domingo, 24 de junho de 2012

Mukherjees no IEA (USP)

O casal de historiadores indianos Arditya e Mridula Mukherjee falarão terça (26/06) no Instituto de Estudos Avançados da USP, como parte do encontro "Democracias de Alta Densidade: Brasil e Índia".  O evento contará com transmissão ao vivo: IEA .

Ardytia é célebre por sua luta contra leituras "revisionistas" do passado colonial indiano e por demonstrar como a exploração britânica da Índia sustentou não apenas o início da revolução industrial inglesa mas também o desenvolvimento social e humano na Grã Bretanha nos últimos dois séculos séculos.  



This essay is based on the basic premise that at the heart of colonialism lay surplus appropriation from the colony to the metropolis or the colonisers. (It was neither a “fit of absent-mindedness” nor the desire to take on “the White Man’s Burden” to “civilise” and “modernise” the “child” people of the colonial countries which led to or sustained colonialism.) The precise form that the process of surplus appropriation took and what constituted  the surplus differed  widely over time, the  level of development of capitalism in the colonising country and the nature of the colony in terms of its natural endowments. To fix the colonial process in only one image – for example, that of the colony being  a  market  for  the manufactured  goods  of  the  metropolis  and the supplier of raw materials to the metropolis – is to miss the enormous range of ways in which colonial surplus appropriation actually evolved historically. As we shall see, surplus could be transferred in the form of labour, commodities (not necessarily only primary goods but could also be manufactured goods) or even knowledge in the, so-called, post-industrial “knowledge society” depending on which was the key factor of production at a point of time.