrabarty notes, was that “there was no class in South Asia comparable to the European bourgeoisie of Marxist metanarratives”—in other words, a bourgeoisie committed to eradicating the feudal order and capturing state power in order to revolutionize the political culture.24
Their eschewal of revolutionary ambitions meant, in turn, that there was little chance the capitalists would try to bring popular classes under their umbrella in a national-popular struggle against the traditional order, for they had sworn off taking on the feudal landed classes in a frontal assault. As a result, they would fail to appease the peasantry, since the main target of peasant animus was the landed overlord. Nor would the capitalists be able to promise workers a rising standard of living, since a backward agriculture would remain a drag on growth rates. Thus, Guha concludes, whereas the European bourgeoisie had come to power by forging a hegemonic coalition with workers and peasants, there would be no parallel experience in the colonial world. The bourgeoisie would exercise dominance, but not hegemony.
• Thesis 2: The Derailment of Capital’s Universalizing Drive
The bourgeoisie’s abrogation of a revolutionary course of action in India, its refusal to dismantle the pillars of feudal power, is taken to signify a deeper historical truth: that in its colonial venture, capital abandoned its “universalizing mission.”25 Universalization for the Subalternists seems to refer to two aspects of capitalism, the first of which is the ability of capital to present its interests as consistent with the interests of other classes, even those it exploits. This, for Guha, constitutes the key to the classic bourgeois revolutions in England and France. A rising bourgeoisie, in both cases, was able to overthrow feudalism because it successfully presented its own interests as congruent with those of peasants and workers, and in so doing, forged a social coalition under its leadership, a coalition it then mobilized to overthrow the feudal monarchy. In this instance, capital’s universalizing drive refers to its ability to rise above the pursuit of its narrow sectional interests and make common cause with those of other classes.
The second aspect is the implantation of social institutions that reflect the politics and culture typical of bourgeois rule. These are taken to be those institutions that can be identified with liberalism and citizenship: formal equality, political freedoms, contractualism, secularism, and so forth. For the Subalternists, the link between capitalism and liberalism is very strong. It rests, perversely, on their acceptance of certain aspects of the Conventional Story, in which the bourgeoisie is understood to have fought not only for economic freedoms but also for political liberties. Once they had displaced the feudal ruling classes, the story goes, the bourgeoisie forged a social order based on both kinds of freedoms—the right to property, as well as political freedoms. This order of rights and liberties was granted to all, creating a national political community that overcame the localism and particularism of the ancien régime. Universalism is, in this instance, the spread of political liberalism as an accompaniment to the economic hegemony of capital.
The putative derailment of capital’s universalizing drive is very significant for postcolonial theory, and for the Subalternist project in particular. Socially, it signals that the deep political and cultural transformations that accompanied the rise of capitalism were not in the East’s cards—at least, not in any way that could fit into the standard liberal or Marxist framework. This is because the agent taken by the Subalternists as having ushered in these transformations—the emerging bourgeoisie—failed to demonstrate any such inclinations once it arrived on Eastern shores. From this sociological fact is derived a theoretical conclusion: if the social matrix and developmental arc of the modernizing Global South are not the same as those of early modern Europe, if their dominant political and cultural forms depart so radically from those of the modern West, then the theories imported from the West cannot be appropriate
