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.
Ardytia Mukherjee - How Colonial India Made Modern Britain
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.
