The Global History of "Modernity": a Response to a Reply Author(S): David Washbrook Source: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol

The Global History of "Modernity": A Response to a Reply Author(s): David Washbrook Source: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1998), pp. 295-311 Published by: BRILL Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3632416 . Accessed: 23/07/2014 15:06

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This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF "MODERNITY"-A RESPONSE TO A REPLY

DAVID WASHBROOK (University of Oxford)

Before embarkingon the unusualstep of replyingto what was, itself, an invited response,let me begin by thankingPeter van der Veer for consideringthe essays on "Modernity"and Its Contents in the Economic and Social History of the Orient,collected for the Special AnniversaryIssue of JESHO40.4 (1997), and for the many interestingquestions which he raises. As he, himself, points out, his own concernwith modernitylies largely with the West and in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies; whereas, for most of the essayists, the issue is more how the concept has affected understandingsof prior epochs and non-Western societies. Also he is suspicious of the practice of "history"itself, viewing the past more from the perspectiveof culturaltheory. It is, therefore,doubly appre- ciated that he should cast his eye over these essays from so differenta window on the world. At the same time, however, a reply from one of the original essayists may not be wholly inappropriatebecause the very differenceof his perspectivemay have created problemsof vision. In the first place, the constructionwhich he puts on our words and the way that he interpretsour argumentsleave many of us puzzled. The act of "reading"involves a sharing of language between authorand reader:it may be that the languagesof our differentdisciplines have now moved so far apart that we have difficultyin communicatingwith each other. But, and second, it is also his peremptorydismissal of our approaches, in favourof one of his own, which leaves us somewhataghast. For he fails to engage with-or apparentlyto see-the many points of criticism which our essays would raise with the position that he adopts.Indeed, far from offeringa critiqueof "the projectof modernity,"as he claims, from our position his arguments have more the effect of continuingit-albeit now from a power-centre differentlylocated on the "globe." To begin with the issues of misunderstanding,van der Veer's renditionof the argumentsof Veenhof,Eyre, Andaya and Washbrookis most curious.Their views of pre-modernhistory are held to reflect "the sense of many roads lead- @ KoninklijkeBrill NV, Leiden, 1998 JESHO41,3

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 296 DAVID WASHBROOK ing to Rome":"to find characteristicsof modernity,especially in the sphere of mercantilism,which lead to the same economic developmentas in the modern West... in a numberof cases, the conditions for modernityare shown to be fulfilled and, subsequently,the argumentgoes onto show how what was poten- tially available did not, in the end, yield the same end-resultas in the West. Some of this has difficultyin escaping the depressingmodernist language of 'failure' and 'lack'."') But, in the first place, Veenhof's discussion is of ancient Assyrian tradeand Eyre's of ancient Egyptian land tenures:does van der Veer seriously believe that they are implying the possibilities,even "failed"possibilities, of industrial capitalismthree thousandyears ago or see "the roots" of the moderneconomy reachingback to ancienttimes? Their own words do not say it. Indeed,Eyre's explicitly deny it: "Behind[my] analysis lies a rejectionof the assumptions... of a Social Darwinism that envisages a progression of modernisations or "development"as an issue of historicalsociology."2) In Washbrook'scase, the imputationis no less hard to understand.Van der Veer links it to his usage of the term "proto-capitalism"3)without, apparently,noticing that he offers an ex- tended critique of the concept, precisely because of its teleology, and seeks alternative,more contingent,ways of explaining some of the phenomenaheld to constitutemodernity.4) Both Eyre and Washbrookare, in fact, disputingthe meaning and utility of the concept of modernityin history and the social sciences: not providingit with historicistgenealogies. The second area where his response to our essays causes puzzlementcon- cerns his objectionto their notion of a series of somewhatdistinctive "moder- nities"-Islamic, Chinese and SoutheastAsia-developing across the world in the nineteenthand twentiethcenturies, which features especially in the works of Lapidus,Zurndorfer and Andaya. He argues that this obscures"the uniqueness and power of Europeanmodernity" and prefers, instead, a formulation which would see there to be only one (Western)modernity, outside which other societies may have different"histories."5) Where this distinctionshows itself, par- ticularly,is with the three authors'emphases on the way that received cultural traditionsand/or local political imperatives patterneddifferent regional con- structionsof modernity.For van der Veer, such apparentdifferences, especially as manifestedin revivalist-and neo-traditionalisms,are betterseen as subsumed

1) van der Veer 1998, p. 286. 2) Eyre 1997 p. 386. 3) van der Veer 1998, p. 286. 4) Washbrook 1997, pp. 412-13. 5) van der Veer 1998, p. 285.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE GLOBALHISTORY OF "MODERNITY"-ARESPONSE TO A REPLY 297 within the universalising(or colonising) logic of Europeanmodernity itself- apparently,because they have to take place within the European-imposedterms of the state/civil society paradigm.Genuine difference with modernEurope can lie only in the "histories"experienced beyond those terms. But, in the firstplace, none of the essayistsdisputes the pointthat, in the modern era, most societies in the world-certainly those that they study-have been subjectedto powerfuluniversalising and homogenisingforces from Europe.Nor do they disputethat these forces have been involved in framingthe criticallim- its within which experiencesof modernityoperate: the modern state, engage- ment with a trans-nationalcapitalist system, exposure to a globalised culture, even the re-generationof "neo-traditions."Whatever happens inside the modern world is confinedby these conceptualschema. However, the questionsthat principallyconcern them are why is it that experiencesof modernitybetween non-Europeansocieties have been so very different,why have they adopted/ adaptedto its imperativesin such variegatedways and what have been the con- sequences of these differences? These are scarcely questions which can be swept aside in view of the very importantimplications which answersto them have for the peoples living inside these societies themselves-answers which literallymean the differencebetween life and death.But it is not clear how they might be pursuedfrom van der Veer's own position. He offers two differentapproaches to understandingnon-European societies' experiences of modernity:the first suggesting that their specificitiesmight be seen as direct functionsof Europeanmodernity itself, particularlyits tendency to generate"neo-traditionalist" ideologies.6) However, he does not elaborateand it must be worthnoting that all the several previousattempts to explain"periph- eral" specificities simply in terms of Euro-generatedfunctions have ended in what most scholarsthese days would regardas failure.The "underdevelopment" theoryof A.G. Frankand the "worldsystems theory" of ImmanuelWallerstein no longer possess much credibility:their empiricalweaknesses being compounded by tendencies,in practice,to become so convolutedthat it ceases to be clear what they are trying to explain.7)We must await, with interest,van der Veer's new, unstated(and presumably cultural) theory of unilinealEuropean determinacy but, in the interim,we may be entitled to remainsceptical. His second approachproposes that non-Europeansocieties should be seen (solely?) in terms of the way that Europeanmodernity "clashes with other his-

6) "... another part of the [modern] project is to invent a traditionthrough which modern culture is naturalized and nationalized. This is happening simultaneously in the colonial metropoles and the colonies... " van der Veer 1998, p. 292. 7) Washbrook 1990.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 298 DAVIDWASHBROOK torical forms of social life and governmentality":8)they shouldbe seen in terms of the negation of modernity.This approachdraws on postcolonial theories which posit an "Alterity"in the consciousnessof non-Europeanpeoples, which lies beyond the terms of modernityand providesthe basis for alternativeforms of culture and society.9)However, van der Veer himself properlycomplicates the position. While he endorses ParthaChatterjee's view that the majorityof Indian society lives outside a consciousnessof "civil society" (in the Western liberal sense), he also insists that this "is not to say that the majorityof the population is outside of modernity.It is targeted by welfare policies of the modernizingstate and it is mobilized by political formationsto express popu- lar demandson the developmentalstate."'0) But if "it" does live in modernity,then does not "its" own characteraffect how modernitycan function?How can modernityeven identify the "targets" of its welfare policies if it does not have some kind of cognitive interaction with those whom it is "targeting"?Even more clearly, how can modernpoliti- cal formations "mobilize" people except in terms of which they have some understanding?In effect, the fuller logic of van der Veer's own position points to the fact thatthere has to be some "dialogue"between modernity and "Alterity" in non-Europeansocieties for the processes associated with modernityto bite at all: which also means that non-Europe'sown culturesand values have to be seen as playing some part in the making of its own modernity(or -ies).") The essayists' principalfocus is on that process of "making."Van der Veer's focus, lurching between European determinismand non-Europeannegation, allows no place for it-and excludes the peoples of the non-Europeanworld from any meaningfulparticipation in what (for good or ill) has been the dominant course of their own history over the last two hundredyears. It is this difference of perspective which, perhaps most clearly, separates van der Veer's position from that of the essayists. Most of their work, following currentswhich have become increasinglystrong in historiographyover the last twenty years, sets out to challenge the Euro-centricand deterministiccon- ception of modernityreceived from the Western social sciences over the last century:to question its provenanceand pedigree;to seek alternativeways of understandingwhat it has attemptedto explain;especially, to recoverfrom "the

8) van der Veer 1998, p. 289. 9) For a summary, Prakash 1990. 10) van der Veer 1998, p. 291. 11) For the difference in approach with regard to the Indian working class, comparte Chakrabarty1989, who merely points to the way that inherited aspects of worker culture negated "modern" industrialism, with Chandavarkar 1994, who shows how that culture played an important role in determining the specific forms which "modern" industrialism actually took.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF "MODERNITY"-A RESPONSE TO A REPLY 299 enormouscondescension of [Western]posterity" (pace E.P. Thompson)sight of Other cultures and the contributionsthat they made to the contemporarysoci- eties in which we live. From this perspective,van der Veer's "Response"suffers from two obvious problems.First, he does not seem very acquaintedwith this "new"historiogra- phy nor to believe that post-Enlightenmentculture could be capable of it. He warns us that: "Enlightenmentrationalism requires... instrumentsof governmentality,one of which is history itself... [which, inter alia] is necessaryfor the spreadof rationalityand the modernnation-state."'2) But if this were meant to posit that the only history possible under the guidance of Enlightenment rationalismis that of its own extension and of the modern nation-state,then it would be falsified by the merest glance at what has been coming out of Westerndepartments of history,not only over the last twenty (post-Foucaultian) years, but ever since they were first founded.Ranke may have supplieda model of modernhistory but, thankfully,not all historianshave ever followed it. More- over and second, if van der Veer's own axioms about history, Euro-centricity and determinacyare examined,they can be seen to be informedby preciselythe same assumptionsas those of the "projectof modernity"from which, contradictorily, he claims to be distancinghimself. That projectconcerns the "mission"to spreadEuropean culture and the modern nation state world wide. If the historicalaxioms informingit are laid out, they would appearto be the following: first, that modernEuropean culture is to be distinguishedabsolutely in both time and space from all Other cultures and that the institutionsand qualitiesrepresenting it (whateverexactly they are) arose uniquelyand within Europeitself. Second and relatedly,that these qual- ities and institutions,therefore, make Europe the only "authenticsubject" of modernity,into which it "ushered"the rest of the world. Thirdand as a corol- lary, this modernityconsists only of the imposition of Europeanmodels onto Othersocieties, which eitherimitate them or reject them outright:such societies being deemed incapablea priori of fashioning their own creative responses. And fourth, where they reject Europe modernity,they do so on the basis of wholly different(and, by definition,Irrational) cultural Traditions. However and unfortunately,these axioms also turn out to be, with one minor qualification, precisely the same as those informing van der Veer's own understandingof modernhistory. The one qualificationis van der Veer's insistence(from Said) that the impact of colonialism should be seen as having a reflexive effect on Europeanculture itself: it involved not merely the taking of a ready-madeEurope "out," but also

12) van der Veer 1998, p. 287.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 300 DAVID WASHBROOK the bringing back of reactive experiences which re-constitutedwhat Europe was itself.13) However, as van der Veer defines the colonial relationship,the qualification-by definition-cannot have included anything which the Euro- peans might have learned or obtained from the Other cultureson which they sought to impose modernity.If that were the case, then those Other cultures, themselves, would have contributedto the constructionof Europeanmodern- ity, itself--which, thereby,would have lost its "uniqueness"and "singularity." Rather,van der Veer's meaningseems to be only that some of the practicesof dominationdeveloped in the colonies (he cites the creation of English Liter- ature) then came back to affect metropolitanculture.14) This may be conceded, but its significance is even furtherreduced when it is remembered(as from Foucault)that metropolitansocieties were developingtheir own-and far more sophisticated-methods of domination over their own subjects than anything seen in any colony.") "Bourgeois"Europe scarcely needed colonial precedents to teach it how to treat "deviants,"although it may occasionally have taken them up. Van der Veer's qualificationdoes not seriously disturbthe idea that modernhistory was made by Europe alone. But, historiographically,all the axioms of "the modernityproject" are now seriously in doubt. For example, a great deal of research(especially on Asia) has questionedwhether the unique culturalqualities and institutions,which the ideology of modernitytook to be self-evolving within Europe,were so unique and did "evolve" within.16) Many parallels have been found in other cultures and societies. The purposewhich Eyre and Washbrookhad in showing "characteristics of modernity,especially in the sphere of mercantilism"in pre-modern contexts was, of course, not to argue that these "le[a]d to the same economic development as in the modern West." Rather, it was to insist that they did not-and thus to falsify the modernityproject's self-theory,which sees such characteristicsas distinctive to and generative of itself. This, in turn, would pose the need for a serious reconsiderationof how Europeanindustrial capitalism did come about; and also indicate that when such "characteristics"are found in colonial situations,they are not necessarilyproof of Europeanmoder- nity's guiding hand. These arguments very much less point "the roads to Rome" than the roads which clearly did not go to Rome; and even raise doubts

13) "..-. the history of modernity itself is located in contacts between different parts of the world." van der Veer 1998, p. 290. 14) van der Veer 1998, p. 290. 15) For the weaknesses of the instrumentalities of modernity in colonial contexts, Vaughan 1991. 16) For examples, Needham 1959-97; Bernal 1987; Staal 1988; Goody 1995; Baechler and Hall 1988.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF "MODERNITY"--A RESPONSE TO A REPLY 301 about whetherthere was a Rome at all. It is van der Veer who believes that there is a Rome-a singular,Euro-centred modernity. Or again, van der Veer notes that "Modernitycelebrates freedom from local- ized, hierarchicalbonds."") But was society before modernityreally characterised and dominatedby such bonds, was the world "saved from the idiocies of [local] life" (pace Engels) simply by it? A great deal of research,not only on Asia but also on medievalEurope, would now be sceptical of the premise.This work draws attention to the significance of wide circles of ecumenical discourse, extensive peripateticpopulations and networksof "tradeand civilisation"crossing countries and continentsin the pre-modernworld.'") It also draws attentionto the existence of concepts of "equality,""the individual"and "eth- nicity"(if not necessarilyexactly the same concepts)in Otherworlds.19) Those worlds no longer seem adequately(or at least uncomplicatedly)characterised in terms of localisation and hierarchyalone. Indeed, and to add furthercom- plexity, recent researchon "modern"society, itself, would suggest that it may generate these same supposedly disappearing"bonds" from processes deep within itself as well-informed by the imperativesof "territorialisation,""nationality,""social structure."Modernity celebrates its supposedlyrevolutionary, lib- erationistrole for obvious ideological ends and juxtaposes its own freedoms to the imaginedbondages of all pasts: but how far is this role justifiablein the light of historicalfact? Van der Veer's own conceptualisationof modernityassumes, unquestion- ingly, that it is. He presents modernity'shistory to us, first, in' terms of the colonial export of Europeanculture (as if Europeanand other cultures had never exported themselves before) and, then, in those of the formation of "global"cultural processes (as if those, too, were completely novel in form). Also, he sees that which has not been "ruptured"by modernity-contained in the different "histories"of non-Europeans-in terms which his postcolonial authoritiesexplicitly conceive as representingthe preservationof "local,""hier- archical"bonds.20) Problems occur, no less, in van der Veer's account of colonialism where much recent research has come to question the utility of the structural(-ist?) oppositionhe poses between Europe and its Othersand of the notion that the spread of (apparently)European ideas was entirely the function of imposition and force. Such oppositions and notions make it impossible to conceive of

17) van der Veer 1998, p. 285. 18) For examples from India, Chaudhuri1985 and 1990; Bayly 1996. 19) Again for India, Zelliot 1976; Jordens 1975; Bayly 1985. 20) Especially Chakrabarty1989; Chatterjee 1993.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 302 DAVIDWASHBROOK meaningful"dialogue" between colonialists and colonised. Yet without such a concept it has provedhard to make sense not only of the melangesof "Creolity" and "Hybridity"which mark the colonial experience,21) but even of the spread of Europeanhegemony itself. Especially in Asia, Europeanpopulations were extremely small and Europeantechnological superiority did not manifest itself in a clear way until late into the nineteenthcentury-and then risked being rapidly turnedback on the colonialistsby the colonised themselves. Van der Veer, himself, draws attentionto the work of GauriViswanathan on the significanceof English literaryeducation in India. But, for the purposesof his case, it must representa singularlyinappropriate example. How did English education come to be so widespread in India? It was scarcely because it was forcefully imposed from above by the British colonial state: the education budget was minute and, perhaps the British Empire's most celebratedIndian Viceroy, Lord Curzon,was stronglycommitted to curtailingit.22) Its expansion was largely driven by the propensityof certainIndian elite groups to pursueit and invest in it themselves-and for their own purposes. They utilised their access to it not merely to advance the projectof modernityper se (as by their early advocacy of Indian nationalism), but also to alter and direct many of its practical meanings. Most notably, they used it to transformthe cultural characterof the modern Indian nation and to define the latter's boundaries. Curiously,van der Veer seems preparedto concede a certain"sharing" of activ- ities between Europeanand non-Europeansin the context of the invention of "neo-traditions":he cites with approvalthe work of Dirks and Prembleon the joint-constructionof pre-colonial pasts by Europeanand Indian and Javanese colonial elites.23)But he does not seem to appreciatethat this simultaneously involved the joint-constructionof modernitytoo. In India (or ratherSouth Asia), the groupswho came to "command"the Eng- lish languagewere overwhelminglyhigh-caste Hindu and they used it (in asso- ciation with Britishpower) to displace older ruling elites, whose hegemonyhad been expressed far more in the languages of Indo-Persianculture inflected by Islam.24)That the identityof the modernIndian nation should now be so much bound up with (Brahmanic)Hinduism is related to this process-as, too, is the division between the modern nation-statesof India, Bangladeshand Pakistan. English may certainly have been involved in making South Asian societies "modern":but South Asian transformationsof its social meanings vitally in-

21) Kaplan and Kelly 1994; Vaughan 1991. 22) Dilks 1969-70. 23) van der Veer 1998, p. 292. 24) For example, O'Hanlon 1994.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THEGLOBAL HISTORY OF "MODERNITY"-ARESPONSE TO A REPLY 303 formedhow this modernitycame to be expressed.Indeed, South Asian transla- tions of its linguistic meaningshave latterlycome back to transformthe nature of "modern"English literatureitself in the West. Van der Veer may not have noticed, but the English-languagewritings of authorsfrom India and other ex- colonies are now widely credited with having refabricated(and saved) that quintessentialproduct of modern culture, the novel, within the Anglo-phone world. Few cases can less well illustratethe uni-directionalforce which Euro- pean modernityis supposed to have supplied to history than that of English educationin India. In fact, from the perspectiveof that case it is possible to wonderwhether the majorfunction which van der Veer sees colonialismplaying in modernity-that of "spread[ing]... rationalityand the modernnation-state"--was ever its prin- cipal intendedpurpose. One ideological expressionof imperialism,that associated with liberalism,suggested that it was. But others,arguably more powerful in the colonies themselves, certainlydid not. Imperialistsobviously had much to fear from rational,modern, nationalist "natives." Another strand in the ideology of modernimperialism, which van der Veer largely dismisses, suggested that "natives"should not and could not become modernand that colonialism's true mission was to frustratetheir effortsto be so. The rule of "Orientaldifference," as EdwardSaid has put it, was very much a mark of--perhaps the other and contradictoryside of-colonial modernity.25) In situationssuch as that of India, it was instrumentalisedthrough the very set of (modern)state institutionsby which "liberalising"modernity was also meant to be spread-the law, the census, representativegovernment.26) It attemptedto keep colonial subjectsdivided and to freeze their societies in ways unthreaten- ing to colonial authority.Van der Veer regardsthe idea that "colonial forces produceda static society in the nineteenthcentury [in India]"as "in need of serious re-consideration"and trivialisesWashbrook's expression of it by relating his argumentsto those of the nineteenth-centuryeconomic historian RC Dutt.27)But the idea, which van der Veer at least recognisesas "orthodox"in the field, can be found expressedas much in the anthropologyand "ethno-history" as the economic history of India, where it was developed explictly in rebuttal of the liberal simplicityof a "modernising"imperialism aimed directlyat "universalising"the West.28)The real political imperativesof colonialismrequired the maintenanceof a "static"Oriental Tradition as justificationfor the contin-

25) Said 1978. 26) Cohn 1987; Washbrook 1981. 27) van der Veer 1998, p. 292. 28) Dirks 1987.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 304 DAVIDWASHBROOK uing rule of a "dynamic"European power. A substantialpart of colonialism's work was to renderimmobile what had once been mobile. And also, perhaps, to render Irrationalwhat once had been Rational, in broadly the same epistemological senses which the ideology of European modernitytook to be the exclusive prerogativeof itself. The idea, which van der Veer takes from Chatterjee,that the discoursesof non-Europeannational- ism were exclusively "derived"from Europeanprecedents, for example, has now come to be widely challenged.29)Those discourses,while certainlyowing much to Europeanconceptions of identity and the state, also drew on ideas of "patriotism"and "publicmorality" which had historiesof their own datingback centuriesin SouthAsian culture(s).Discourses relating territory and blood, posit- ing communitybases to law and associating identity with moralitywere long part of South Asia's intellectualmilieux.30) The ultimate and very variegated constructsof modernnation-state ideology across the non-Europeanworld may need to be understoodas referencedto these "local" discourses, too, and not just the ones authorisedby Europe. Indeed, van der Veer's account of the place of the modern nation state within Europe,itself, now seems at odds with currentunderstandings of Euro- pean intellectualhistory-at considerablecost to his ability to place his own "position."He insists that we cease to view comparativesociology in terms of the contrastbetween "civilizations"in orderto construeit in termsof the expan- sionaryhistory of the modernEuropean nation state. But what is the place and significance of the modern nation state within Europeanculture(s)? Van der Veer assumes them as direct predicatesof Enlightenmentrationalism: "Enlight- enment rationalismrequires as its vehicle the nation-state"and that "Hegel's philosophy shows... that colonial interventionby Europeanpowers is necessary for the spread of rationalityand the nation-state."31)But he never makes clear why it is a nation state that should be requiredor is necessary at all? However, if his bald assertionsare examined they can be seen to be prob- lematic. It is difficult enough to demonstrateany direct connection between Enlightenmentthought and any form of modernstate, developedalong the con- ceptual spectrumfrom individualismto universalism.Why it should have to be a nation state is even harderto grasp. Nor does van der Veer help: his citing of Hegel, here and in other places, confuses more than it clarifies. For Hegel was never an advocateof the national form of the modernstate: he was a sup- porterof Prussianmonarchism, politically opposed to the programmeof German

29) Chatterjee 1986. 30) For a summary, see Bayly 1998. 31) van der Veer 1998, p. 287.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THEGLOBAL HISTORY OF "MODERNITY"-ARESPONSE TO A REPLY 305 nationalismin his time. His modernstate may have been liberal and constitu- tional but it was not, definitively,national.32) If the intellectuallineages of the nationalform of the modernstate are traced out, they would seem to go back much less obviously to Enlightenmentration- alism than to the Romantic reaction against it. Herderwould make a better father of the nation-statethan Hegel. In effect, the nation-stateprogramme of modernitycame out of a (frequentlyconflictual) dialogue in Europeanhistory between Enlightenmentrationalism and its Romanticist critique. It drew on them both and the preceptsof both are represented,albeit contradictorily,in its concept.33)Van der Veer's understandingof "the modernityproject" in termsof the nation-stateentirely occludes recognitionof the Romanticist,anti-Enlight- enment, side of its heritage. But this heritagemay have been crucial and its occlusion also may suggest why a critique of modernityoffered from van der Veer's position has to be unsatisfactory.For, as Thomas Blom Hansen has recently argued of postcolonial theory more generally,it appearsto consist of little more than a repetition of Romanticism'scritique of Enlightenmentrationalism without appreciating that critique,too, is part of-contained within-the projectof modernity.34)As a result, the critiquebecomes innocuousand collapses into self-contradiction. For example,van der Veer challengesErnest Gellner's formulation of nationalism, noting sharplythat it "ends up, predictably,with its own, axiomaticdi- chotomy between 'traditional'and 'modern'."35)However, his own concept of modernitygains its cutting-edgein the non-Europeancontext from juxtaposition to the "histories"supposedly taking place beyond it. But what is the contentof these "histories?"Van der Veer is at least honest in conceding that they are "difficultto conceptualize."36)However, if the work of the postcolonialtheorists whom he cites for authorityis examined it can be seen that they define them (Alterities)either as simple negationsof Reason (Resistance),37)or else on the basis of "facts"gleaned from the analyses of anthropologists,who are modern- isation theoriststhemselves-including Louis Dumont,whom van der Veer else- where criticises.38)In effect, they representnothing more than modernity'sown vacuousalter-concept of IrrationalTradition: they can be definedonly in relation

32) Taylor 1975. 33) Hansen 1995. 34) Hansen 1995. 35) van der Veer 1998, p. 288. 36) van der Veer 1998, p. 291. 37) Guha 1984. 38) See the use of authoritiesin Guha 1983; Chakrabarty1989.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 306 DAVID WASHBROOK to/againstReason itself. Both inevitablyand "predictably,"van der Veer "ends up" taking us back to Gellner's own dichotomy. In other areas,too, van der Veer keeps repeatingthe epistemologicalmistakes of "modernisationtheory," while claiming to dispose of them. For example, it was noted earlier how he objected to the argumentsof Eyre and Washbrook for what he understoodto be their teleological, "roadsto Rome" approachto history. However, his own approachto the past entirely mirrorsthat formula. He offers a vignette concerningElihu Yale, a sometime English merchantin Madras,South India, who went onto found Yale Universityin North America. He tells us that Yale's story "narratesthe first steps towards the building of the BritishEmpire... between India, Englandand America."39)But when Yale was a merchant in Madras, between 1671 and 1699, there was no British Empirein India nor any sign of one for several furthergenerations. To see the British-IndianEmpire of the later eighteenthand nineteenthcenturies as some- how immanentin Yale's seventeenth-centuryactivities-besides overlooking such (minor?)intervening contingencies as the fall of the Mughal Empire, the transformationof the Europeanstate system and a double-revolutionin weap- ons technology-represents a stunningexercise in teleology: viewing the past in the terms of, even as definedby, its eventualfuture. A critiqueof historicist teleology which consists merely of substitutingthe word "steps" for that of "roads"might be thoughtnot very telling. Or again, van der Veer warns the essayists against using uncritically"the contrastivepairs of public versus private,individual versus groups, community versus society" which he sees "to derive from modernity."40)But he then pro- ceeds to offer an analysis of colonialism and the nation-state,which is entirely dependenton the meaningfulnessof the contrastivepairs of "state/civilsociety" and "secularism/religion,"which derive from exactly the same source. It is difficult to see how what he offers can be regardedas anything other than a version of modernisationtheory itself, bearing the same hallmarks of Euro- centricity and determinismas the original-albeit now in so inverted, convo- luted and self-contradictorya form that it risks reducinghistory to an exercise in inanition. But it is also a version which largely occludes one majortradition of "mod- ernist"scholarship, in the light of which van der Veer's understandingof modernity might no less be questioned. He scarcely pays attention to the Marxist discourse of modernity,except to reveal a remarkablemisunderstanding of it. He tells us that:"The basic flaw of modernizationtheory, espoused by Gellner,

39) van der Veer 1998, p. 289. 40) van der Veer 1998, p. 285.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF "MODERNITY"--A RESPONSE TO A REPLY 307 as well as that of many Marxistanalyses of the expansionof Capitalism,is the assumptionthat a common, shared culture (or ideology) is necessary to inte- grate the social system."41)But to which (undisclosed)"Marxist analyses" can he possibly be referring?If they are Marxist in any recognisableform, their central concept of sociological analysis, certainlyin the context of capitalism, has to be "class":in which case, they cannot hold that social systems in capitalism are ever successfullyintegrated, by "a common,shared culture (or ideology)" or by anythingelse. Indeed,seeking to show how even the "appearance" of such sharedculture is "in reality"a function of hegemony and domination is the principalproblematique of one of Marxism'sleading "schools,"that associated with Antonio Gramsci. Yet if the Marxist discourses of modernityare foregroundedmore clearly, they raise a numberof difficultieswith van der Veer's own positions.First, how can the nation-statebe prioritisedas the privileged"vehicle" of modernitywhen this form of the state was instrumentalisedwithin a trans-continental(mercan- tile) capitalisteconomy, which considerablypre-dated it, and subsequentlyhas seen most of its claims to autonomyand power underminedby the advancing forces of "global"(finance) capitalism?The power of the nation-statewould seem most obviously connectedto the phase of early industrialism:42)but both capitalismand modernityhave pre- and post-industrialhistories, which are not containedby it. Second, when the concept of class is admitted,van der Veer's sharpjuxta- position between Europeand non-Europealso comes into question.He may not have noticed, but the view of Chatterjeewhich he endorses-that the majority of Indian society lives outside the terms of "civil society"-could be applied no less to substantialsections of Europeansociety until the very recent past, and even now in relationto "sub-cultures,""underclasses," "minorities." On the other hand, some (powerful,property-holding) non-Europeans were long estab- lished as part of a common "civil society" with bourgeois Europeans-in the case of British India, even sitting as membersof imperialcouncils in Calcutta and Delhi and the imperialparliament in London. "Civil society" is a highly elitist, liberal concept and inclusion within it (especially within its British meaning)has depended-and still depends-on factors of class as much as of "nationality."So why should "nation-ality"be especially privileged? In a final warning to the essayists, van der Veer notes that "thereis a sub- stantialneed for a reflexive theoryof the genealogy of history."43)But his point

41) van der Veer 1998, p. 288. 42) This is an implication of Washbrook 1997. 43) van der Veer 1998, p. 290.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 308 DAVID WASHBROOK then invites the question,what is the genealogy of his own "postcolonial"discourse of history?Here, as several critics have recently seen, that lineage may appearrather obvious. In what context and in relation to what problemsdoes it make sense to lump all non-Europeanpeoples together,in ways which min- imise or trivialise their differences and particularities,and to take the dominant problemin their various histories to be, simply,juxtaposition to European modernity?In what context, too, does it make sense to eliminate class from modern history and assume membershipof "civil society" to be largely the productof membershipof a nation-state.It is scarcely in any context directly occupied by most peoples in the non-Europeanworld. In India, for example, the kind of postcolonial theory advanced by van der Veer has been subject to severe criticism from "local" intellectuals: in part, because of its failure to address in useful ways the issues that they con- sider important-the forms and incidences of poverty, violence and oppression within their own societies, not just in oppositionto "the West""); in part, because, albeit perhapsunintentionally, its emphasison "Alterity"provides practical legitimation for highly repressive "neo-traditionalist"fundamentalisms which posit their own justificationin terms of their Othernessto modernityand Europe. It is also difficult to see how this discourse might inform (except by confusing) practical political action since, if nothing much can be achieved until Europe and modernityare either "rejected"outright or change their fun- damentalcharacter, nothing much might be achieved at all. Rather, postcolonial discourse would seem to make much more sense in a context where non-Europeans,of multiple origins, have enteredinto a common national citizenship; and have blended their "differences"into a composite "minorities"identity in juxtapositionto a dominatingmodern/European/white presence. And also in one where they participate in a juridical and political system given to practices of "amelioration"when confronted with past violations of present-daymoral norms. In other words, this discourse is the productof, and its meanings addressedto political questionsraised inside, the "bourgeois"and now "multi-cultural"civil societies of the Westernmetropolises themselves-especially of the United States where, until recently, van der Veer was "located"and where remain most of his theoreticalauthorities. As Aijaz Ahmad has argued,its "knowledge"seems most clearly to reflect the battle for "position"inside the AmericanAcademy.45) Yet, as Arif Dirlik has also added, if the characterof this "knowledge"does more to mystify than clarify the history of non-Europeansocieties (and Euro-

44) Sarkar 1995; Panikkar 1994. 45) Ahmad 1992, pp. 159-220.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THEGLOBAL HISTORY OF "MODERNITY"--ARESPONSE TO A REPLY 309 pean ones too), its power and influencein the contemporaryworld have to be marked.46)It emanatesfrom the currenthegemonic centre of global cultureand, in two ways, can be seen to advance purposes long associated with modern imperialism.On the one hand, it preaches again "the rule of Orientaldiffer- ence," directingnon-Europeans to develop their "Alterities"and to "reject"the modern rationalitieswhich might actually enable them to contest power in a world still dominatedby the technologies of modernity.And, on the other, it conceals (and therebynaturalises) the relationsof "bourgeois"capitalism under- pinning the new "global"civilisation. It might best be seen, historiographically, as an ideology of New World imperialism,replacing the decaying and inade- quate version once associatedwith the ideology of Europeanmodernity.

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