From The Guardian:
In the mid-19th century Karl Marx claimed that European colonisers, though corrupt and violent, were the “unconscious tool of history” that would propel India and China into modernity. He described the backward “Asiatic mode of production”, defined by the absence of private ownership and the presence of a rigid, centralised form of government that prevents change and modernisation.
Such views prompted Edward Said to denounce Marx as an orientalist who had subsumed India and China into a narrative of human progress designed by and for Europeans. But nothing Marx said about Asia would ever be as influential or widely disseminated as the recent idea in the west that free-market capitalism has finally awakened India and China from their long Asiatic slumber.
If the rise of India and China seems dramatic, it is because not so long ago India appeared in the western imagination as a poor, backward and often violent nation. With its needy millions and Luddite communist regime, China seemed sunk even deeper into darkness. [Full text]
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