Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (World Social Change)

Product Description For the appendixes mentioned in the book, Click Here. In this innovative and ambitious global history, distinguished economic historian Amiya Kumar Bagchi critically analyzes the processes leading to the rise of the West since the sixteenth century to its current position as the most prosperous and powerful group of nations in the world. Integrating the history of armed conflict with the history of competition for trade, investment, and markets, Bagchi explores the human consequences for people both within and outside the region. He characterizes the emergence and operation of capitalism as a system driven by wars over resources and markets rather than one that genuinely operates on the principle of free markets. In tracing this history, he also charts what happened to the people who came under its sway during the last five centuries. Bagchi thus broadens our understanding of the nature and history of capitalism and challenges the fetishism of commodities that limits the perspective of most economic historians. The book also challenges the Eurocentrism that still underlies the conceptual framework of many mainstream historians, joining earlier narratives that chronicle the history of human beings as living persons rather than as puppets serving the abstract cause of "economic growth." His unflinching examination of the human costs of development―not only in the colonial periphery but in the core nations―includes not only economic processes and issues of inequality within and among nations but also the intertwining of economics and war-making on a world scale. The book also contributes to our knowledge of how and in what sequence human health has been shaped by public health care, sanitation, modern medicine, income levels and nutrition. Written with extraordinary range and depth, Perilous Passage will change the ways in which we think about many of the largest issues in world history and development. Review [Bagchi] challenges Eurocentric views on the rise of capitalism and argues that Europeans gained a decisive advantage over China and India thanks only to the maturing of the machine-based Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century.--International Review Of Social History A hard-headed examination in facts and figures of how capitalism has insidiously but inexorably destroyed human happiness and ravaged our ecological system. . . . A compelling and thoughtful account with the lucidity of argument of someone compressing the essence of a lifetime's research into a philosophical framework.--The Statesman Amiya Kumar Bagchi's Perilous Passage is a book that deserves our attention in this historical moment. It is born of our moment and offers us crucial intellectual resources in our attempts to understand the beast we must confront. Perilous Passage is a global history and in many respects perhaps one of the first truly global histories of our epoch to appear. . . . Bagchi's Perilous Passage is a weapon in the intellectual arsenal of social justice activists everywhere. . . . Perilous Passage may contribute to the development of a newer kind of understanding that will allow us to begin undoing the layers of injustice, ecological destruction, and human immiseration such ascendancy has created.--Labour An ambitious work that essays to rethink the extent to which the transition to capitalism did not accomplish significant human development until well into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. . . . Bagchi's 'human development' frame is one that stimulates and appropriately outrages.--Journal of World History An impressive book that, in the tradition of world systems analysis and dependency theory, challenges Eurocentric understandings of capitalism. . . . This book makes an important contribution to that struggle.--Science & Society Bagchi has written a great book, a history of human development as he calls it, which offers a fascinating account of global capitalism as it