The Global Coproduction of Ideas

• In Event: The “Global” in Political Theory

Abstract

In this paper, I explore how political theorists can begin writing global histories of political thought. The need for such histories comes from an epistemic necessity of understanding common human problems and a political necessity of understanding mutual antipathies between human populations. Widespread inequality, ecological crises, and religious differences have combined to demand a global history of political thought. If we are accustomed to thinking of the world’s populations as discrete, with distinct historiographies, we ought to focus our attention on epochs when, in the words of John Dunn, cumulative human historiographies “unmistakably collide.” In these moments of collision, the intrusion of categories from one historiography into another is inevitably an exercise in translation with the imposition of some “imaginative parochialism.”

I view British imperial expansion in South Asia in the eighteenth century as one such epoch where the cumulative historiographies of Britain and India unmistakably collided. I use two specific examples of precipitated crises of British imperial administration in India during the second half of the eighteenth century: the institution of property rights and the collection of taxes. Studying these crises, and the transformations in political thinking that they engendered, offers us a way to write a global history of political thought.

Ostensibly “European” ideas could not be implemented in India without contradiction, but these contradictions became important determinants for imperial policy. More importantly, the contradictions also became the source of new political ideas, through the interactions of British rulers and Indian subjects. Yet, existing knowledge about the source of political ideas tends to obscure intellectual coproduction. The role of silent authors in this process can be recovered by thinking of moments of rupture or sudden transformation also as moments of interaction.

Recent work in intellectual history and Indian political thought, by focusing on the meaning of “India” or “Indian”—and alternatively, “European” or “British”—sublimates the altogether more important question about the production of the very concepts that are conventionally understood to have been diffused or transmitted to Indian minds from European shores. The clamor for recognizing indigenous contributions in the appropriation or reception of political ideas, along with supplementing the same with local forms of knowledge, obscures from view the possibility that Indians, along with many others, were vital in the construction of ideas of sovereignty, obligation, freedom, and democracy, at least in the ways that such concepts have been understood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The attempts at clinching originality or authenticity for Indian ideas in fact provincializes Indian history of the past three centuries.

Rather, we should underscore that the emergence and spread of political concepts across the world from the eighteenth century onward was not a European project of diffusion but one dependent on interactive coproduction. Of course, not all Indians in the eighteenth century were writing political-theoretic texts in response to the British. However, in their interactions with their new governors, they performed an invaluable role. This is not to claim that it was the agency of Indians that accounted for conceptual change in the eighteenth century but that however paradoxically—and ironically—Indians were not external to the production of ideas that are thought to be purely European.

A global history of political thought ought to illuminate such complex histories of intellectual production and transformation. The emphasis on historical interactions and connections makes it impossible for us to legitimately claim processes of intellectual production to be exclusively British or Indian or German or European—such geographical specifications become impediments to understanding the history of political thought.

Author

• Anurag Sinha, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities