 My chapter, as Deepak said, is trying to provide a missing historical background to Asian drama. Asian drama, as most of you will know, and as Deepak said, is a huge book. A 2,300 pages spread over three volumes. But Murdoch never bothered with any historical background. He more or less jumped into the story at the time of Indian independence in the late 40s and then carried on with the story from 1968 onwards. So what I do in my chapter for the second volume of the Naya study is to provide a sort of missing historical background chapter. So this chapter has the benefit of hindsight and also gives one the possibility of trying to fill in the blanks and give a broader perspective on the background that Murdoch discussed in his book. So let me get down to the substance of my chapter. The opening section of the chapter, the title of the opening section is Malthus, Muslims and Mongols. So I got a little carried away with three M's and Malthus, Muslims and Mongols seemed like a nice way to start. So why would I do that? What's Malthus got to do with it anyway? Well, one question I like to ask my students at the beginning of any of my development lectures in Columbia is why do you think that one-third of humanity is either Indian or Chinese? So everybody knows that, well, there's lots of Indians, there's lots of Chinese. You add them up and they're about one-third of the total human race. This is true today, it was true 500 years ago, it was true 1,000 years ago, probably 2,000 years ago, roughly speaking. Third of humanity is either Indian or Chinese. So why is that? And I wait for the answer from my students and usually the good students will come up first and they'll say something like river valleys. And of course river valleys is the answer. The Indus and the Ganges in India, the Yangtze and the Yellow River in China, these are these great river valleys that provide the flow, the deposits of silt and the banks of these rivers provide very fertile ground for agriculture. So this naturally gives an advantage to agricultural production and therefore to population to population growth. So in the Malthus model, the Malthus Ricardo classical model of economic growth, population is endogenous, unlike modern economics where you simply take population as given. So how is population endogenous? Well, Malthus basically says that fertility is an increasing function of per capita income. Mortality is a decreasing function of per capita income. So where these two functions cross, you can think of as determining a level of per capita income. Let's call it little y star, where little y star is. The level of per capita income that equates the fertility and mortality and therefore at which population will be constant. So we can think of for India, determine the y star for India, for China determine the y star for China. But then what little y star is just a per capita income. It's not the total population of the total GDP. So to get that, we just, you know, we can ask you to do some mental geometry, not mental arithmetic. Mental geometry, you have GDP on the vertical axis, labor population which are proportional to each other on the horizontal axis. So little y star can be thought of as a ray through the origin, right? And then since given land and technology, GDP is an increasing function of the labor force but with diminishing returns, all right? So eventually the production function will cross this y star ray through the origin and that will determine the level of labor force and therefore population as well as GDP, all right? And since you have the Ganges and the Indus in the case of India and the Yangtze and the Yellow River in the case of China, you have lots of land. You have, you know, the best technology that was available at that time and so you get big GDPs and big population for both India and China, all right? So let's start with, that's the underlying sort of structural base for Asian history, all right? And you have these two big giant, of course there are many other countries that Deepak went through and each of them, of course, deserves to get its due, due attention in the course of our study. But, you know, it's inevitable that the story is going to be dominated somewhat by these two giants, all right? China and India. So China and India were so dominant that Karl Marx, when he wrote the capital, was thought of them as constituting a peculiar mode of production. He says, and as most of you will know, in the West he thought that the society, you know, progressed through the stages of the ancient mode of production based on slavery, the medieval mode of production based on feudalism, and then capitalism, all right? But in Asia he said you had what he called the Asiatic mode of production, all right? But for these big river valleys, the floods have to be controlled so the state plays an important role in controlling irrigation and this leads to what he called the Asiatic mode of production and what Karl Wittfegel, after him, called Oriental Despotism, all right? Because the water has to be controlled so you need a powerful state and the powerful state sort of dominates the society and you don't have, you don't have, you have prosperity, you have GDP at a high level because you have this, but you have a big population and you don't get a driving force of feudalism and competition between feudal lords and things like that that you find in Western history. So in Asian history you have this underlying stability, all right? So this concept of an Asiatic mode was heavily criticized both by non-Marxists as well as Marxists and more recently people speak about the tributary mode of production, all right? Where to administer this big GDP and big population and big labor force, you need a central administration dominated by let us say the emperor and his court and he needs to support him. He needs an army and a bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is partly at the center. The army and the bureaucracy are partly at the center but partly also dispersed around the various regions to provide protection and also to ensure law and order and the prompt payment of taxes, all right? So that constitutes the tributary mode, all right? And of course each electricity is not necessarily stable because the provincial officials can think, you know, why should we submit the tribute to the center? Why can't we retain some of it for ourselves? And so then you get conflict between the center and the provinces and some provincial governor or some foreign invader may take advantage of the situation and overthrow the dynasty, all right? So you get this dynastic cycle but then the new ruler, the new emperor will start a new dynasty but then he himself or his dynasty will be subject to the same forces, all right? So in the end you get a repetition of these things. In China you have, during the last millennium, last thousand years, you had the Song dynasty, which was a native Chinese dynasty. It was replaced by the Mongol Yuan dynasty, which in turn was replaced by the native Chinese Ming dynasty and then another sort of nomadic central Asian dynasty, that of the Manchus, all right? So you have this succession of empires but with the same underlying structure and function, all right? So this provides a continuing basis for Asian history. Now of course the trade was not, we tend to think of trade as more or less coming with the modern world but trade did exist at that time, through the volume was limited but nevertheless and because of the high transport costs you had to have, it had to be in very valuable commodities so the valuable commodities of course were silks and spices from Asia that the West needed very much and which traveled west along the Silk Road overland, which is the overland route and through the sea lanes from the Indonesian islands through the Straits of Malacca into the Red Sea and then the Egyptian Sultan in Cairo and the Venetian traders with their base in Alexandria would win the haggle over the price and the profits, all right? So whether this very lucrative Asian trade was practiced for many hundreds of years, right? So then the Mongols have to be brought into the picture. So Central Asia which we can divide Asia into South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. The Mongols of course were sort of pastoral herdsmen from Central Asia but their mode of existence depending on horses and using the bow gave them this military striking power and they use this military striking power to dominate the whole of Eurasia up to China and to the borders of Russia of course. So the Pax Mongolik stimulated overland trade, stimulated the westward flow of silk and not only of silk but other Chinese techniques and so on that the great British historian Joseph Needham discussed in his book on science and civilization in China so this was the route through which East and West were connected. It was the early example of globalization, right? And we don't think of the Mongols but you know you need peace along these ways and when you have an empire we are familiar with the Pax Britannica but before the Pax Britannica you had the Pax Mongolika, right? The Mongol peace that stimulated the westward flow of trade. So you have the succession of dynasties then in China that I mentioned earlier. In the chapter I go into the transition from one to the other but here I have no time to do that but then the important thing is to realize that despite this succession of empires what was happening was that the underlying structure was remaining very much the same but much of this changed with the European intrusion. The European intrusion came at the end of the 15th century as we all know and why did Vasco Dacama show up in Indian waters? Well, the idea was to outflank Venice to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, control Malacca which is the straits through which the eastern spices had to pass and there was this Portuguese saying that a lot of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice. So that was the stimulus for the Portuguese intrusion. But then of course the Portuguese were followed by the English and the Dutch but then the land-based empires, the Mughal Empire in India, the Ming and later the Qing Empire in China they were very powerful land-based empires and it was not easy for the west to overthrow them. So the west basically was on the periphery of making profitable trade but not intruding into the center. But all of this changed of course with the advent of technology. The Industrial Revolution brought the steam engine, the steamboat and this meant that the west could more effectively intrude into the land-based power of the Asian states. And the best illustration of this of course is the Opium Wars. So as we know that because of the activities of the East India Company the East India Company could get opium from, it had a monopoly on opium in Bengal. It would sell this Bengal opium in China. Instead of using up valuable silver it could export the Indian opium. In return you would get tea and porcelain. And then this could be shipped back to England. So on us there was this trade triangle between India, China and Britain. So who got what? In my normal life I teach the theory of international trade how everybody gains and from all these three countries everyone of course should have been better off. But if we ask historically under those circumstances who got what? We can say that the Chinese got Indian opium and the British got Chinese tea and tea cups. As you know the English word for porcelain is China. China with a small c. So you get the tea and the China from China to drink the tea. And then what do the Indians get? As somebody said well the Indians got Queen Victoria and the British Raj. So that was the closing, that was the closing, that was the closing of the triangle. Because what the East India Company ended up doing was because of the industrial revolution the machine made Lancashire textiles could be sent to India and that destroyed the handloom weavers in India. And of course I mean Robert Clive and so on had already made intrusions into India but after the industrial revolution by the 19th century the British takeover was complete. Okay so that's the sequence by which the Asian empires which resisted for so long were finally to more to the large extent suffocated. Ron that's 15 minutes. Okay so I'll just take a couple minutes more. So the British continued their rule in India. In China there was an informal rule. I mean the Chinese were still technically sovereign but the British got Hong Kong and all these so-called unequal treaties were imposed on China. So as a result we could say that meanwhile of course the Dutch had also intruded into Indonesia so you had the European colonial control over most of Asia by the 19th century. Then if we look at per capita income just coming back to the Malthusian theme as a result of the work of Madison and various other people we have per capita income statistics for hundreds of years. And if we look at them the remarkable thing is that China under the Song dynasty in the 11th century seemed to have been at least as prosperous if not more prosperous in terms of per capita income than she was in the middle of the 19th century. So for the entire period, the entire thousand years from the 11th century to the middle of the 20th century per capita income really didn't change either in China or in India. So it's remarkable that this Malthusian mechanism kept per capita income at a steady level. It didn't mean there was no change. There was lots of change. For example, when the Europeans brought the New World Silver and other materials what they brought also were the food plants, potatoes and maize and peanuts and things like that and this of course gave a great stimulus to agricultural production but it got all swallowed up in population expansion so you had bigger GDP, bigger population but per capita income did not change. So all of that remained the same until the middle of the 19th century when you had the independence movements in the Communist Party in China the Indian National Congress in India and other nationalist movements in Southeast Asia re-established Asian independence and then of course now we come to the initial to 1968 and the beginning of the Muradal story and that's the point at which I'll stop. Thank you.