Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India

Book Description

Why were some countries able to build "developmental states" in the decades after World War II while others were not? Through a richly detailed examination of India's experience, Locked in Place argues that the critical factor was the reaction of domestic capitalists to the state-building project. During the 1950s and 1960s, India launched an extremely ambitious and highly regarded program of state-led development. But it soon became clear that the Indian state lacked the institutional capacity to carry out rapid industrialization. Drawing on newly available archival sources, Vivek Chibber mounts a forceful challenge to conventional arguments by showing that the insufficient state capacity stemmed mainly from Indian industrialists' massive campaign, in the years after Independence, against a strong developmental state.

Chibber contrasts India's experience with the success of a similar program of state-building in South Korea, where political elites managed to harness domestic capitalists to their agenda. He then develops a theory of the structural conditions that can account for the different reactions of Indian and Korean capitalists as rational responses to the distinct development models adopted in each country.

Provocative and marked by clarity of prose, this book is also the first historical study of India's post-colonial industrial strategy. Emphasizing the central role of capital in the state-building process, and restoring class analysis to the core of the political economy of development, Locked in Place is an innovative work of theoretical power that will interest development specialists, political scientists, and historians of the subcontinent.

Customer Reviews:

superb.......2005-02-22

The best book on the political economy of India to come out in a generation. LOCKED IN PLACE will become the standard that all other books on industrialization and state building in India.

It may look dull, but it is important.......2004-02-05

Vivek Chibber's book on the failures of industrialization is not one that most people are likely to read, even in the unlikely occurrence that they ever encountered it. Filled with such unenthralling topics as "nodal agencies", "the developmental state," "the developmental bourgeoisie," "state capacity," and with how to create more efficient and effective bureaucracies, it is not a book that is likely to attract most people's interest. And it is true that Chibber does not have a style that would bring these topics to life. Nevertheless this is a book that should not be ignored, because it deals with a very important topic. As everyone knows, many third world countries sought to industrialize in the post war period with the help of state intervention. India under the Congress Party was a particularly prominent example of the developmental state. As time went on this path was ultimately unsuccessful, and for the past two or three decades, the IMF and the World Bank have been encouraging private enterprise and free trade. According to the advocates of globalization, state encouraged industrialization is a failure. But there is a striking exception to the narrative of failure: South Korea. It is the value of Chibber's book that it explains why India was so much less successful than Korea.

One might think that the reason South Korea was so much more successful than its rivals was because it had a streamlined and efficient bureaucracy. But this is not necessarily the case: in the mid-eighties it required as many as 310 approvals and 312 documents before permission was granted to form a new industrial plant. One might think that the difference was the result of the strategy of industrialization. India, like many other countries, followed an import substitution industrialization (ISI), while South Korea followed an export-led industrialization (ELI). The difference here is not simply one between protectionism and free-trade: for a long time South Korea had its own system of tariffs to protect domestic industries. But an ELI path insured that Korean companies faced the pressures of foreign competitors, while an ISI path often resulted in domestic companies smugly idling in the fleshpots of assured markets. But Chibber shows that this is not the result of the cleverness of South Korean bureaucrats and the ideological blindness of Indian ones.

There were reasons why countries preferred ISI to ELI. For a start, industrial countries placed tariffs on industrial goods from developing countries in the fifties. American foreign aid put restrictions on exports during the fifties. So did many foreign companies. One Indian committee found in 1969 that 65% of the collaboration agreements it surveyed had export restrictions imposed by the foreign partner. Moreover, since export markets were competitive and risky and domestic markets safe and assured it was only rational for businesses to resist their governments' push for export drives, which in India and elsewhere they successfully did. Korea was different. It had the luck to be the place where Japan needed to outsource its light manufacturing, and this gave it the contacts and places for its own export drive in the sixties to be successful. Moreover this led to a crucial difference with India. Because the export markets were both competitive and profitable, companies would support the disciplinary measures the South Korean state imposed to assure that its aid worked. After all, if one company failed to do what it was supposed to, there would be another to do a better job of it. By contrast, in India under ISI, there was no such incentive. There was considerable support for getting state incentives, but there was stringent opposition to enforcing any disciplinary measures. And so Chibber details how Indian business' call for state planning in the forties was in fact a way to pre-empt more radical measures, that it was call for not socialism, but for capitalist planning. He discusses how they worked vigorously to take out any teeth in Indian planning legislation, and he also shows how the Congress party demobilized the labour movement, which could have served as a counterweight to Indian business. And he goes on to discuss how Indian business was able to thwart possible reforms in the fifties and sixties, and how Indira Gandhi's erratic patronage system undermined it once and for all. He also notes how Korean business eventually became powerful enough that they did not need the developmental state's restrictions, and so started to dismantle it. The result is a complex, well documented account, which should be read by all shallow advocates of globalization.

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Interesting theories

State Building and Late Development
David Waldner
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0801485754

Book Description

Why does state building sometimes promote economic growth and in other cases impede it? Through an analysis of political and economic development in four countries--Turkey, Syria, Korea, and Taiwan--this book explores the origins of political-economic institutions and the mechanisms connecting them to economic outcomes.

David Waldner extends our understanding of the political underpinnings of economic development by examining the origins of political coalitions on which states and their institutions depend. He first provides a political model of institutional change to analyze how elites build either cross-class or narrow coalitions, and he examines how these arrangements shape specific institutions: state-society relations, the nature of bureaucracy, fiscal structures, and patterns of economic intervention. He then links these institutions to economic outcomes through a bargaining model to explain why countries such as Korea and Taiwan have more effectively overcome the collective dilemmas that plague economic development than have others such as Turkey and Syria. The latter countries, he shows, lack institutional solutions to the problems that surround productivity growth.

The first book to compare political and economic development in these two regions, State Building and Late Development draws on, and contributes to, arguments from political sociology and political economy. Based on a rigorous research design, the work offers both a finely drawn comparison of development and a compellingly argued analysis of the character and consequences of "precocious Keynesianism," the implementation of Keynesian demand-stimulus policies in largely pre-industrial economies.

Customer Reviews:

Interesting theories.......2002-06-12

Having taken Comparative Politics 101 with Waldner at the University of Virginia, I have to say he is a very good lecturer. I didn't have to read this book for the class, but I picked it up anyways since I got interested in the topic of state building. His style of writing is good; he presents some very interesting theories here. A nice look at the differences between the discussed countries' institutions and the effects on the countries' conditions. Lots of research done. Pick it up if you feel you might be interested in the subject.

Book Description

This book is a close study of lawyers who practise occupational safety and health law in the United States, using detailed interview and survey data to explore the roles that lawyers have as representatives of companies, unions, and OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration). Placed in the context of evolving understandings of regulatory politics as a problem of public-private interaction and negotiation, the book argues that lawyers adapt to multiple roles in what prove to be highly complex settings. The core chapters examine stages of the administrative process where various groups attempt to shape the immediate outcomes and the development of OSHA law. These stages include administrative rulemaking, post-rulemaking litigation of government standards, regulatory enforcement, and compliance counseling by lawyers.

Book Description

Students of medicine and the life sciences will appreciate the special perspective of this invaluable study guide. It explains how physics principles and concepts apply in these particular fields, including more than 70 drawings and graphs to help students visualize, understand and remember the relationships. The hundreds of problems solved step-by-step also help boost learning and grades by reinforcing the ideas and aiding recall.

Customer Reviews:

Replete with errors........2001-03-30

A very poorly-compiled book. Spend the money to get a good textbook, or the Nova series physics review (for the MCAT), which is much better. Formulas are incorrect, calculations done wrong, etc. Will have you pulling your hair out. A waste of time.

Book Description

How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage. By transforming social relations, monetization contributed to the concepts of the universe as an impersonal system (fundamental to Presocratic philosophy) and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods, as found in tragedy.

Customer Reviews:

Intellectual honesty in question........2006-05-19

Richard Seaford, is a self professed anti-Zionist (read anti-Jewite), and his views on the monetary system should be viewed through a skeptical lens. He is the product of an imperialistic, hegemonic society - one that still imposes an Apartheid-like system of government in Northern Ireland and has made land grabs in places as far-flung as the Falklands (against the Argentinians), Gibraltar (against Spain), Anguilla (against descendents of the British slave trade) and in Australia and New Zealand (against native populations that have been virtually destroyed by British occupation). Yet, he is possessed of a high-handed, cynical hypocrisy in suggesting that Jews living in their ancestral homeland, instead of being ruled by the British (as they were until 1948) or being overrun by an Arab population drawn to economic accomplishments of Jewish pioneers in the late 1800's/early 1900's, are somehow worse than the "sun never sets on their Empire" British and that they are therefore deserving of an "academic boycott" (read, once again, anti-Semitic Jew-baiting in the tradition of the English massacre of Jews in York in 1190). Accordingly, whatever this man has to say about the Greeks is most likely tinged with his Anglo-centric view of the world (and an apparent belief that Greeks were more lily-white than their "darkie" Mediterranean Jewish neighbors). His notion that 6th century BCE greeks "invention" of monetization seems to fly in the face of the earlier-invented Jewish "shekel", widely used to help finance the Temple and also given in place of actual sacrifices for atonement-offerings, etc. His notion of Greek invention of Philosophy ignores the Hebrew scriptures, among which, Ecclesiastes (or Kohelet), is a prime piece of philosophical work. When he boycotts China (over Tibet), Britain (over N. Ireland, its aristocratic hierarchy and its numerous subjugations of peoples), Africa (over its lack of interest in Darfur), Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Palestinian Authority (over their funding of mass murder of noncombatant civilians and their ideology of woman-subjugation and murder of [...] people), et al., then I would consider that his concern with the plight of downtrodden "nations" is on the up and up and not a sham to cover his dislike of descendents of Jacob.

Book Description

From the time of his departure on February 16, 1863, to join the Union Army until he returned home on July 18, 1865, Louis N. Beaudry kept a detailed diary of the day-to-day events of the Fifth New York Cavalry. The unit was a participant in the Battle of Gettysburg, and Beaudry writes of it in great detail. As the unit's chaplain, Beaudry was very observant of those factors that influenced morale, such as fighting, disease, boredom, hunger and weather conditions; his diary is thus uniquely focused on the daily routine of the Fifth New York.

Book Description

This book is the first to trace the good and bad fortunes, over more than a century, of the earliest large free black community in the United States. Gary Nash shows how, from colonial times through the Revolution and into the turbulent 1830s, blacks in the City of Brotherly Love struggled to shape a family life, gain occupational competence, organize churches, establish neighborhoods and social networks, advance cultural institutions, educate their children in schools, forge a political consciousness, and train black leaders who would help abolish slavery. These early generations of urban blacks--many of them newly emancipated--constructed a rich and varied community life.

Nash's account includes elements of both poignant triumph and profound tragedy. Keeping in focus both the internal life of the black community and race relations in Philadelphia generally, he portrays first the remarkable vibrancy of black institution-building, ordinary life, and relatively amicable race relations, and then rising racial antagonism. The promise of a racially harmonious society that took form in the postrevolutionary era, involving the integration into the white republic of African people brutalized under slavery, was ultimately unfulfilled. Such hopes collapsed amid racial conflict and intensifying racial discrimination by the 1820s. This failure of the great and much-watched "Philadelphia experiment" prefigured the course of race relations in America in our own century, an enduringly tragic part of this country's past.

Customer Reviews:

An Excellent, Highly Readable Overview.......2007-02-05

Researching life in Philadelphia in the 1790's, I was looking for a concentrated source that would give an overview of the role of African-Americans in the city, and ran across this book. It was exactly right. It provides a concise overview of the origins of the African-American population, the various social classes, the leaders and dynamics of the community, and the relevant historical and social developments. I am not a scholar in this period, but the book appears to be well-researched, with numerous references to statistics and primary source materials. This is no dry statistical tome, however; It also provides lots of meaty details about the lives and views of particular individuals, both African-American and White, who are part of the overall story. It is well-footnoted, for those who want to trace the documentation or sources further. It is just what the title promises, and highly readable to boot.

Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community 1720-1840

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Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community 1720-1840
Gary B Nash
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NPR5BO

Average customer rating:

Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840
Gary B. Nash
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000J1515E

Book Description

Nearly everyone knows the names of the great scientists, but how many of us know anything about their work, let alone their private lives? In this easy-to-read series, eminent science writers John and Mary Gribbin look at the lives and work of eight major scientists; each book is accessible enough to be read for fun but informative enough to appeal to students of science. The iconic Albert Einstein emerges as a dashing ladies' man and the greatest scientist of his time; but why did Charles Darwin wait for decades before going public with his ideas on evolution? How was Marie Curie's great work shaped by her childhood experiences of oppression under the Czars? And what was Edmond Halley, of comet fame, doing as Captain of a King's Ship and later spy for the Crown? We meet a bookbinder's apprentice, an obscure monk, a Victorian gentleman--eventually famous scientists all. An introduction and afterword places each scientist's work in the context of the development of their subject, but in accordance with their true worth, not necessarily in accordance with their place in popular mythology. Engaging, stimulating, and instructive

Customer Reviews:

Useful text.......1999-01-07

This edited volume brings together numerous noted international relations theorists on the challenging issues of regime formation, the role of science, and the role of values. Seas tie the articles together but the real contributions are theoretical.

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