On some recent critiques of AJR’s work

The recent obsession with a single paper by AJR (especially given their really unusually wide repertoire of topics) has been amusing to watch. I had not planned to weigh in on this, but given that the RW establishment is also now joining in, I can't resist making a few points here.

Let me start with two quotes.

Quote No. 1:

"In the course of the long boom of capitalism, stretching from the mid-nineteenth century right until the first world war, when capitalism consolidated itself as a global system, this dialectic of wealth and poverty worked as follows. There was a spread of capitalism from Britain to continental Europe and further to the temperate regions of European settlement like Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The mechanism for this was a diffusion of industry to these areas of settler colonialism, made possible by Britain not only keeping its own market open to imports from these regions, but additionally exporting capital to them to accompany the massive out-migration from Britain and the rest of Europe to these regions. ... The growth of wealth in the settler colonies and elsewhere during what Hobsbawm calls the “long nineteenth century” (stretching up to the First World War) had as its counterpart the growth of poverty, including periodic famines, in the tropical colonies which were colonies of conquest (as distinct from colonies of settlement)."

Quote No. 2:

"Our argument rests on the following premises: (1) Europeans adopted very different colonization strategies, with different associated institutions. In one extreme, as in the case of the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, they went and settled in the colonies and set up institutions that enforced the rule of law and encouraged investment. In the other extreme, as in the Congo or the Gold Coast, they set up extractive states with the intention of transferring resources rapidly to the metropole. These institutions were detrimental to investment and economic progress. (2) The colonization strategy was in part determined by the feasibility of European settlement. In places where Europeans faced very high mortality rates, they could not go and settle, and they were more likely to set up extractive states. (3) Finally, we argue that these early institutions persisted to the present. Determinants of whether Europeans could go and settle in the colonies, therefore, have an important effect on institutions today."

The first quote is from Prabhat Patnaik's latest critique of AJR in Peoples Democracy. The second quote is from the AJR's much maligned work which is the subject of so much of discussion.

The fact that European colonizers treated their own "kith and kin" in New World differently from the natives is a point which we repeatedly heard from the left (significantly, I remember them from my classes in CESP). To the best of my understanding, AJR is only attempting to provide some empirical basis to the arguments which for long have been associated with the left. Does it capture the entire left argument? Certainly not, because it picks up only a part of it for which it is in a position to provide empirical justification. The scope of a research paper is limited by its research question. Was such an empirical justification necessary? I believe it was, but that is a separate debate altogether. But does that make AJR "pro-colonial" and "eurocentric"? How on earth, exactly, when they are essentially saying the same thing?

More importantly, this is just one paper by AJR out of a mind-bogglingly long list of work from diverse areas. One of these areas I found the most interesting originated in Acemoglu and Robinson's 2001 paper in AER, eventually culminating in their 2005 book "Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy". Most academic as well as ground-level activists on the left believe in some sort of a people's movement or revolution as a source of change. But why do revolutionary movements occur in certain places at certain specific junctures of history, and not elsewhere even though conditions seem ripe for such movements? Why does every unequal society where abject poverty coexists with obscenely rich elite not result in a revolution? Unfortunately, the traditional left discourse does not provide a satisfactory answer to this question. Acemoglu and Robinson's work started a large literature in this area. A series of papers by Shadmehr and others are some of the excellent contributions in this area. My PhD student, Tariq Basir wrote his PhD thesis on some of these issues.

Being dogmatic about methodology and language is the last thing that the left can afford at this stage. Rather than rejecting an entire body of work just because it uses a methodology and language that does not fit into the traditional left scholarship, one needs to approach scholarly work with a more open mind. Criticize, yes - of course all academic work should be open to criticism. But an outright rejection out of dogmatism not only speaks very poorly of the rich history of left scholarship but also misses the opportunity to enrich academic research into some of these very important issues. Instead, left plays into the hands of being utilized by a section of right for its own defense, as has increasingly been happening of late.