In contrary to the statement, that Marx had only limited and outdated information on Indian society, a position you obviously agree with, we determined, that Marx had read most of the recently published books on India. His excerpts and some quotes in the articles show, that he had worked on:
Campbell, George; „Modern India: A Sketch of the System of Civil Government“, 1852
Chapman, John; “The Cotton and Commerce of India, considered in Relation to the Interests of Great Britain; with remarks on Railway Communication in the Bombay Presidency”, 1851
Dickson, John; “The Government of India under a Bureaucracy”, 1853
Mill, James; “The history of British India”, 1826 Murray, Hugh; Wilson, James; “Historical and descriptive Account of British India etc.”, Edinburgh, 1832
MacCulloch, J.R.; “The Literature of Political Economy”, 1845 - (Source: footnotes from MECW Volume 12, No.127)
I am not sure whether these citations invalidate my claim that Marx was lacking the kind of information that would have prevented him from writing such obviously one-sided formulations:
"We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow."
The British Rule in India, New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853
After all, the above-cited J.R. MacCulloch was described by Marx in the Grundrisse as a 'past master in pretentious cretinism', 'at once the vulgarizer of Ricardian economics and the most pitiful image of its dissolution'.
As for James Mill, perhaps the less said the better. Well, maybe a few words are in order. Mill believed that India, China and Japan needed enlightenment and progress in the utilitarian sense. He states in "The History of British India" that "even to Voltaire, a keen-eyed and sceptical judge, the Chinese, of almost all nations, are the objects of the loudest and most unqualified praise." The spread of European, and British in particular, rule would bring "glorious results" for the whole of Asia, described rather infelicitously as "that vast proportion of the earth, which, even in its most favoured parts, has been in all ages condemned to semi-barbarism, and the miseries of despotic power."
When the question of independence for India came up, Mill argued, "whatever may be our sense of the difficulties into which we have brought ourselves, by the improvident assumption of such a dominion, we earnestly hope, for the sake of the natives, that it will not be found necessary to leave them to their own direction".
Not to belabor the point, it seems that all that was wrong in Marx's Tribune articles on India was a function of reading nonsense like this. Years later, especially in an aside with the Russian Danielson, Marx dispensed with any notions of Great Britain's civilizing mission in India, and simply described it--accurately--as thievery.
To describe Marx’s view on British colonialism as “enthusiasm” is contradicted by his articles. You even quoted some of the passages yourself. If Marx was enthusiastic about anything, than it was changing conditions of the opportunity for something new.
But that's the problem. His enthusiasm for railroads, telegraphs, etc. was a reflection of an inadequate understanding of how and why they would be used in a place like India or Argentina, for that matter. Here is what Frederic Clairmont wrote in "The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism", The Other India Press, Goa, India, 1995). It tends to deflate the sort of expectations that were found in the Tribune articles:
>>It is one of the banalities of liberal economic thought to consider private international foreign investments as a polarizing agent in the industrialization process of the recipient country; but the illusion that foreign investment in railways would, under all conditions, usher in a new period of industrialization was also shared by the founders of Marxism. In one of his letters to Engels, Marx maintained that the British conquest of India should be seen as part of a historically progressive force, and that the British occupant was "the unconscious tool of history."
"England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question," he continued. "The question is: can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution."
To him, the harbinger of this "British Revolution" in India was, of course, the railway, for once this was introduced the dialectical process of industrial inevitability became operative. Given the availability of strategic resources, industrialization was irresistible once railways were laid.
It is surprising to find a League of Nations economist repeating the Marxist fallacy. The inflow of capital for the development of other activities stimulates industrialization. "If foreign capital is engaged, for instance, in building a railway intended to carry agricultural exports, those employed in the construction and later in railway transportation and agriculture will exercise a demand from which domestic manufacturing will profit; the railway will also serve the transportation of domestic manufactured goods; and will release domestic savings for investment in manufacturing." ["Industrialization and Foreign Trade, 1945, p. 67]
The story of the Indian railways, within the context of economic policies of the British raj reveals the fragility of such a generalization, and justifies Jenk's contention that "railroad building in India did not give rise to a flood of satellite innovations, and it destroyed more occupational opportunities than it opened up." [Journal of Economic History, December 1944]
It is true that the "iron horse" contributed immensely towards the opening up of the American and Canadian West and their later remarkable growth. The same is true of France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Railway construction in Japan after the Meiji restoration of 1868, under the impetus of state initiative, was a potent factor in Japanese growth. Nevertheless, it does not follow that the establishment of communications networks must *inevitably* lead to industrialization.
In certain cases it may even retard balanced growth, as both India, China and certain parts of Africa and Latin America have demonstrated. In the last analysis, it would appear that the ancillary effects of railway construction depends on the socio-political and economic background of railway policy: the objectives and interests it intends to serve.
Railway financing on the London money market did not create enhanced possibilities for the risk-taking creative "dynamic entrepreneur" in the Schumpertian sense of the word nor did it induce new metallurgical construction or the training of technicians and engineers, so intimately tied up with the development of a railway network. This last point is of vital importance, being equally applicable to other countries which nave absorbed vast inputs of foreign capital. The Actworth Railway Committee of 1921 reported the absence of native trained personnel. Of 710,000 persons employed by the Indian railways, 700,000 were Indians and only 7,000 or 1% Europeans. "But the 7,000 were like a thin film of oil on the top of a glass of water, resting upon but hardly mixing with the 700,000 below. None of the highest posts are occupied by Indians; very few even of the higher." [Actworth Report, London 1921]<<
In you mail you state Marx’s understanding was a “need for capitalist transformation of all precapitalist social formations”. That suggests a general view on historic development, that is independent from specific local economic and social conditions. But Marx has always linked his evaluations to specific conditions. It wasn’t for no reason, that he explicitly limited his statements on the need for capitalist transformation to western Europe. Eastern European or Asian economic and social formations are treated differently.
Are they? If so, then the claim that "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future" in the Preface to V. 1 of Capital (1867 German Edition) needs to be seen rather critically. In fact, Marx did come to the understanding you describe, but rather late in life and within the context of Russia, where he specifically repudiated the sort of stagism that was implicit in the 1867 preface to Capital.
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