The True Economics of Migration

Peo Hansen

Over a few days this past summer, as I was putting the finishing touches to my book, A Modern Migration Theory, my daughter developed a pain in her left foot after having twisted her ankle. As the pain persisted we went to see a doctor. In the waiting room at the local clinic I took note of the fact that seven of the ten doctors in the corridor had foreign names, three of which were Muslim. I have seen doctors from Iraq, Romania and Syria at this clinic, which was no coincidence given that Iraqi and Romanian doctors make up two of the largest groups within the cohort of foreign-born doctors in Sweden. More than 30 per cent of all doctors in Sweden are born abroad (OECD 2019), and in the case of Iraqi doctors most of them arrived as refugees in the noughties. My daughter was examined by a doctor from Germany who swiftly referred her to the main hospital for an X-ray.

We took a taxi to the hospital, and here as well the person servicing us was foreign-born, maybe from Syria. Around a half of Sweden’s taxi drivers are foreign-born and the great majority have come as refugees (Statistics Sweden 2019; 2020). The driver dropped us off at the emergency room entrance, and from there we had to ask for directions to the X-ray department. We were helped by a doctor and nurse who came walking our way. Judging from their ID badges it seemed as if the doctor was from an African country and the nurse from a Middle Eastern country. In all likelihood, the nurse who took care of my daughter in the X-ray department was also from a country in the Middle East. Close to 15 percent of the nurses working in Sweden come from other countries (OECD 2019).

Luckily, the X-ray indicated no fracture, and so we headed for the bus stop to go home. There was a bus sitting at the kerb, but the driver told us that it would take a while before it would depart. With my daughter in some pain we decided to take a taxi again. This time our driver might have been from Somalia; the same probably applied to the bus driver. Over a half of those working as bus and tram drivers in Sweden are born in another country, and, needless to say, almost all of them have come as refugees. I think I have made my point. But I should mention too that we also passed by a team of cleaners in the hospital. The pattern repeated itself, and no coincidence in this case either. Sixty per cent of the cleaners in Sweden are foreign-born, and, yes, the majority have refugee background (Statistics Sweden 2019; 2020). They clean Sweden for very low pay, and they have continued to fulfil this absolutely essential public function during the Covid-19 pandemic.

My daughter and I had an excursion into the Swedish reality. In this reality people who have come as refugees carry out absolutely vital work without which the Swedish society and economy would cease to function. Close to 30 percent nationally, and about 55 percent in the Stockholm region, of those working in the Swedish elderly care are foreign-born – practically all of them have refugee background (Socialstyrelsen 2019: 47). Although it refuses to acknowledge this fact in the public debate, in a report from 2018 even the Swedish government (2018: 16) concedes as much: “Without the foreign-born women and men, the elderly care would face significant problems in fulfilling its task.”

“Without the foreign-born women and men, the elderly care would face significant problems in fulfilling its task.”

Again, this is the reality and the numbers are there for everybody to see. Yet this reality persistently fails to register in national and European debates on asylum and migration. The seriousness of this deliberate omission cannot be overemphasized, and it is one of the main reasons why I decided to write a book about it.

Instead of broadcasting the real benefits that refugees and labour migrants bring to EU countries and, from there, enact policy to improve migrants’ often precarious situation, the political establishment has done the opposite. It has made sure to soak and trap the European Union in a toxic debate over an alleged plethora of negative effects of migration – though “highly skilled” migration is sometimes spared.

The Cost Perspective on Migration

Integral to this is the ubiquitous cost perspective on migration, which makes up one of the most powerful shields against the EU’s migration reality. This perspective, or narrative, is the main focus of my book. As I describe in great detail, not only politicians but also researchers today agree that refugees admitted to the European Union constitute a net cost and fiscal burden for the receiving societies. Whereas researchers draw this conclusion from a seemingly neutral accounting exercise – refugees are said to contribute less in taxes than they receive in welfare assistance – politicians and the media eagerly use this “economic science” to justify and explain restrictive asylum policies. To be sure, politicians and researchers may judge low-earning and low-skilled labour migrants to be both necessary and affordable, but only on the condition that their access to welfare provisions is restricted. This does not apply to refugees, however. Since refugees cannot work and pay taxes from day one and since they may have children, refugees will initially always depend on welfare assistance. By definition, therefore, they are deemed fiscal burdens.

From the perspective of research this is just a scientific fact, and so research cannot be held accountable for being complicit in stoking the sentiment that refugee reception and low-earning migrants jeopardize the welfare state and that, consequently, refugee prevention constitutes a prerequisite for the fiscal viability of the welfare state. As one expert in the field puts it: “The lower the skills and earnings of migrants in the host country, the greater will be the strictly economic case for restricting some of their welfare rights in order to minimize the fiscal costs for existing residents” (Ruhs 2013: 46).

The “strictly economic” serves to indicate that the issue at hand is neither grounded nor decided within the realm of political choice. Rather, economic laws of fiscal sustainability are said to constrain what is politically feasible.

According to world-renowned economist Branko Milanovic, “[t]he arrival of migrants threatens to diminish or dilute the premium enjoyed by citizens of rich countries, which includes not only financial aspects, but also good health and education services.” Yes, you read right, migrants working in the health services are supposedly diluting “the premium enjoyed by citizens of rich countries”. Admitting low-earning migrants therefore “requires withholding some civic rights”, Milanovic asserts. “We can debate the sharpness of the trade-off, but cannot deny its existence.” (Milanovic 2016a: 152) In Milanovic’s (2016a: 152) quest to figure out ways to “pay for increased migration”, such withholding of rights to migrants – or “discriminatory treatment”, as he terms it – are both necessary and beneficial to all (2016b). Migrants, Milanovic (2016b) suggests, “could also be made to pay higher taxes since they are the largest net beneficiaries of migration”.

Finally, here’s another representative scholarly view, published in a recent issue of the International Organization of Migration’s (IOM) journal International Migration: “The refugees represent a fiscal burden for the host countries at least short and medium term. Under these conditions refugee migration is unable to help to alleviate the aging related fiscal burden of the host societies, on the contrary, it contributes to its worsening. Thus, when the majority thinks that refugees represent a fiscal burden (they “take out more from the public purse than they pay in”), they are not wrong this time. It is not possible to argue against this with solid empirical evidence. Naturally, the moral (and legal) obligation argument for accepting the refugees is still valid but it couldn’t be underpinned with further economic reasoning. The moral obligations and the economic benefit are in conflict here (Gál 2019: 352).

As communicated in the quote, “the majority [is] not wrong this time”, implying that, though majorities may be wrong most of the time, on the issue of refugees they are not. Here, the majority opinion is in agreement with science. The political parties on the extreme right have always had this piece of “economic science” tattooed into their party programmes and flagship slogans. Here is an instance when Europe’s extreme right cannot be dismissed as populists or as being guilty of simplifying complex issues. As asserted in the quote, the factuality of refugees constituting a “fiscal burden” “is not possible to argue against […] with solid empirical evidence”. And since a fiscal burden, per definition, is synonymous with something very negative in the public debate, we should not be surprised if politicians and the public take those making up the burden – i.e. the refugees – to be undesirable too.

It is like starting a discussion about equal pay by insisting that we acknowledge that women are a fiscal burden on men because women pay less in taxes – and that trying to diminish or hide this “fact” only plays into the hands of the sexists.

In response to this, the proponents of the cost perspective simply say that to mask or hide the truth about refugee migration – or any other migration deemed costly – goes against the scientific ethos and that it would make for an even worse place to begin integration. Many would add that tampering with the truth will only aid the anti-immigration populists – a particularly common retort from mainstream politicians and scholars who want to mark their distance from the extreme right. Since so few challenge the basic principles and maths of the cost perspective, it has gained an air of unassailable truth. But those who claim that they side with accuracy in order to avoid playing into the hands of the anti-immigration right do something even worse than allowing the cost assumption to stand unchallenged. They give it new life and credibility by insisting it be acknowledged in advance. It is like starting a discussion about equal pay by insisting that we acknowledge that women are a fiscal burden on men because women pay less in taxes – and that trying to diminish or hide this “fact” only plays into the hands of the sexists.

A Modern Migration Theory

My book is not just an argument to debunk the cost perspective’s detrimental impact on migrants’ integration and inclusion. Employing the descriptive macroeconomic framework provided by the scholars within Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), it also demonstrates that the cost perspective builds on a flawed economic conception (see e.g. Ehnts 2017; Mitchell, Wray & Watts 2019). Much of this is attributable to the heavy imprint of the orthodox “sound finance” doctrine on migration research and policy – the assumption that governments face a budget constraint much in same way as households, municipalities and businesses. This orthodox “sound finance” economics and its household accounting thus mistakes state spending for being precisely that: analogous to household spending. Here, therefore, spending amounts to little more than a cost, in the same way that a household looks at its outlays – i.e. as something that subtracts from the household’s income, savings or borrowed money. As a consequence, the money spent on refugees would have to be made up for through tax hikes or “risky” borrowing or by removing funds from other areas, such as welfare benefits intended for needy citizens.

For countries that issue their own currencies, however, none of this applies. Since the central government is the monopoly issuer of the currency, it follows, both in logical and in concrete terms, that it necessarily has to spend or lend the currency (via the banking system) into existence before it can collect it back in taxes. If this was not the case, there would be no money to pay taxes with. Such governments are thus the exact opposite of municipalities, business and households, all of which have to collect, earn or borrow the money before they can spend it; they are mere users of money, not issuers. Hence, and as MMT explains, currency-issuing governments are not revenue-constrained. This means that taxes collected by the central government are not used to fund government spending as they are when collected by currency-using bodies such as municipalities or constituent states in federations (or as in the eurozone prior to ECB’s adoption of the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program, see Ehnts 2020).

Central government taxes fulfil other indispensable functions and purposes. By constantly removing a large chunk of money – and thus spending power – from the private sector, taxes work as a powerful anti-inflationary measure while at the same time moving resources from the private to the public sector. Taxes also work as an instrument regulating income and wealth distribution and they are used to promote or discourage certain industries, professions and behaviours. And there are, of course, other purposes that central government taxes can be made to fulfil – but revenue for spending and saving for future spending do not form part of them. Again, as the monopoly issuer of the currency, the government can always spend its own currency.

Had it been seriously pondered, I suspect the whole notion of the potential unsustainability of refugee spending would have had to be reconsidered. In other words, what is so bad or dangerous about households, businesses and municipalities receiving net incomes?

As MMT also demonstrates – and as the historical pandemic-spending corroborates – money spent never disappears, and this, of course, applies to all monetary systems everywhere. This is so because all central government spending, by definition, must end up somewhere and hence be collected by someone. Spending by the central government is thus synonymous with income in the non-central government sector – as such, spending always equals income. In the scholarly literature on the fiscal impact of migration as well as in fiscal policy-making, this irrefutable fact is never considered, which, when one comes to think about it, is strange indeed. Had it been seriously pondered, I suspect the whole notion of the potential unsustainability of refugee spending would have had to be reconsidered. In other words, what is so bad or dangerous about households, businesses and municipalities receiving net incomes?

Real Resources, Financial Resources

What may be even more serious is that scholars and policy-makers also fail to understand why we need to distinguish between real resources, such as labour, and financial resources. Reflecting this failure, researchers cannot grasp the value and indispensability of the labour performed by those 60 per cent of cleaners in Sweden who are born abroad. Instead, they conceive of these workers as fiscal burdens. Their tax contributions fall below average and so they are said to receive more in government welfare spending than they pay in. By always being in the red, so to speak, these workers will neither be able to redeem the costs for their initial stay in the country during which they did not work and pay taxes at all. Of course, if refugees work as doctors they will be able to offset such alleged costs, and they may also be able to offset additional costs, such as their children’s schooling. But, if they work as cleaners, they remain perpetual net costs. According to this logic, then, Sweden would have been better off without the cleaners who came as refugees.

This is silly and absurd reasoning. To deem people as fiscal assets or fiscal burdens depending on which side of the average for tax payments they fall is to misunderstand society. Not everyone can earn above-average incomes, as, by definition, some will be above whereas some will be below. What purpose does it serve to consign those who earn below “average” to the status of costs and burdens when, as everyone ought to know too, society is impossible without them? What would society be like if no one worked in food production, if no one cleaned​, cared for children and the elderly, drove the buses or worked as assistant nurses?

To deem people as fiscal assets or fiscal burdens depending on which side of the average for tax payments they fall is to misunderstand society.

As I explain in my book, the real resource contribution from the foreign-born nationals to the Swedish society has been nothing less than astounding. With fewer Swedish-born workers joining the labour force than leaving it, the entire addition of working age people in Sweden has, since 2008, consisted of the foreign born. Between 2010 and 2017 the number of working age (16–64) Swedish-born people dropped by over 150,000 while the number of working age foreign-born grew by some 360,000 people (SPES 2018). In this period, Sweden was thus able to increase its working age population by more than 200,000. This growth will pick up even more until 2025, when the foreign-born share of the working age is set to hit 27 percent, as compared to 18 percent in 2010. Because of this, Sweden is the only country in the EU (and beyond) that has not seen an increase in the median age over the last decade. The figures for 2017 illustrate this well. Here, the labour market added 94,000 jobs, of which 75,000, or 80 percent, went to foreign-born workers (SPES 2018: 26). According to the Swedish Public Employment Service (SPES 2018), this pattern is likely to continue.

Crucial too is that refugees in Sweden have disproportionately ended up in smaller, rural municipalities. Many of these municipalities appreciate refugees as vital in making local communities liveable again, helping to reverse a decades-long vicious spiral of depopulation, declining local tax revenue and welfare service retrenchment. Thanks to refugee reception, municipalities that were closing schools are now opening them and building new ones instead.

Thanks to refugee reception, municipalities that were closing schools are now opening them and building new ones instead.

Concerning the financial aspects, during the three years 2015–2017, as I detail in the book, the Swedish central government increased spending massively to manage the reception of 163,000 refugees. In 2015, and for many years prior to that, Sweden had been the largest recipient, proportionally speaking, of asylum seekers in the EU. Most of the funds went to the municipalities that received the refugees. But the government made sure to inform the public that the spending was a necessary evil that would impact negatively on the Swedish economy and welfare state – this was the message that was repeated by the government over and over again. In addition, practically all economic expertise warned in unison of economic and financial damage, urging the government to trim spending and introduce austerity measures to avoid deficits and debt accumulation.

But while Sweden’s central government, its economic experts and the media were busy worrying about the expenditure column and the future fiscal balance, many rural and de-populating municipalities away from Stockholm were busy welcoming this expenditure as income. Thanks to the refugee spending by the central government, 2016 ended up being one of the best fiscal year ever for Swedish local governments, with practically all of the country’s 290 municipalities running surpluses.

The central government spending to the municipalities financed the reception of refugees and their initial integration. In and of itself this increased public consumption enormously; and it stimulated investment and employment, which greatly boosted overall economic growth. But since much more money was transferred than was needed for the immediate refugee concerns, municipalities were able to attend to other things too, such as welfare needs, schools and infrastructure. Besides impacting positively on the health of welfare services, in many municipalities state refugee funds also enabled municipalities to invest, save and pay down debt.

The admission of refugees – that is, real resources – together with the generous addition of financial resources from the central government thus proved to be a hugely virtuous combination for scores of depopulating municipalities in Sweden. With this we also see the nullification of what scholars and centrally located politicians claim to be an inescapable and indisputable trade-off between refugee spending and welfare spending – between the reception of refugees and strengthened welfare for all. Right before our eyes, then, Sweden had built a real-world model – however reluctantly – that was capable of receiving large numbers of refuges while at the same time investing in welfare. Instead of the misconceived trade-off between migration and welfare, or the alleged choice that has to be made between welfare spending and refugee reception, the Swedish case demonstrated that it is exactly the other way around. Spending on the refugees, the non-citizen newcomers, became a way of rediscovering the viability of welfare for all.

Human Rights Are Not a Sacrifice

When politicians sound the alarm over refugee costs, claiming that these threaten the fiscal sustainability of the welfare state, they do so from the comfortable place of being able to cite research. No accusations of populist fakery here. But most of the time they do not have to cite research. The notion that there is a trade-off between refugee migration and the welfare state is simply common sense in the public debate. The debate is not whether this is actually accurate; everybody agrees that refugees involve costs for taxpayers. The debate is, rather, whether these costs are deemed affordable or not. It is clear who is winning this debate in terms of policy outcomes; asylum policy is becoming increasingly restrictive and the residence and social rights for those refugees who still manage to enter the European Union are being curtailed. No EU member state wants to share the “refugee burden”.

But it is a strange debate, because the losing side, or those defending refugee rights, almost always contend that human rights never should be allowed to be subjected to cost–benefit analyses. Given that no one is questioning the assumption that refugee reception indeed constitutes a cost, this position is understandable. Under these circumstances, human rights proponents will always lose a cost–benefit debate over refugee reception. But what if the assumption is inaccurate? This is another main reason for writing this book: to show that it is the other way round. As I explain, refugee reception is not costly. Rather, it amounts to a beneficial addition of real resources, as illustrated in the snapshot of the Swedish reality above. The government spending on refugees, for its part, will do what government spending always does: it will end up as income in other sectors of the economy – that is, as income for municipalities, businesses and others involved and employed in the management of refugee reception and integration. Those advocating human rights, therefore, do not have to concede the mistaken orthodox assumption that refugees are costly. Nor do they have to think of “the economy” as the enemy. Receiving refugees in the EU is not an economic or fiscal sacrifice. The book aims to correct this prevailing misunderstanding.

But let me be clear: I am not saying that Sweden or the EU as a whole should admit refugees because it benefits Sweden and the EU. Sweden and the EU should admit refugees to honour their human rights obligations and commitments. On the economics of it all, there is no argument. In admitting and investing in refugees – that is, real resources – societies in Sweden and the EU cannot but benefit.

Peo Hansen is Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linkoping University, Sweden. He has written extensively on questions of migration, citizenship and identity and how they relate to the political economy of European integration. His books include The Politics of European Citzenship (with Sandy Brian Hager) and Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (with Stefan Jonsson).

Header Image Credit: Deborah

References:

  1. Ehnts, D. (2017) Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics. Abingdon: Routledge.
  2. Ehnts, D. (2020) “Dirk Ehnts – The Eurozone is Fully Committed to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)”, 4 April
  3. Gál, Z. (2019) “Fiscal Consequences of the Refugee Crisis”, International Migration, Vol. 57, No. 5, pp. 341–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12520
  4. Milanovic, B. (2016a) Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  5. Milanovic, B. (2016b) “There is a trade-off between citizenship and migration”, Financial Times, 20 April.
  6. Mitchell, W., R. Wray & M. Watts (2019) Macroeconomics: A Modern Money Theory Approach, London: Red Globe Press.
  7. OECD (2019) Recent Trends in International Migration of Doctors, Nurses, and Medical Students, OECD Publishing, Paris.
  8. Ruhs, M. (2013) The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labour Migration, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  9. Socialstyrelsen (2019) “Vård och omsorg om äldre: Lägesrapport 2019”
  10. SPES (Swedish Public Employment Service/Arbetsförmedlingen)2018. Arbetsmarknadsutsikterna hösten 2018: Prognos för arbetsmarknaden 2018–2020 [Labour Market Outlook Autumn 2018: Forecast for the Labour Market 2018–2020]. Stockholm: SPES.
  11. Statistics Sweden (2019) “Pizza makers have largest share of foreign born persons”, Statistical news from Statistics Sweden, 7 March
  12. Statistics Sweden (2020) Yrkesregistret med yrkesstatistik 2018, Yrkesstrukturen i Sverige, The Swedish Occupational Register with statistics 2018, March
  13. Swedish Government (2018) “Framtidens äldreomsorg – en nationell kvalitetsplan”, Regeringens skrivelse, 2017/18: 280, 20 June 2018.

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Hansen, Peo 2021. ‘The True Economics of Migration’ Discover Society: New Series 1 (1) https://doi.org/10.51428/dsoc.2021.01.0002

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The Quality of Empathy

Moushumi Bhowmik

I came to Ranajit Guha’s work only recently, late in my life. If I had been a first year at university then my teachers and peers would tell me what to read and how to read him. Now I must seek assistance in writings on Guha, from his readers, scholars and critics; in interviews and reminiscences.

The good thing about coming so late to someone’s work, especially to work as vast and deep as an ocean, is that by now I have a measure of my own self, I know that I have not learned to swim and I can’t even stay afloat, but barely dip my ankles in the water. I also know a thing or two about what I can take home after hours of sitting by the shore; some sand sticks to my feet, that I must  dust off before walking in through the door. But I keep with me the sights of the rising waves I have seen and their sound as they come crashing, ships which cross the horizon, small fishing boats, even drowning people I was unable to save.

It is with such sounds and sights and feelings that I tried to loosely sketch an impression of Ranajit Guha, translating what I have understood to be some of his lifelong concerns and questions, into song.   

On 20 October 2023, when we had gathered at the University of Sussex to remember Ranajit Guha, two weeks of systematic destruction of life in Palestine had passed, following the 7 October bloody Hamas operation against Israeli occupation. Is there no daya left in our hearts? Where is the quality of empathy? There was an all-pervasive feeling of helplessness, even on the faces of those who were courageously marching to stop the killing spree. 

Around 2008, Ranajit Guha had started to write a Bengali book entitled Daya: Rammohan Roy O Amader Adhunikata (Empathy/Compassion: Rammohan Roy and Our Modernity) which was first published in 2010. 

‘We easily forget’, he wrote in its Prelude, which he subtitled ‘The Victory of Cruelty’. ‘If we couldn’t forget, then perhaps our very existence would be unbearable under the weight of remembrance. So, we need to forget. Even to those who witnessed Partition [of India] in their childhood and youth, that experience has faded now as [the colours and details] in an old scroll painting. The dust of Mahakal (Endless Time) falls on the past and everything fades away. Dust has begun to settle on the communal frenzy in Gujarat which happened barely seven or eight years ago. Which is why millions of people are unable to see in their minds’ eyes what they had actually seen. However, we know that the discipline of history and forgetting are sworn enemies. Hence, with my belief in justice [attainable through remembrance], I have picked up my pen to write about a much older time, to remind ourselves of 2002. [Lest we forget.]’ (Guha, 2021: 13; translation mine). 

‘Daya diye hobe go mor jiban dhute/Noile ki aar parbo tomar charan chhnute‘ (I must wash my life with daya/ How else can I touch your feet?) Rabindranath Tagore’s 1910 song rang in my ears. Ranajit Guha wrote extensively on Tagore and I wonder if this was one his favourite songs? His student, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, wrote after his death that in writing only in Bangla/ Bengali during the last decades of his life, Ranajit da was ‘returning home’.  In her memoirs Danube, Ganges, and Other Life Streams, Methchild Guha wrote: ‘Ranajit and I discussed many times what our roots were. He feels rooted in Bengali language and culture irrespective of where he lives, and, believing it crucial to maintain this sense of identity, he kept pressing me to similarly acknowledge the culture and language that had formed me,’ (Guha, 2014: 49).  

The Bengal of Ranajit’s birth is where I have travelled over the past decades, listening to songs and stories and making recordings of what may be considered ‘small voices’ of history, with my machine and in my memory. But ‘small’, says who? In the pouring rain of the monsoon month of Sraban, the women of Barisal are singing songs to the snake goddess Manasa; the song rises above the sound of the rain, then it drowns, and rises again–one female voice leads, others repeat the lines. I have heard them and imagine that Ranajit had also heard such sounds when he was a small boy, for Barisal was his birthplace. Perhaps this was also the language and culture that had formed him? Why did he not write about these little things of his own history? 

Ranajit Guha ‘turned down all requests to write an autobiography,’ wrote Partha Chatterjee. ‘He even did not want to give any long interviews on his life and work. He would refuse saying, “It is not possible to write the truth about one’s own life. Whatever autobiographies you read, know that they are full of lies.”” (Chatterjee, 2023: 86) But for some reason he did give Partha Chatterjee a long interview on 1 and 2 July 2018 in his home in Purkersdorf on the edge of the Vienna Woods; he was 95 at the time. They talked about books he read as a boy, the library at home, his grandfather, teachers, early friendships, introduction to communist ideology, Tagore, Bankim, his comrades, literature, politics, history-writing, subaltern studies and so much more, but not much about the interior of his childhood home and other realms of feeling. The conversation is marked by the stark absence of voices of women. There was an externality in that conversation, such as there is in Bengali male intellectual addas.

How to listen to that absence? How to interpret it? In The Art of Listening, Les Back wrote about the need for deep sociological listening, which is ‘tied to the art of [‘thick’] description’. (Back, 2007: 21). We must be able to listen to both the presence and absence of sound.

It is interesting that Ranajit Guha had opened up in a different way during another conversation that he had with the Bastar folklorist Harihar Vaishnav in Canberra in 1991. The master dhokra or bell metal sculptor Jaydev Baghel of Chattisgarh was also present in the room, along with anthropologist Chris Gregory. Ranajit Guha was talking in Hindi and this translation by Pritha Banerjee is from a  special volume  dedicated to him which was published after his death by Anushtup in Kolkata, edited by Simool Sen. ‘I am a Dukkhabadi (I incline towards sorrow),’ Ranajit had said to Harihar Vaishnav. ‘I see both happiness as well as dejection. I have seen both. But I perceive a sense of remorse in the unprecedented fate of mankind. […]  But the battle must be waged. It doesn’t matter whether you triumph or fail. The struggle must go on.’

Vaishnav then asked him if there was any one incident he remembered which gave him both inspiration and pain?  ‘I don’t know about any specific event,’ Ranajit said, ‘but there is one that I can recall. You people are all young, born after Independence. There is one event before Independence that has left a mark on all people’s lives — British Rule. Before our independence, the era of British rule was an era of humiliation. I cannot begin to tell you how deeply humiliating the situation was. An Englishman had the power to come to this country and demean its own citizens. My childhood was situated within this corridor of humiliation. My family was an elite, upper class family in Bangladesh. We were big Hindu landowners. When I was a child, I saw peasants being thrashed with shoes by members of zamindari (landowning) families like mine. There was a farmer who lived near my house. He was older than me. I used to call him Dada. Although I belonged to a wealthy family, he brought coconuts for me. When he went fishing in the river, he used to take me along in his boat. I saw my uncle and his servants in our zamindari family pummel him with shoes. One day, he was heartbroken and left his home and the village. He thought my family was affectionate towards him. But they beat him with shoes – that was sheer insult! He left in a small boat. My young mind was affected by this. This agony occupied my mind since childhood. This is a short anecdote. It’s not political. It is empathy. It is sympathy. My discernment, my anger come from that place.’ 

I think it was a real political act on the part of Ranajit Guha to draw from the deep well of empathy and fight the battle ‘that must be waged’, throughout his long life. 

Here is a clip from my presentation at a memorial event for historian Ranajit Guha (1923-2023) at the University of Sussex on 20 October 2023. My presentation-performance was entitled ‘Some Small Voices of History: Listening after Ranajit Guha’. The composition I sing, first setting the context, is of the Bengali poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore, written in 1910.

References

Back, Les 2007. The Art of Listening (Oxford, New York: Berg)

Guha, Methchild 2014.  Danube, Ganges , and Other Life Streams  (New Delhi: Permanent Black)

Chatterjee, Partha ed. 2023 Ranajit Guha Sahityer Satya (Kolkata: Anushtup)

Guha, Ranajit 2021. Daya: Rammohan Roy O Amader Adhunikata (Kolkata: Adom)

Sen, Simool ed. 2023. Ranajit Guha Bishesh Sankhya (Kolkata: Anustup)

Moushumi Bhowmik is an Indian singer-songwriter, writer and researcher based in Kolkata.

Header Image Credit: The Travelling Archive

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Bhowmik, Moushumi 2024. ‘The Quality of Empathy’ Discover Society: New Series 4 (1):

Property and the Political Economy of Colonialism

Gurminder K Bhambra

Ranajit Guha, as set out so clearly in the other articles in this issue, was a complex man. He was at the University of Sussex for close on twenty years and is most well-known for work that he did at the end of that period; that is, his work on historiography and the setting up of Subaltern Studies. My own initial encounter with Guha’s work was through these very studies. In particular, I was taken with the way in which he used historiography to investigate the exclusion of the subaltern from the structure of academic disciplines and thereby revealed the parochial and partial nature of the histories produced. Here, I want to return to his earlier work; to his first book, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the idea of Permanent Settlement.

Guha had started work on this topic in the 1950s and it was published in 1963 by a French publisher around the time that Guha started as a lecturer at Sussex. By all accounts, Asa Briggs, then Dean of the Social Sciences, who would go on to become Vice Chancellor, had invited Guha to apply for the job on the basis of this work. Around the same time, Briggs was also involved in bringing the economic historian, Donald Winch, to Sussex. Winch’s first book, Classical Political Economy and the Colonies, was published two years after Guha’s and ostensibly dealt with similar themes. It was developed from his dissertation which dealt with ‘the optimal conditions for colonial economic development’ and was primarily focused on Britain’s settler colonies with only a brief discussion of India via the work of the Mills.

The overlap between their concerns is sufficient, however, for it to be a puzzle – at least ostensibly – as to why they never appeared to acknowledge the work of the other. Winch did reference Stokes’s The English Utilitarians and India, which had been published just prior to Guha’s book and with which it was often compared and addressed in tandem. One reason could be that provided by David Fieldhouse in his review of Winch’s book which notes that while Winch ‘is good on economic theory, … [he] is obviously less strong on colonial history’. However, this would be to point to an intellectual divergence that was confirmed only through Guha’s later work directly addressing the colonial context. A Rule of Property is as much focused on economic theory as is Winch’s text and I will discuss the implications of their similarity subsequently. First, to the text itself.  

A Rule of Property addresses the debates that took place between East India Company administrators in Bengal in the late eighteenth century around the status of land, how it was best to be managed, and the consequences of this for the possibility of colonial governance and deriving revenue over the longer term. The focus of the debates was the idea of a ‘permanent settlement’ or solution. The primary impetus was that a new way of organising the ownership of the land was required and that this would be best served by entrusting its care to ‘a class of native entrepreneurs who had solid interests in the land and were politically reliable’ (p9). That is, the proposals being debated were around establishing a right of private property in land. The security of landownership was deemed to be necessary for the creation of a sound administration.

It was acknowledged by the colonial administrators of the time that they held no good title to the land. Alexander Dow, for example, noted that while the provinces were held ‘in appearance, by a grant from the present emperor’, in reality, they were only maintained ‘by the right of arms’ (quoted in Guha p25). As such, what was necessary was to establish the legitimacy of dominion beyond that which was provided through the act of conquest. This was done by developing economic theories that saw the territory governed as if it were a Company estate. This estate could then be parcelled out to local zamindars who would come to own the land, permanently, as property and be made responsible for the payment of taxes on it, thus ensuring a steady stream of revenue for the colonial government. It was this separation of the right of ownership from the right to collect revenue that would establish the permanence of dominion.

Guha, impressively and rigorously – as Sanjay Subrahamyam notes in his obituary – ‘took apart the minutes, proposals and counterproposals that were presented and debated in the administrative councils of the time’. He set out their different economic premises – deriving from mercantilist, physiocratic, and classical political economy – and demonstrated that, despite their differences, they nonetheless shared a common political focus, establishing the permanence of orderly dominion. However, this political orientation, is much less a concern for Guha in A Rule of Property, rather, his focus is on the detail of the economic debates.

As an aside – as I was reading in preparation for this, I came across reference to a review of Guha’s book, by Sarvepalli Gopal, published in 1966, who regarded it primarily as an exercise in British intellectual history, with the implication being that it was therefore of little concern to historians of India. A Das Gupta similarly suggested that the book had little to do with India ‘because India existed beyond the thoughts of Englishmen’. Guha rebutted this critique in the 1981 preface to the second edition of his book (comment and critique took longer in the times before social media) by stating that if the historical origins of the concepts and theories underpinning the most important land reform introduced by the British in India, which led to the statute of permanent proprietary rights, wasn’t important to the study of Indian history, he didn’t know what would be. Nonetheless, there was something to the critique.

While the importance of Guha’s book appears clear, to me at least, I am interested in the place of colonial histories in the book, or, rather, their absence. It is obvious that Guha is not unaware of them and, given his subsequent work, he is alert to the relationship between power and knowledge in the construction of disciplines and the production of histories. So, what accounts for his failure to locate the discussions of the East India Company administrators within their colonial context and discuss the implications of their theories with regard to that? I suggest that this is where the overlap between Guha and Winch is perhaps more pertinent.

The illegitimacy of colonial rule may have been so obvious to Guha that it was regarded as otiose to even mention that this was the context in which he was working. However, another explanation could be that, as a Marxist – as he was then and later – he worked within a frame of political economy that regarded capitalism as the more significant historical moment. One whose unfolding through time and history had to be understood in its own terms.

In Guha’s presentation of the discussions that were happening among colonial administrators about how best to organise the ownership and distribution of the land under their control, there is no questioning of their right to do so. The act of conquest is seemingly naturalised and forms no part of the contextualisation of the subsequent discussions oriented to establishing a permanence of dominion. As Subrahmanyam notes, Guha also had very little to say about ‘the complex property regimes [of the Mughal period] that had been in place before Company rule’. Something that was not omitted by at least one of the administrators under discussion, Dublin-born Phillip Francis.

This flattening of history and elision of its complexities enables colonial conquest to be made subordinate in an account of political economy oriented around ideas of capitalist development. This is also enabled through the way in which the debates constructed Mughal rule as despotic or feudal, at the same time as establishing a neo-feudal settlement. The British established despotism in the provinces and then claimed that Oriental despotism was the reason that they were needed in order to bring progress and modernity to these benighted areas!

While Guha’s political commitment to Marxism shifted over time – with him coming to support the Maoist Naxalbari peasant movements in the 1970s – the refusal to consider colonialism as central to the emergence and development of capitalism perhaps blunted the force of his arguments. Even in the terms of his own book, A Rule of Property, the question of colonialism is central to the emergence of the very need, on the part of the colonial administrators themselves, for a Permanent Settlement and yet this context is relegated to a few paragraphs.

I remember giving a lecture that mentioned British colonial rule in India and a student coming up to me afterwards and asking, ‘but what were the British doing in India?’ ‘Well, quite,’ I replied.

What were the British doing in India? And under what authority were they seeking to determine the patterns of land ownership and distribution there? And further, how do their understandings of property in the colonial context continue to shape our understandings in the present and how are our contemporary understandings inadequate to the extent that we do not acknowledge the significance of colonialism to the emergence of the very idea of property?

Not taking colonial histories seriously in the development of economic ideas is a shared elision in the work of Guha and Winch. While their political orientations may well have been different – Winch identified strongly as working class, whereas Guha saw himself as belonging to the Third World – what they had in common was a failure to acknowledge the significance of colonial histories to the emergence of a global political economy.

Guha’s identification with the struggles of the peasantry in the 1970s no doubt went on to shape his reflections on history and historiography, even if he did not return to consider the implications for political economy. This was also a moment when, as Vinita Damodaran notes, postcolonial nationalism was beginning to devour its children. Fifty years on, as political figures in India seek to decolonize from the ‘double empire’, it would be a shame – to put it mildly – if postcolonial perspectives were mobilized in the turn to populist ethno-religious nationalism as opposed to being the counter to it. Guha’s political commitments would undoubtedly have been with the latter.

Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Historical Sociology at the University of Sussex. She is author of Connected Sociologies and the award-winning Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. She is also co-editor of Imperial Inequalities and co-author, with John Holmwood, of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory.

Header Image Credit: Book cover

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Bhambra, Gurminder K 2024. ‘Property and the Political Economy of Colonialism’ Discover Society: New Series 4 (1):

Ranajit Guha: An inspirational and challenging teacher

Adi Cooper

I had the opportunity to share my reflections regarding being taught by Ranajit Guha at an event at Sussex University celebrating his career on 20th October 2023. I have had, and continue to have, a very varied career – I am a long away from where I was in 1984 submitting my PhD on the tebhaga movement, the sharecroppers’ struggle that took place in Bengal in the late 1940s. I have worked in the charity sector, as a paramedic, as a qualified social worker, manager and senior leader in Adult Social Services. I continue to work in the specialist field of safeguarding adults in England. This may appear quite random but there is a connection between then and now. People requiring safeguarding are often the most marginalised and vulnerable in our society in England; sharecroppers were amongst the most oppressed and dispossessed in rural communities in Bengal.

Tebhaga

It is no exaggeration to say that Ranajit Guha changed my life; first in motivating me to undertake my degree in the School of African and Asian studies (AFRAS) in Sussex University, and then to undertake a PhD on sharecroppers’ struggles, particularly the tebhaga movement. In 1976, when I was choosing a subject for my PhD, no one had studied the tebhaga movement, which grew from a pre-history of peasant activism and was led by the Kisan Sabha, the peasant wing of the Communist Party of India.

Ranajit supported me to do my PhD in so many ways – significantly by advising me to do a PhD in the first place. I wanted to go to India after 3 years of studying Indian history and he said – ‘don’t go as a tourist but go as a scholar’, so I did. In Kolkata his connections sent me to the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences where I was supervised, befriended and supported by so many people through different networks, scholars and students. His name opened doors.

I had read – probably directed by Ranajit – Sunil Sen’s memoirs of being an activist in Dinajpur in the tebhaga movement. I wanted to know more: how, what, when and where the movement had taken place. I wanted to understand how marginalised and oppressed Bengali sharecroppers became the fighters, resisters, and activists in the tebhaga movement, demanding to keep a larger share of the crop, challenging the landlords and oppression in their lives. I wanted to record their history. I undertook conventional research and found written records in the Writers Building in Kolkata and government archives in Dhaka. I wanted to go beyond and behind these texts to find out from people who were still alive in the late 1970s what they remembered, and I was fortunate as so many people were able to tell me their stories.

I learnt Bengali before I left England and spent 2 years meeting and interviewing over 200 people who had been involved in the tebhaga struggles. I searched out people, followed up leads, used different networks to find them. I collected their memories, stories and songs. I spoke to so many different people, in towns and villages, young and old, men and women, in West Bengal and Bangladesh; landlords, sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, peasant activists and communists, including a Minister in the West Bengal CPM government. I travelled all over Bengal and then returned to England to write the PhD thesis. I tried to do justice to their experiences.

Studying the tebhaga movement was unconventional because it was about Bengal – both East and West Bengal, now Bangladesh and India. My privilege as foreign scholar was that I could do this, at that time, when local historians couldn’t cross the international border. This helped me with my own issues about being a white English woman doing this work. Local scholars assured me that in this way I could make a helpful contribution. In current discussions and debates about decolonising, I can frame this discomfort in a clearer way.

The post-colonial legacy of guilt haunted me even though my own family were immigrants to the UK, and anti-imperialists. They were communists. In this context I remember walking through some paddy fields with an interpreter (because my Bengali wasn’t adequate for understanding all the local dialects), in single file behind an elderly peasant activist who was walking ahead of us, whom I was going to interview, talking to himself. ‘What was he saying?’ The interpreter told me – ‘he was asking himself, ‘why has this English woman come all this way to speak to me. This because of international communism’. This has stayed with me for decades. There was some truth in his reflection because I had been brought up with an internationalist perspective in a communist family.

Studying in Sussex

Ranajit had been my tutor throughout my undergraduate course, as well as supervising my PhD. I had met him in 1972, arriving in Brighton after travelling overland from Pakistan. Coming back to Sussex I really wanted to know more about the history of the non-European world. A schoolfriend introduced me to Ranajit and I was inspired. I moved across to AFRAS and this changed the course of my life. University life in Sussex in the 1970s was very different to how I understand it might be now. Sussex had a radical reputation both academically and in terms of the student experience. The radical approach to learning was why I had applied to go there: the inter-disciplinary schools of studies and the more fluid approach to curriculum, with courses based on cross-cutting themes like ‘millenarian movements’, rather than historical periods. I was attracted to the radical political activism that Sussex was known for. I was already involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement, anti-Vietnam demos, school student radicalism in London. Sussex was perfect for me.

It was a privilege to be taught by Ranajit although I don’t think I recognised this at the time – you take for granted that your experience is normal when you are young and have little to compare it with. I have memories only of tutorials with 2 or 3 other students. Ranajit spoke about whatever the subject was – he was hugely knowledgeable, and there were discussions and debates. I remember him talking about the way in which Greek philosophers taught their students through discourse. So, his teaching methods did make sense. What was this like for students? Exciting and scary. Writing essays to explore ideas. Being pushed to think and consider different ways of thinking. Light bulb moments. Stimulating and intellectually challenging. Terrifying and I was always in awe of him. Our essays would be tightly critiqued with respect and ambition. Correcting our use of language. ‘Inspirational and challenging’ as I called this piece.

He was an intellectual giant – Anna (another student of Ranajit’s in the 1970s) reminded me that he learnt Gujarati to read Gandhi’s work. He referenced Marx, Lenin and Gramsci, structuralism and post structuralism, semiotics. We learnt how to deconstruct text – being able to read other stories from what was on the surface, to see through to what was behind and the stories that weren’t told. This was his biggest legacy. Anna reminded me of her arguments with him about feminism – would sexism fade away with capitalism as a relic of feudalism? And he always had the last word. Studying with Ranajit was never dull. He always went to what was most important – issues of justice and human rights, class analysis. He also said that history was the true and only worthwhile academic discipline. He was so astonishingly erudite; he would use literature and multiple cultural references; unapologetically an intellectual.

AFRAS had a very strong identity – we learnt about imperialism and post-colonialism from radical scholars. So different to history in school. It was a great place to be and learn. Ranajit was part of that – he had his own style and brilliance. Additionally, it was special but not unusual to be invited to academics’ homes to meet other students. I did feel privileged but a bit overwhelmed to meet the scholars that Ranajit brought together. It was helpful to know that there was a community of interest, in which he was the centre. The connections were helpful when I went to India and in validating what I was doing, which always felt niche and isolated, particularly when I was in England.

When I came back to England in 1979, I experienced serious culture shock on re-entry. Looking back, I think Ranajit’s high standards of scholarship and his critique of my writing triggered a writer’s block and I made the very difficult decision to change supervisor. I moved to work with Terry Byres at SOAS, who helped me through this. I completed my PhD on sharecroppers struggles and sharecropping in Bengal in 1930s and 1940s. It was published in Kolkata and part translated into Bengali and published in Bangladesh. I was driven to ensure that at least there was a record of what I had been able to find out. I owed it to all the people that I had met. Decades later I emailed Ranajit, prompted by Shireen Huq, a mutual friend who visited him in Austria (she also studied with Ranajit in the late 1970s). I said what I’d been doing over the many years and got a lovely response from Mechtild Guha; there was closure.

Remembering those years, I want to also reflect on our politics at that time. We were intellectually and academically applying a Marxist lens and critiquing it – so my PhD was about the economic history of sharecropping as a semi-feudal mode of production, as well as a political history of a peasant struggle. Ranajit introduced us to what was happening in Indian communism at the time, including the Naxalite struggles. This had significant personal resonance for me; coming from a communist family, as a child living through the 1950’s Cold War backlash of anti-communism, parents who had been deported from America due to McCarthyism. This was another connection. I had a tutor who could make some sense of that. Researching a peasant struggle led by communists was amazing on a personal level. I was in West Bengal when the CP(M) came to power after Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule: this was an extraordinary experience for me. All the hammer and sickle graffiti on the walls and communist red flags waved in demonstrations on the maidan. This was incredible for someone whose grandfather, a Polish tailor, had heard Lenin speak in Paris. In India and Bangladesh, my communist party family identity was an asset, not something to hide. People trusted and helped me in my research because of it. As the elderly peasant activist said – I had come to speak to him ‘because of international communism’.

Postscript/legacy – some final words

Looking back, I just feel very grateful to have had the experience of being taught and inspired by Ranajit. In subsequent decades I have randomly come across people who knew his work, so belatedly I have understood that during those years he was developing his subaltern studies approach. It is always such a surprise and a gift to have those conversations. I have continued to utilise the skills I learnt, and I have always maintained my values and commitment to supporting people who are most marginalised and excluded. For the last 15 years as a social work leader this has taken the form of transforming the ways vulnerable adults are safeguarding in England.

I ceased my academic career once my PhD was published, although have developed one in social work. But I have come back to this part of my life. An American professor sought me out a few years ago; I showed her the notebooks recording the interviews that had been kept in the loft, unopened for 25 years. She wrote a blog about the encounter. That was a key turning point. Subsequently Dr Layli Uddin contacted me and with her encouragement and support, I have been transcribing the interview notes. I want to place the transcripts in archives so others can access them, reflect, analyse, and learn from these stories.

This is also part of Ranajit’s lasting influence. I still believe that this work is so important – there is an ongoing interest in subaltern studies; in the histories of people, seen to be at the margins but really at the centre. There is so much richness in these recollections of their experiences, their memories. This is a legacy that I want to pass on to others. A legacy that wouldn’t exist, if not for Ranajit Guha.

References

Adrienne Cooper Sharecropping and Sharecropper’s Struggles in Bengal 1930-1950, K.P.Bagchi, Kolkata, 1988

Sunil Sen Agrarian Struggles in Bengal 1946-47 P.P.H. Delhi 1972

The full text of the presentation is in the upcoming volume:

Ranajit Guha (1923-2023): Bishesh Sankalan (Ranajit Guha (1923-2023): A Special Commemorative Collection). Edited by Sourav Chattopadhyay, Kolkata: Alochana Chakra, 2024. ISBN: 978-93-83208-15-9.

Adi Cooper OBE is a Visiting Professor at the University of Bedfordshire, Independent Chair of two Safeguarding Adults Boards in London and Adviser for safeguarding adults (Partners in Care and Heath). She is a Non-Executive Director of Social Work England. She also works as a safeguarding consultant and has published books and articles on safeguarding adults. She is a qualified social worker and worked in Adult Social Care for over 30 years, including as Director of Adult Social Services, Housing and Health for nine years. Her PhD thesis about the tebhaga movement was published in Kolkata on ‘sharecropping and sharecroppers struggles in Bengal 1930-50’ and she studied as an undergraduate and post-graduate with Ranajit Guha at Sussex University. Twitter @adi_coo

Header Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons (government open data licence, India)

TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:

Cooper, Adi 2024. ‘Ranajit Guha: An inspirational and challenging teacher’ Discover Society: New Series 4 (1):