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SIRAJ AHMED. The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India. Stanford: Stanford, 2012. Pp. x + 291. $80; $24.95 (paper).
The Stillbirth of Capital is looking for a fight. Its introduction begins by retelling two well-established, even orthodox historiographical stories-in order to prove that they are dead wrong. Mr. Ahmed's first target is the story that ''the Enlightenment provided European imperialism its intellectual foundation.'' According to this narrative, which Mr. Ahmed traces back to Frantz Fanon, Ranajit Guha, and Edward Said, that is to the founding figures of postcolonial and subaltern studies, the universal claims of the Enlightenment to understand human nature both parallel and underwrite the imperialistic ambitions of European states. Second, he attacks the even more fundamental story that ''capitalism is the basis of modernity,'' that is, the claim, advanced by Marxists and liberals alike, that capital unmoored from state power and political intervention becomes in the eighteenth century the engine of European economic development and social change.
Instead, Mr. Ahmed argues, the Enlightenment vision of European colonialism was profoundly critical. Far from being apologists for the violent global projection of European power in their time, figures such as Voltaire, Smith, Condorcet, and Kant saw their Enlightenment programs as alternatives to the incumbent world order: ''universal ideals tend to function as critical tools, not as historical realities or even as the telos towards which history necessarily tends.'' And this is because they realized something that, in Mr. Ahmed's telling, subsequent scholars have forgotten: that modernity did not begin with the...