So this is how we did it – how we survived capitalism while retaining our humanity more or less intact. Capitalism is inevitable, to be sure, and it is unsurpassed in its ability to bring economic prosperity to individuals and societies, and economic prosperity in turn is associated with a long range of highly attractive social goods. Yet as the previous chapters have demonstrated, the expansion of markets also has a number of profoundly unsettling effects. We discussed two in particular – the alienation brought on by the division of labour and the erosion of values brought on by commodification. We are consequently faced with a conflict of imperatives. Since markets are beneficial, we want to extend them ever further, yet because they are also destructive, we want to restrict them. The question is not how capitalism can be replaced by some other kind of system – the question is how we can work out a solution to this dilemma.

As our overview has made clear, there are a large number of solutions here and they vary considerably from one society to the next. The problem is how to summarize this diversity, but also how to explain the pattern that emerges. The obvious answer – indeed, the one that seems to be implied by much of our discussion – is that protective arrangements are the products of the ‘traditions’ or the ‘culture’ of each society concerned.

Associations, we said above, occupy an intermediary position in social life. Associations are located somewhere between the state and the family, in a world which at the same time is both public and private. This intermediary position is what gives them their unique characteristics. They have far more power over their environment than families, and they are also more robust since they are governed to a larger extent by rules than by the actions and reactions of individuals. By becoming a member of an association we escape the narrow confines of family life and learn to act together with others in the pursuit of common goals. Here were are all ‘brothers’, ‘sisters’, ‘comrades’ and ‘mates’. And yet, as we have pointed out, associations have authority structures of their own. Just like the home itself these homes-away-fromhome have their own ways of manipulating us. Who is protected and on what terms is ultimately a political matter – that is to say, a matter of power.

Europe has experienced three great waves of association-formation corresponding roughly to three great spurts in the development of markets. The first wave took place when money was reintroduced after the eleventh century and markets first began expanding. The second wave came with the great upsurge in trade after the sixteenth century. The third wave, associated with industrialization and the unleashing of laissez-faire economics, happened in the nineteenth century.

It is instructive to compare European families with families in China. Obviously, many of the same caveats apply. When it comes to its structure and the actual living conditions, there is every bit as much variation between Chinese families as there are between European. And yet in China too there was an idea of the family. In fact, the idea of the family was stronger and more explicitly spelled out here than in Europe. In China the family was the primary source of material, emotional and social support, but it was also a political and even a religious institution. The primacy of the family was manifested in legal practices which turned families rather than individuals into property owners, and which held families legally responsible for the actions of their members. In the eyes of the law as well as its members, it was the family and not the individual that constituted the basic building block of social life.

However, the Chinese family can also be understood as a protective arrangement. Capitalism developed early in China - far earlier, in fact, than in Europe – already by the fifth century BCE there were large and well-functioning markets in a long range of consumer goods. As early as in the Han dynasty – 206 BCE to 221 CE – China produced as much cast iron as Europe would in 1750 CE, and during the Song dynasty – 960 to 1279 – manufacturing really took off.

In the early 1860s, with the Mutiny still fresh in memory, British officers serving in the west and the centre of the subcontinent rediscovered princely India as a colonial frontier. This was, in fact, the discovery of overlapping frontiers — a geographic periphery, a cultural backwater and a political area of darkness. Each was remarked for conquest, and the instruments and sites of confrontation evolved over the following decades. Alongside the post-1858 durbar that McLeod, Ramusack and others have characterized as a new boundary between princely and British India, colonial administrators oversaw a network of educational institutions for the children of the princes. These schools — the Chiefs' Colleges, the Imperial Cadet Corps, relatively modest institutions for modest relatives, experiments in guardianship and tutoring — highlighted childhood itself as a live border in colonial India. The male child at the centre of these institutions was the point of entry into the adult world of political calculations, through which British viceroys, political agents and principals sought to bring about a more reassuring and pleasing colonial order.

The aristocratic native child did not enter these schools fully formed; his childhood, aristocracy and nature were all revealed by the school. This revelation could take place only within a set of experiments in institutional, political and racial order. The very act of revelation, therefore, indicated conquest and order, including possible and even impossible orders.

In 1853, Charles Hathaway, Inspector General of Prisons in Punjab, wrote a memo to the provincial government outlining the problems posed by juvenile offenders. The system in place for the punishment of children, Hathaway wrote, was a dismal failure. Young vagrants and thieves drifted in and out of British-Indian jails, returning often and becoming progressively delinquent with each visit. Under such circumstances, the Inspector General asked, ‘how is his chance of reformation bettered?’

Hathaway's alarm illuminates an ideological and administrative crisis within the colonial reformatory, shortly after the passage of Act XIX of 1850 and long before the RS Acts and the Bayley-Napier debates. Due to the work of Arnold and Ernst, we are as familiar with the shortcomings of colonial modernity as Hathaway appears to have been. The colonial prison was not Bentham's Panopticon or even Ignatieff's Pentonville, and it would be unreasonable to expect the child inmate to become ‘a hostage in his own hands’. Nevertheless, taking their cue from Foucault, scholars of disciplining institutions have generally made two related points. One is that nineteenth-century modernity was optimistic about the possibility of managing disorderly populations by subjecting the individual offender to measured doses of discomfort. The other is that this modernity was marked by a steady, albeit incomplete, withdrawal from the deliberate infliction of physical injury.

At first glance a discussion of business corporations would seem to fit rather badly with the guilds, unions and sects examined in the previous chapter. Companies are run for profit, after all, and as such they have entirely different aims than those of these other, more altruistically-oriented organizations. And although this is undoubtedly true, private businesses are associations of a sort too. Just like guilds, unions and sects, they occupy an intermediary position in social life somewhere between the individual and the market. Companies are private in the sense that they are owned by private individuals, but they are simultaneously public in the sense that they are ‘PLCs’, companies publicly available on the stock market. Moreover, companies occupy an intermediary position also in the sense that they provide a way for individuals to leave their private spheres and work together with others in the pursuit of common goals. They are places where strangers become colleagues and friends.

The etymology of the word is revealing in this respect. ‘Corporation’ derives from corpus, the Latin for ‘body’, and in the Middle Ages the body in question consisted of partners who pooled their resources in order to be able to invest in some common project, above all in trade ventures overseas. By owning a part rather than the whole of a company, merchants were able to reduce their exposure to risk.

Between 1984 and 1994 Thailand was the country with the highest economic growth rate in the world – around 10 per cent annually. These were the years of the boom when Thailand was industrializing, urbanizing and modernizing at an astonishing speed. Asphalt was poured over rice paddies and concrete over tropical beaches; foreign companies located their assembly plants here, and international banks and hoteliers built skyscrapers. Pollution increased, occupational safety standards slipped, and new disparities in wealth made Thailand one of the most inegalitarian countries in the world.

The old pre-boom Thailand had been a far more quiet and more predictable place. It was a country of peasants run by a series of authoritarian, if never actually repressive, military regimes in cahoots with a small class of Chinese businessmen and a large class of hidebound civil servants. With close to 90 per cent of the population living in the countryside, farming completely dominated economic and social life. Agriculture was commercialized late, and in remote parts of the country such as the north-eastern region of Isaan subsistence farming lasted well into the 1960s. In the pre-boom years there was little in the way of manufacturing industry and no working-class. In fact, apart from the capital, there were not even any genuine cities.

Changes which in other countries took centuries to accomplish were thus in the case of Thailand dramatically compressed. In the span of a few short decades former subsistence farmers were exposed to the full force of global capitalism.

Given this long list of negative social consequences – and much more could have been said along the same lines – it is surprising that most people complain as little as they do. Given the high costs imposed by the continuous widening and deepening of markets, one would expect us to go crazy and society to break apart. Yet on the whole we don't and it doesn't. This fact is enough to make us start doubting the validity of the analysis presented above. If capitalism really is this difficult to live with, one may legitimately ask, why do people on the whole seem fairly content? Why, for example, did the revolution which Marx prophesized never happen? Why are many of us on the contrary reasonably comfortable with a system that has such obvious flaws?

The answer as so often lies hidden in the assumptions. Economists, as we pointed out above, usually feel quite ill at ease when discussing the actual world and prefer instead to talk about the world they have created in their theoretical models. This was the premise also of our discussion. The argument concerned the social consequences that would have materialized as long as everything else remained equal. Yet in the real world, as economists are constantly reminded, nothing ever remains equal and the effects predicted always interact with other, counter-balancing, effects. The same is true of our analysis.

Alongside the expert on native children, the colonial reformatory produced the native child, or at any rate, a widening set of arguments about its boundaries, content and varieties. Childhood was partially delinked from age, and constructed with reference to a ‘nature’ that was revealed by encounters with the judicial system and articulated in terms of plasticity and hardness. By interrogating nature, child-correction professionals sought to differentiate the plastic child (that might be detained) from the hardened adult (that must be rejected or released). The hardness or plasticity of nature was reflected in the inmate's natal society, in the crime itself, in the punishment, in the response to punishment, in sexual behaviour and in the juvenile body. Between child and adult, in the 1920s as in the 1860s, there existed not so much a line as a process — a zone of discipline, investigation and uncertainty. The reformatory, along with experimental concepts such as adolescence and precocity, lay within this gap of productive uncertainty.

As a penal institution, the juvenile reformatory was of course a part of the ‘carceral archipelago’ of colonial India. Its inmates entered not only as children but also as criminals. The two categories are closely related — Nasaw has pointed out that the pedagogical focus of modern child-saving requires the construction of children as delinquents.

Let us next turn to states in East Asia, or to be more precise, to the states of China and Japan. Just as in Europe, there is no doubting the formidable power of these entities. Indeed, the power of East Asian rulers was one of the things that most impressed the Europeans who visited this part of the world in the sixteenth century. The emperors of China and Japan, Jesuit missionaries and Dutch sea-captains reported, ruled like tyrants and everyone was forced to obey their commands. For the Europeans the kowtow – the practice of prostrating oneself flat on the ground before the ruler – became the symbol of what in the nineteenth century was known as ‘Oriental despotism’. In the twentieth century this image of East Asia as governed by omnipotent rulers was only strengthened as Japan subjected its citizens to fascism and much of the rest of Asia to imperialist rule, and as China was taken over by a dictatorship with totalitarian ambitions.

And yet these impressions were quite mistaken. For one thing, authority in the East Asian context was typically understood in personalized rather than in institutionalized terms. In both China and Japan people were seen as connected with each other through long chains of hierarchical relationships stretching from the bottom of society to the very top. These relationships were organized according to particularistic rather than universal rules.

In 1912, the government of Bombay decided to send Mohabat Khan, the twelve-year-old Nawab of Junagadh, to school in England for a year and a half. The decision set off a small firestorm of criticism in India as well as in England. The boy's mother, Asha Bibi, had not been consulted in the decision. In a series of petitions to British authorities at every level — the political agent, the Governor of Bombay, the Viceroy, the Secretary of State for India and the King — Asha Bibi demanded that her son be returned to her. Sections of the English press took up her cause; the Nation called the episode ‘kidnapping by order’. Nevertheless, the decision stood. The Nation's editors were dismissed by old India hands as naïve about the realities of imperial government and colonial society, and Asha Bibi was labelled a hysterical woman who did not understand her son's best interests.

The Mohabat Khan affair was emblematic of the larger conflict over the upbringing of the children of the princes. The new child-rearing schemes were welcomed by many Indians, including the princes themselves. The latter, in particular, recognized that this education increased their ability to move vertically and horizontally within the empire at a time when they were in some danger of becoming irrelevant. They embraced the ideological goals of colonial education, and the opportunities it provided for the reinvention of the Indian prince.

Expertise and experiments, rather than reformed children, were the prized products of the colonial reformatory. Not long after the initiation of the reformatory project in India, a curious assortment of career jailors, modernizing bureaucrats, native authority figures, women social workers, capitalists and religious colonizers had gathered under the umbrella of juvenile reform. As a group, they were similar to the ‘voluntary empire’ that Patricia Barton has identified in early twentieth-century entrepreneurial oversight, but not identical or coterminous, being much more closely affiliated with the state. Simultaneously, the increasing significance and authority of the ‘professional’ had expanded and complicated the qualifications that were required of the supervisors of institutionalized children. Under the circumstances, expertise and authority were not stable in their disciplinary, racial, geographical and gendered locations. They were contested continuously between ‘qualified’ professional and ‘unqualified’ worker, expert and expert, scientist and bureaucrat, birth parent and surrogate parent, European and native, metropolitan specialist and colonial improviser, institutional patriarch and female interloper.

This instability increased in the closing years of the nineteenth century as middle-class Indians became more assertive in the reformatory, because these men (and eventually women) brought with them their peculiar political imperatives.

In India in 1876, the colonial government passed the Reformatory Schools Act, providing a common structure of guidelines and rules to a mechanism of juvenile delinquency that had been taking shape in the provinces since mid-century. In the same decade, British educators and administrators in the princely states established the institutions that became known as the Chiefs' Colleges. Linking these apparently disparate episodes is the child: the criminalized child from the margins of native society, the effete child of the decadent aristocracy, and always, in the shadows, the European child that might serve as model, measure and foil. These childhoods emerged at a particular moment in the encounter between a western-European metropole, its imperial agents and people who would be described by Kipling as ‘half devil and half child’. Reformatories and boarding schools enabled experiments with the relationship between the devil and the child, and raised questions about whether devilry and childhood could co-exist. From the outset, as such, colonial child-saving developed as an ‘investigative modality’.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant metropolitan assumptions about childhood were its plasticity and its innocence. These assumptions were hardly uniform, being contingent upon the location of the child on the metropolitan map of class, gender, race and urban/rural geography. Some children — the poor, the delinquent, the Irish, the gypsy, the girl, the homosexual, the ‘precocious’, the adolescent — were either more plastic and innocent, or less so, than others; germs of instability were ingrained in the Victorian child.

Every society has to decide on the degree of reforms it may accept by opening itself to others. It is a choice that is greeted with more or less optimism and anxiety depending on cultural and historical circumstances.When the balance is tilted in favour of anxiety, what might at other times have been considered an opportunity worth seizing begins to take on the character of threat or inescapable fate. And when it comes to discussions of globalization, however sophisticated they might appear, much of what is written is simply a reflection of the deepening sense of unease felt with this sort of dilemma.

There can be few other domains in which such anxiety is so palpable as the domain of agriculture; where what is presented as defence of tradition may be easily confused with the invention of new identities, new natural species and new definitions of place. This may be partly due to the curious fact that even the greatest enthusiasts of hybridity in other domains of culture seem considerably less willing to embrace this doctrine when it comes to the issue of what they eat. But it no doubt has even more to do with the actual inability to decide, in all sincerity, what is the most desirable path for developing countries: to stick to the policy of localism, the defence of traditional agricultural practices, and self-subsistence, or to recognize the limitations of such a strategy, concurring with Amartya Sen's view that ‘food self-sufficiency is a peculiarly obtuse way of thinking about food security’ (2002).

The first of the two epigraphs above is the masthead on the website of Hinduism Today, a magazine published in Hawaii since 1979, which enjoys a wide readership among overseas Hindus, especially in the United States. Using the standard modern phrase sanatana dharma or ‘eternal religion’ to refer to Hinduism, the epigraph is a striking example of how Hinduism may be proclaimed as a genuine global or world religion, flourishing as never before. The second epigraph comes from the website of a religious trust in Chennai (Madras) and it announces the Vedic Heritage Teaching Programme (VHTP), which was designed in America but is also being promoted in India. The epigraph, which equates ‘Indian’ culture with the ostensibly Vedic Hindu religious tradition, expresses a profound anxiety that westernization may soon lead to its extinction.

Optimistic confidence about global Hinduism and pessimistic concern about Hindu Indian culture are obviously antithetical. Nevertheless, they belong to the same discourse of globalized Hinduism and highlight a crucial ambiguity that runs through it.