The Unruly Road to Revolution

IN 1751, THREE years before the first attempt to forge a political union in America, Benjamin Franklin—one of the founders of the United States—wrote how six Indian tribes had existed as a political unit for a long time while a dozen odd English colonies found themselves squabbling over the nature of what would have been a very limited, largely defensive, union.

In the event, the 1754 Albany Congress came to a naught and in Franklin’s picturesque language, “six nations of ignorant savages”—the con­federation of Indian tribes—were better organised than the quarrelling English colonies in Eastern America. It would take a series of mistakes by the British beginning in 1767 that culminated in their ouster and the formation of a new nation in 1783.

Jon Elster’s America Before 1787: The Unraveling of a Colonial Regime details the events leading up to American inde­pendence. The book is the second part of a trilogy that includes his exploration of the demise of the ancien regime in France (France Before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime, 2020). A third volume will synthesise observations from the two very different revolutionary episodes.

The American story is fascinating. It casts light on how difficult it is to forge a nation from pre-existing political units. How does one get these units to come together even for a limited purpose, let alone constituting a nation where each of them would have to give up some politi­cal rights? As the experience of the Albany Congress showed there are massive collective action problems involved even when the number of participants is small. In 1754 only seven of the twelve English colonies participated. The danger was real: the threat of war from the French and the Indian tribes. The colonies in the South that did not face this danger directly, were not inclined to bear the cost of the union.

If this was the situation with just a handful of delegates who had to sign on a dotted line, the situation at the level of individuals in these colonies was down­right chaotic. The interests and moti­vations of millions of individual agents could not be aggregated into a coherent answer. It is not as if attempts were not made to forge an anti-British front at the level of individuals: the entire spectrum of political forms such as boycotts, appeals to the love of liberty, home rule and more were used. The results were often very different and often indiffer­ent. Merchants and planters, individual consumers and farmers, all had very dif­ferent interests. An appeal to one set for not consuming British manufactured goods elicited an opposite response from another group. Reading Elster’s chaotic catalogue of events, an adherent of rational choice methods runs the risk of becoming a believer in Divine Providence. The forging of the American Nation was no less than a miracle.

But one need not transcend one’s way to heaven to understand what happened in 18th century-America. It was a series of British calculations geared towards their interest that led to the revolution across the Atlantic. The 1767 Townshend Acts that sought to impose a series of taxes to fund the administration of America began the unravelling of the colonial regime. Elster argues that the ef­fect of these and other Acts of the British Parliament were uncertain. The British thought they could calculate their end result, but this was an erroneous idea: one cannot calculate one’s way through uncertainty. This was pointed out by different speakers in Parliament. The same uncertainty marked the British response to how Americans responded during this period. Unsurprisingly, the hero of the American story for Elster is Edmund Burke who was one of the few members of Parliament who understood the uncertain effects of British meas­ures. By then it was too late. In any case, Burke’s intellectual prowess was the very opposite of his political influence.

Rational choice methods are consid­ered passé in this age of causal inference based on analysis of gigantic quantities of data. Elster, who has spent a lifetime in using rational choice to parse through complex phenomena, is testimony to the power of this method. His blending of psychology—especially emotions—with history has led to fruitful outcomes. In his hands, analyses of impenetrable histor­ical events—one’s that confounds most analysts—become models of clarity.

Unsurprisingly, the hero of the American story for Jon Elster is Edmund Burke who was one of the few members of parliament who understood the uncertain effects of British measures

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America Before 1787 is about colonial America but it is hard to resist the tempta­tion to say something about India. After all, just like America, India, too, was a British colony and had to struggle to gain Independence. That’s where the similar­ities end: A gulf of 164 years separates the two events along with different political and social conditions that prevailed in the two countries. But it is in the realm of history writing that the differences are stark. In India there is nothing that comes even remotely close to the kind of histo­ries that Elster has sketched for France and America. The history of India’s freedom struggle is one of “movements” where the top leadership “directed” the “masses” to a defined goal—Independence—and the masses happily followed the leaders. Collective action problems never seem to have existed in this country. The three “movements” that Gandhi led—1919 to early 1922; 1930 to 1932 and 1942- 1945—are supposed to have culminated in freedom by 1947. Never mind the fact that by the end of 1945, the geopolitical situation in Asia had changed dramatical­ly and the British were exhausted. In these top-led “movements” there are no studies of micro-foundations, collective action challenges and motivations. Simply put, this is a “switch on; switch off” version of history in which Indians simply obeyed what they were asked to do.

Perhaps this is not wholly true as there have been attempts, such as those by the Subaltern Studies collective, to outline an alternative history. But while these neo-Marxist attempts have cast in­teresting light on various episodes of the time, in the end they remained distant from exploring psychological/emotion­al and rational choices behind what they described. Both “schools” of history were remote from any systematic exploration of individual choices.

Should this matter at all? After all this is nothing more than an ivory tower fight about historiography. It does because in India history writing is com­promised by its close association with politics. Whenever political contesta­tion crosses a threshold, history—espe­cially that of anti-colonial resistance—is brought to bear on what is acceptable and what is not. It also leads to the notion that certain political ideas are acceptable while others are not. What individuals think, how they behave and what moti­vates their choices are simply brushed away. They don’t matter.

That is one reason why histories of the kind that Elster has written are so attractive. They are all about trying to understand the drivers of history from the individual all the way to the “big” men and women. In his explanations, there is room for messiness that characterises everyday life even as a series of deliberate choices and accidents leads to a certain end. This history, written long after the events in 1783 and 1789 had come to pass, leaves the end open even as it goes about exploring cause and effect sequences as a detective novel. There is much to com­mend the book from a methodological point of view even as it more than meets its intellectual ambition.

About The Author

Siddharth Singh

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