Prosperity & Violence: The Political Economy of Development (Norton Series in World Politics (Paperback))

Excellent, arrived on time and as described

no marks or anything

In his book, Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development, Robert Bates examines how underdeveloped societies transform from rural and agrarian to urban and industrial. Exploring the vast history of the modern state, Bates draws on numerous case studies to formulate a general theory that explains how societies make this great transformation. Central to his argument is the link between prosperity and violence. Perhaps no different from many scholars of development, he contends that agrarian societies face a debilitating cycle where prosperity begets violence which further restricts prosperity. Thus, we would assume that these societies are doomed to stagnation. But if this is so, how might developed industrial societies have come about? One may expect that the solution exists in somehow driving a wrench in the cycle and eliminating the encumbering violence. But Bates takes an unusual perspective and offers an unexpected and fascinating explanation. He argues that in order for societies to develop successfully, they must embrace their propensity for violence and use it to their own advantage. By domesticating coercion to cultivate investments and encourage economic growth, societies utilize violence to overcome stagnation and ultimately transform themselves into prosperous developing states.To understand development, Bates first explores what causes its failure. He begins by examining societies that are predominately agrarian, rural, and dominated by kinship. These kinship societies invest in migration and expansion to control new resources and overcome diminishing returns. They specialize in production, form markets, and engage in exchange. They manage the risks of nature by diversification and reliance on family support. They devise means to promote family welfare and to raise the expected level of income per capita. Economically, these societies have the ingredients for prosperity and development. However they are often characterized by poverty. So, why do they fail?The answer, Bates claims, is in the penchant for violence and a particular formation of political institutions. Violence takes root in agrarian societies and instills fear amongst the people. Eventually this fear lends to the formation of a political system that survives on deterrence. To illustrate this point, Bates draws on the Nuer of Southern Sudan. The Nuer lacked formal institutions such as a court, a functioning police system, or any inkling of a central government. Although one might picture life as brutish and short in such a case, they actually maintained relative harmony. The reason was simple: everyone was so darned afraid of everyone else. They didn't steal from one another for fear of fierce retaliation. And because the Nuer were so inclined to act violently at the slightest provocation, violence rarely occurred. Peace was maintained, but it was fickle and came at a cost of prosperity. Those within such a society become so concerned with protecting themselves that they easily prefer being destitute over the risk of acquiring wealth. Inevitably, the system thwarts production and progress, and society becomes indolent. The result is stagnation and poverty. And thus, as Bates explains, these agrarian societies fail to develop and never make it to the great transformation.In contrast, the second half of the book focuses on how these societies manage to overcome the obstacle of violence that blocks the path to development. Bates' answer is seemingly simple and yet strangely intuitive. He contends that violence (or more appropriately, coercion) needs to be tamed by the state and publicly provisioned rather than privately provided. Unlike agrarian societies that use coercion as a means of predation, industrial societies find a way to successfully distribute such force so as to promote economic growth. Specialists in violence emerge who learn to invest their power in those that efficiently produce capital. As in the case with medieval monarchies, rulers voluntarily delegated authority to citizens to govern their own affairs. Such liberties allowed people to build economic organizations as well as towns to expand and flourish. In agrarian societies, political force effectively suffocates economic prosperity, whereas in industrialized societies, political force works to promote economic prosperity. The point is clear, this alignment of politics and economics is essential to a society's development.Bates supports his argument through a plethora of historical and modern applications. Each assumption seems to be supported by at least a tid-bit of evidence from the past. However, I cannot help but question the details. His argument is generalized to span across ages, but he seems to pick and choose the subject matter to stand up to his test. The theory appears robust, but I would have liked to have seen more evidence, data perhaps, that further called on cases of agrarian and industrial societies. Would the theory still hold?Other than that, Robert Bates presents a tantalizing argument that departs from the usual approach for interpreting development. He effectively links economic prosperity with political violence in an analysis that should shake the field.

Had he come of age in Uganda in the early 1980s, would Thomas Hobbes have written Leviathan in the same way as the classic work of political theory he penned in the aftermath of the English civil war more than three centuries earlier? For Robert Bates the answer is an affirmative one. That he can make such a claim is both the strength and weakness of his slim, provocative volume on the political economy of development.The book's subject is the politics and economics of what Karl Polanyi (1944) described as "the great transformation," that is, the movement of societies from village to city, from agriculture to industry. Bates seeks to explain variation in the extent to which different countries have experienced this transformation. In his account this structural change is essentially the story of development, which consists of two primary elements. First, it includes an economic dimension, which refers to the growth of per capita incomes in a society. Second, development has a political dimension, which implies the "domestication of violence" for productive rather than predatory social ends. The interplay of these two themes--prosperity and violence--animates Bates's exploration of the historical and contemporary experiences of developing societies.Although he may overstate the novelty of his approach, unlike many studies in the contemporary field of development, this analysis centers on comparison of the political-economic trajectories of countries in different periods of history. The core of the book is organized around a quartet of chapters that cover different aspects of the development process. These chapters proceed sequentially to analyze agrarian societies, the formation of states, state formation in the modern era, and shocks to the global system at the end of the 20th century. This historical approach risks repeating the mistakes of more naïve versions of modernization theory, which assume that societies move through specific stages to reach a kind of "development" that looks suspiciously like contemporary US or Western European liberal democracies. However, Bates avoids this by identifying both commonalties and differences between the experience of societies historically in Europe and those struggling to develop in the contemporary world.His basic argument is that differences in the structure and use of coercion explain differences in development, both historically and today. Explanation unfolds as follows. As agrarian societies, which are dominated by the institution of family, expand they make economic gains. These gains require protection. Protection in such societies is supplied privately through existing kinship institutions; it can be effective, but it is also fragile because the behaviors and beliefs that supply peace also encourage behavior, such as honor-bound retaliation, that increases the likelihood of violence. Perversely, people may thus try to avoid the costs of violence by choosing limit their economic activities, trapping them between peace and prosperity. In the formation of the modern state in Europe, Bates sees the advent of "political forces that break the fetters limiting development in agrarian societies" (p. 49). Expanding population and the rise of towns generated new income, but also increased conflict. Specialists in violence needed funds to fight their wars and the victors allied their political force with the economic machinery of specific towns and larger territories. The result of this alliance, Bates contends, was a new mutually reinforcing political-economic order in which violence was "tamed"-- reorganized from kinship groups to kingdoms and early states--to enhance the productive use of society's resources.This describes "classical" development in the case of Europe, but it is insufficient to explain development and underdevelopment in the post-World War II period. Like dependency theorists and many other observers, Bates argues that development in this "modern era" is different in that states that developed earlier dominate in the international system. Unlike such theorists, however, he does not concur that the relative weakness of developing countries accounts for their economic policy choices. Instead, the failure of many countries to develop can be located in the structure of the interstate system, which did not provide incentives for many countries to fortify their political economies by securing finances from their citizens in exchange for protection. The military threat they faced was less and external sources of revenue were often available, so the governments of such countries did not feel compelled to develop the liberal political institutions conducive to development. The debt crisis of the 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union provide further explanation of differential patterns of development. These twin shocks, Bates argues, removed the props that had supported political order in the "fictive states of the developing world" (p. 100), thus inhibiting economic growth.Bates's ability to distill a concise argument about development from complex political and economic histories in Europe, Africa, and Latin America is impressive and largely compelling. But the level of simplification he achieves risks glossing over important aspects of the story, including those that might undermine his argument. For example, he skips over whole period of colonialism, the effects of which are largely absent from his account. In his quest for parsimony he also neglects the experience of the Americas, including the US. These countries generally gained independence well before the "modern" period the book addresses and thus may pose a challenge to his argument. Finally, even as he digs into the dirty reality of power and violence that he views as either underpinning or undermining prosperity, one still has the sense of development as a more or less rational unfolding of ever more felicitous political institutions. A finer-grained account might have strengthened his overall argument by also describing the unintended consequences, strange historical breaks, and uncertainty that must have characterized at least some aspects of historical processes of (under)development.In the last pages of the book Bates recounts how he turns to Hobbes in trying to make sense of the political and economic situation he confronted in Uganda as an advisor for the World Bank in the early 1980s. He juxtaposes the terms of the World Bank Mission to that country and the famous paragraph in Hobbes' Leviathan that ends with "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Such a broad-brush approach that sees equivalence in social contexts separated by more than 300 years and nearly 3000 miles will not appeal to everyone. It certainly leaves gaps. But whether one ultimately agrees with the approach, Bates has written a highly readable, thought-provoking book that should be of interest to a wide audience concerned with understanding the tangled political-economic roots of development.

Good anaylsis

The narrative of this book has aged badly and it's also very uninteresting. Maybe 20 percent of the book is worth the time it takes to read.