Japanese thrust for Asian economy

M Rajivlochan

This over-priced book proceeds on the basis of the fiction that an innocent, brave Asia succumbed to the perfidy and trickery of the colonising powers of Western Europe. Nationalists and Marxist historians of India, when they are being utterly banal, say so too. That the majority of Asia succumbed to colonialism is a historical fact. That Asian nations were subjected to open loot is also fact. To see the process in terms of innocence versus villainy is simplistic and untrue. 

The book is organised into six chapters and an epilogue about the colonial legacy. The first chapter gives a potted version in about hundred pages, of the arrival of colonial powers in Asia. Subsequent chapters narrate the political journey till 1971, of different Asian countries and the setting up of independent nations.

In this story of heroes and villains, Prasenjit Basu sees no value in understanding the serious conceptual differences that defined the encounter between Asia and Europe. Europe proceeded on the assumption that it was quite all right to do trade over the barrel of a gun. The various East India companies that arrived in search of the fabled riches of the East were backed by the power of the state in those countries. This is what enabled them to conduct a series of battles in different parts of the continent, to open armed settlements and to pursue trade in good years and bad ones. Common to British, Dutch and French approaches to Asian cultures was the willingness to use coercion to further trade. This was matched by a mysterious Asian blindness to the utility of a powerful state machinery to improve trade. Asians remained completely indifferent to the importance of information. Asian countries, leaders, statesmen, and scholars simply did not seem to be able to understand the nature of the White men at their door beyond guessing that the White ones were hankering for power. It was not power alone, but the power to trade that drove the White ones but that is something that Basu does not notice.

However, he correctly points out that Japan was the one major exception. The Japanese learnt fast that it was the pursuit of trade, better organisation, a better military and guns that would enable them to win their conflicts with European companies. They courted the French to help them build a shipyard, iron foundry and dockyard and to help modernise the Japanese army. They sent students abroad, modernised their military and improved ties with major powers. One only wishes that Basu had chosen to unpack this a little more and tell us why this kind of learning did not happen in other countries.

Whether it was China, India, Indonesia or Vietnam, these countries either did not see the looming threat fast enough or if they saw it, they felt helpless to organise themselves to face it. Most importantly, the governments in those countries did not reach out either to improve trade, to improve their armies or to better the lot of their people. Japan stands out here, too. It was one of the earliest nations in the world to achieve near universal literacy.

Basu says that, “Asia was able to throw off the colonial yoke because one Asian nation, Japan, proved able and willing to stand up to the European powers”. This is too simplistic.

Simplistic statements abound in this book. A good copy-editor would have excised them. Witness the author’s use of a long parenthesis to make a somewhat silly statement regarding the Congress party in pre-independence India. The author says: “almost all policy decisions were made through a democratic process (explaining why democracy has survived so long in India, quite unlike almost all of Britain’s other former colonies)”. Really?

In the last 50 years, Asian economies have moved rather fast up the learning curve. They have shown consistent economic growth and an ability to handle a diverse set of problems. Has this growth been by default or by design? If it was by design, what were the factors underlying it? If by default, then why? These are questions that are ignored in the 600-odd pages of this book.