Piketty and Nievas: Quantifying the White Man’s Burden While Pampering the White Man's Sentiments

A popular philosophical question delving into the complexities of reality and human perception goes roughly like this: “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody around to hear, does it make a sound?” When reformulated to align with how we tend to perceive (and ignore) reality in more modern times, the question could very well be: “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody around to document it in a standardized manner, did it really fall?” The tyranny of mainstream economics, coupled with the tyranny of metrics, has generally meant that national and global elites will acknowledge (or lean towards acknowledging) a claim or an argument, particularly one which challenges the status quo, only if it is numbered and quantified. This “metric fixation” of our time, among other things, is what many scholars have been vociferously critiquing over the past week after the Europe-based economist Thomas Piketty announced the publication of a new article providing additional quantitative proof for what people already know well: that “colonial extraction and unequal exchange have shaped two centuries of North-South inequality”. “While some of these facts [about North-South inequality] are relatively well-known at a general level,” Piketty and lead author Gastón Nievas do acknowledge in their paper, “the main novelty is that we are able to offer a systematic quantitative study.…”

Indeed as a general rule, novelty is a highly appreciated phenomenon in the scholarly world. The new global database which Piketty and colleagues have built up and maintained — World Historical Balance of Payments Database — powers their paper, and is available open access. New evidence and new interpretations frequently help us better understand the past and the present, provided, of course, that the novelty is genuine, the argumentation is robust, and authors generously acknowledge their scholarly debts. While the novelty of the database and the quantification it enables (including of the “invisible flows” of the world balance of payments) will surely make significant contributions to our understanding of world history, it is also true that fundamentally, Nievas and Piketty’s paper adds little new conceptually and intellectually to what we already know. For example, many users on Twitter/X were quick to point to earlier analyses and books on this theme, most inspired by Karl Marx’s eternally relevant ideas: e.g., Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade, Samir Amin’s Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The Twitter account of publisher Iskra Books, “specializing in original works of revolutionary theory, practice, and art”, shared a link to the Denmark Communist Working Group’s 1986 publication “Unequal Exchange and the Prospects of Socialism”. To quote scholar Sonali Dhanpal, while the Nievas-Piketty article is an important contribution, “what scholars are critically and rightly pointing to is the origins of these ideas and their use by Third World Marxists since the 70s.”

As a scholar deeply invested in better understanding global and regional inequalities through historical and public health lenses, Nievas and Piketty’s (not-new) arguments were tempting to me. On page 5 I found a helpful, succinct distillation of what they are trying to argue in the paper: “Unequal comparative development largely stems from unequal exchange, in the sense that a different set of trade rules and institutions could have led to a different pattern of comparative development, and could contribute to do so in the future.” Neatly delineated by commas, the above sentence deals with the present, the (counterfactual) past, and the future in each of its three clauses. This is great, and indeed relates to one of the most fundamental ideas one learns in historical training: i.e., contingency (often described as the opposite of inevitability). The authors are thus saying (reiterating, that is) that the patterns of development and underdevelopment we see in the world today were not inevitable, and are not based on a “natural” political economic evolution dictated by “inherent” merits and demerits of each set of peoples, but instead originate in the historical and contemporary “unequal exchange” between different peoples and regions. In fact, in a strong critique of modern global capitalist systems and market fundamentalism — despite not describing it in those words — the authors say-reiterate that “global economic relations appear to be characterized by persistent imbalances and power relations, rather than by self-correcting market mechanisms” [emphasis added].

“British soldiers during the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897" (Image source)

This is, however, the farthest the authors are willing to go in terms of a faithful analysis of what they are quantifying (which is saying something, because they won’t even write “power asymmetries”, just plain “power relations”). So here we have a lengthy paper by leading scholars, claiming to provide meticulous numerical measures of the global political economy including “the role of colonial transfers.. in the build-up of Europe’s foreign wealth”, but not once do we come across a robust, faithful description of colonial systems and the wealth “transfers” therein. The entire paper skips any mention, even passing or in the footnotes, of white supremacy, racism, colonial violence, exploitation, drain, stealing, and plunder. The authors’ justification for using the contextually meaningless term colonial transfers instead of a phrase like “colonial extraction” reads like an embarrassing capitulation to the selective insistence of Global North academia on being “neutral” and “unbiased”: “we prefer to use the less loaded term of ‘transfers’” [emphasis added]. Perhaps in anticipation of the flak this strange stance will elicit, the authors unhelpfully add: “it is clear that from a modern perspective this looks very much like colonial extraction” [emphasis added]– as if Global South people in the past never recognized European-perpetrated exploitation and extraction for what they were.

The authors’ clearly stated preference to hide or skip (whitewash?) basic realities and descriptors of colonial history, in a paper from a social sciences discipline that deals with major aspects of said history, is not a trivial decision and comes with dire scholarly implications. Just as one can’t write a meaningful academic paper discussing the economics of Europe’s Industrial Revolution by jettisoning terms like efficiency and productivity which define that historical period, one cannot write a meaningful thesis on inequalities during colonialism by invisibilizing the exploitation and the plunder which defined that period. Indeed the term “invisible” does a lot of work in the Nievas-Piketty paper. While on the one hand the authors rightly take credit for the importance of quantifying the many ways, apart from the “visible” trade route, in which European powers extracted resources from the South, the way they define these “invisible flows” — “trade in income, foreign income and foreign transfers” — will give most readers no clue about the sheer greed and corruption that was involved.

If my reading is right, then the term “foreign transfers”, which is further described as “including private remittances and various forms of public transfers” is the concept in this paper that deals with what many of us associate European colonialism with: the stolen wealth and treasures from around the world which ended up either in private possession or on public display in different European countries (think about the Kohinoor diamond and the museum scene in Black Panther (2018)). Corruption was rife among colonial officials, many of whom misappropriated money, commodities, art pieces, precious documents, treasures, etc and brought them to Europe. Lumping together under a lackluster term like “foreign transfers” the myriad and ingeniously corrupt ways in which Europeans drained away wealth from the South to the North, does a disservice to anyone who is reading this paper to gain a sharper understanding of “unequal exchange” in the colonial past. The closest that the authors come to even a vaguely faithful description of what they label “foreign transfers” is in a footnote (footnote no. 15), where they summarize the major arguments of India-based scholars like AK Banerji, Utsa Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik, and Aditya Mukherjee on “unrequited exports” among other things.

Insufficiently serious scholars (especially from disciplines like mainstream economics) might consider it “too radical”, but it is actually easy—and not just desirable—to write an economic analysis of the colonial period while simultaneously being faithful to the ground realities of colonial history. Take, for instance, one of the papers which Nievas and Piketty cite liberally in this essay: Pilar Nogues-Marco’s Measuring Colonial Extraction: The East India Company’s Rule and the Drain of Wealth (1757–1858). Note how the title itself mentions “extraction” and “drain of wealth”. The abstract goes many steps further: “I conclude that available figures lend empirical support to the Marxist interpretation… that colonialism generated a steady drain of wealth and that this drain was responsible for Indian famines, poverty, inequality, and economic retardation.” Nievas and Piketty completely refrain from mentioning Karl Marx and the “Marxist” inspiration behind most of the existing rich scholarship without which their paper would not exist. Moreover — and this will come as a big shock to many — there is no mention whatsoever of “capitalism” in the entire article, even though both colonialism and Thomas Piketty are intimately associated with that economic-cultural system!

The irony blossoms fully when one realizes that most of the scholars who have worked on quantifying the economics of colonialism have been categorical about emphasizing the direct relationship between the needs and demands of colonialism and capitalism. The first line of Nogues-Marco’s abstract, for instance, is: “This paper revisits the relationship between capitalism and colonialism by examining the case of British India under East India Company rule (1757–1858).” The primary argument of the Aditya Mukherjee essay that Nievas and Piketty cite, titled Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain, is that “the rise of capitalism in Europe was closely linked with Europe’s relationship with the rest of the world from about the 15th century.” There’s a more recent paper which Nievas and Piketty strangely do not cite, but which closely deals with the phenomenon of unequal exchange: Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 by Jason Hickel et al. The first two sentences of this article contain more accurate descriptors of the colonial North-South relationship than the entire Nievas-Piketty paper: e.g., “labour forcibly appropriated”, “exploitation”, “coercive”, and “enslavement and indenture”.

In the opinion of many scholars, including me, the tepid language and uninspiring historical analysis in this article reflect a reluctance on the authors’ part to “perceive” colonialism, as the Indian Marxian scholar Irfan Habib put it forty years ago, in the article Studying a Colonial Economy Without Perceiving Colonialism, when describing a similar tendency in many British historians. Or to borrow from Gurminder Bhambra’s general critique of Thomas Piketty’s work, some scholars are narrating inequality but eliding empire. It is like claiming to explain how a car engine works, but providing as explanation only a dramatic demonstration of inserting the key and turning the car on. Such endeavors are intellectually low-yield, even if they might be technically or mathematically rich. At the end of the day, the question we need to ask and answer is this: Are we interested in quantification because we are interested in assigning a numerical value to everything (“metric fixation”), or are we interested in quantification as an important, though not the only, way to better understand human and social experiences?

The answer to this question is doubly important because, in case one’s interests are primarily quantitative, then one’s comprehension of the concerned issues and one’s proposed recommendations and “solutions” will make little meaningful difference in people’s lives. As Ingrid H. Kvangraven said about the ideas that Nievas and Piketty propose to correct the global economic imbalances: “[This paper is an] Example of what happens when a mainstream economist discovers structural inequality (without ‘discovering’ the theories to explain it): very impressive empirical documentation of it + completely out-of-touch assumptions about how to fix it.”