The Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital  by  Amiya Kumar Bagchi

(Lanham, Maryland, USA : cheap cigarettes Rowman and Littlefield , 2005)

In this innovative and ambitious global history, Amiya Kumar Bagchi critically analyzes the processes leading to the rise of the West since the sixteenth century to its current position as the most prosperous and powerful group of nations in the world. Integrating the history of armed conflict with the history of competition for trade, investment, and markets, Bagchi explores the human consequences for people both within and outside the region. He characterizes the emergence and operation of capitalism as a system driven by wars over resources and markets rather than one that genuinely operates on the principle of free markets. In tracing this history, he also charts what happened to the people who came under its sway during the last five centuries.

Bagchi thus broadens our understanding of the nature and history of capitalism and challenges the fetishism of commodities that limits the perspective of most economic historians. The book also challenges the Eurocentrism that still underlies the conceptual framework of many mainstream historians, joining earlier narratives that chronicle the history of human beings as living persons rather than as puppets serving the abstract cause of "economic growth."

His unflinching examination of the human costs of development-not only in the colonial periphery but in the core nations-includes not only economic processes and issues of inequality within and among nations, but also the intertwining of economics and war-making on a world scale. The book also contributes to our knowledge of how and in what sequence human health has been shaped by public healthcare, sanitation, modern medicine, income levels and nutrition. Perilous Passage will change the ways in which we think about many of the largest issues in world history and development.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

Offers a true global history that fully explores the developing world.

The first book to bring together the history of human development and survival, not only in Europe but also in major non-European countries such as China, India, and Japan.

Presents a distinctive narrative of changes in the human condition by connecting them to socioeconomic changes and alterations in military-political balances across countries and continents

Utilizes major advances in the historiography of countries like China, India, and Japan—scholarship that is often overlooked by Western historians

Provides a new interpretation of flows of migrants and investment across the world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century

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