Page 47 - K M PANNIKAR and The Growth of a Maritime Consciousness in India

PARALLAX HISTORIES
The Americas in the Making of Early Modern Asian Empires
The impact of the Americas on the development of capitalism has been
extensively documented at least since Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery
(1944). Scholars have shown how chattel slavery underpinned the emergence
of capitalism in Europe while others have argued that the European ‘discovery’
of the Americas was the root cause of the ‘great divergence’ in socio-economic
developments between Europe and the Yangzi Delta. What has been obscured
in this literature is the impact of the Americas on early modern empires in
Asia. This paper locates the flows of bullion and botanical bounties from the
Americas to India and China within the context of wet-rice cultivation. Bullion
imports from the Americas were vitally important for expansion of commercial
relations in a continent starved of coinable metals but the peculiarities of
irrigated riziculture did not privilege the accumulation of capital. The ability of
lands under rice cultivation promoted labor-intensive manufacturing and the
expansion of circuits of exchange to areas not ecologically suitable for growing
rice. Unlike rulers in Europe who were dependent of financiers and merchants
for military campaigns, these conditions meant that the pursuit of power in
much of continental Asia was not dependent on an alliance with financial elites.
Hence there was no compulsion to restructure social relations to favour the
accumulation of capital unlike in Europe. At the same time, as the territorial
unity of China, and the absence of a pan-Indian polity emphasizes there were
consequential differences between these two geographical zones. This is also
underlined by the fact that while the crops from the Americas led to a massive
increase in Chinese population through state-sponsored colonization of
marginal lands, there was no parallel to this in South Asia.

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