[ 166 ] The Great Transformation
an external culturally undefined situation, like a simple scarcity of
food," says Dr. Mead. "The process by which a group of savages is con-
verted into gold-miners or ship's crew or merely robbed of all incen-
tive to effort and left to die painlessly beside streams still filled with
fish, may seem so bizarre, so alien to the nature of society and its nor-
mal functioning as to be pathological," yet, she adds, "precisely this
will, as a rule, happen to a people in the midst of violent externally in-
troduced, or at least externally produced change. ..." She concludes:
"This rude contact, this uprooting of simple peoples from their mores,
is too frequent to be undeserving of serious attention on the part of the
social historian."
However, the social historian fails to take the hint. He still refuses
to see that the elemental force of culture contact, which is now revolu-
tionizing the colonial world, is the same which, a century ago, created
the dismal scenes of early capitalism. An anthropologist* drew the
general inference: "In spite of numerous divergencies there are at the
bottom the same predicaments among the exotic peoples to-day as
there were among us decades or centuries ago. The new technical de-
vices, the new knowledge, the new forms of wealth and power en-
hanced the social mobility, i.e. migration of individuals, rise and fall
of families, differentiation of groups, new forms of leadership, new
models of life, different valuations." Thurnwald's penetrating mind
recognized that the cultural catastrophe of black society today is
closely analogous to that of a large part of white society in the early
days of capitalism. The social historian alone still misses the point of
the analogy.
Nothing obscures our social vision as effectively as the econo-
mistic prejudice. So persistently has exploitation been put into the
forefront of the colonial problem that the point deserves special atten-
tion. Also, exploitation in a humanly obvious sense has been perpe-
trated so often, so persistently, and with such ruthlessness on the back-
ward peoples of the world by the white man that it would seem to
argue utter insensibility not to accord it pride of place in any discus-
sion of the colonial problem. Yet, it is precisely this emphasis put on
exploitation which tends to hide from our view the even greater issue
of cultural degradation. If exploitation is defined in strictly economic
terms as a permanent inadequacy of ratios of exchange, it is doubtful
* Thurnwald, R. C, Black and White in East Africa; The Fabric of a New Civiliza-
tion, 1935.
Birth of the Liberal Creed (Continued) [ 167 ]
whether, as a matter of fact, there was exploitation. The catastrophe of
the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disrup-
tion of the basic institutions of the victim (whether force is used in the
process or not does not seem altogether relevant). These institutions
are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is forced upon an
entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made
into commodities, which, again, is only a short formula for the liqui-
dation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society.
Changes in income and population figures are evidently incommen-
surable with such a process. Who, for instance, would care to deny that
a formerly free people dragged into slavery was exploited, though their
standard of life, in some artificial sense, may have been improved in
the country to which they were sold as compared with what it was in
their native bush? And yet nothing would be altered if we assumed that
the conquered natives had been left free and not even been made to
overpay the cheap cotton goods thrust upon them, and that their star-
vation was "merely" caused by the disruption of their social insti-
tutions.
To cite the famous instance of India. Indian masses in the second
half of the nineteenth century did not die of hunger because they were
exploited by Lancashire; they perished in large numbers because
the Indian village community had been demolished. That this was
brought about by forces of economic competition, namely, the perma-
nent underselling of hand-woven chaddar by machine-made piece
goods, is doubtless true; but it proves the opposite of economic exploi-
tation, since dumping implies the reverse of surcharge. The actual
source of famines in the past fifty years was the free marketing of grain
combined with local failure of incomes. Failure of crops was, of
course, part of the picture, but despatch of grain by rail made it possi-
ble to send relief to the threatened areas; the trouble was that the peo-
ple were unable to buy the corn at rocketing prices, which on a free but
incompletely organized market were bound to be the reaction to a
shortage. In former times small local stores had been held against har-
vest failure, but these had been now discontinued or swept away into
the big market. Famine prevention for this reason now usually took
the form of public works to enable the population to buy at enhanced
prices. The three or four large famines that decimated India under
British rule since the Rebellion were thus neither a consequence of the
elements, nor of exploitation, but simply of the new market organiza-
[168] The Great Transformation
tion of labor and land which broke up the old village without actually
resolving its problems. While under the regime of feudalism and of
the village community, noblesse oblige, clan solidarity, and regulation
of the corn market checked famines, under the rule of the market the
people could not be prevented from starving according to the rules of
the game. The term "exploitation" describes but ill a situation which
became really grave only after the East India Company's ruthless mo-
nopoly was abolished and free trade was introduced into India. Under
the monopolists the situation had been fairly kept in hand with the
help of the archaic organization of the countryside, including free dis-
tribution of corn, while under free and equal exchange Indians per-
ished by the million. Economically, India may have been—and, in the
long run, certainly was—benefited, but socially she was disorganized
and thus thrown a prey to misery and degradation.
In some cases at least, the opposite of exploitation, if we may say so,
started the disintegrating culture contact. The forced land allotment
made to the American Indians, in 1887, benefited them individually,
according to our financial scale of reckoning. Yet the measure all but
destroyed the race in its physical existence—the outstanding case of
cultural degeneration on record. The moral genius of a John Collier
retrieved the position almost half a century later by insisting on the
need for a return to tribal land holdings. Today the North American
Indian is in some places, at least, a live community again; not eco-
nomic betterment, but social restoration wrought the miracle. The
shock of a devastating culture contact was recorded by the pathetic
birth of the famous Ghost Dance version of the Pawnee Hand Game
about 1890, exactly at the time when improving economic conditions
made the aboriginal culture of these Red Indians anachronistic. Fur-
thermore, the fact that not even an increasing population—the other
economic index—need exclude a cultural catastrophe is equally
borne out by anthropological research. Natural rates of increase of
population may actually be an index either of cultural vitality or of
cultural degradation. The original meaning of the word "proletarian,"
linking fertility and mendicity, is a striking expression of this ambiv-
alence.
Economistic prejudice was the source both of the crude exploita-
tion theory of early capitalism and of the no less crude, though more
scholarly, misapprehension which later denied the existence of a social
catastrophe. The significant implication of this latter and more recent
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