Editor’s Note: This two-part article proposes a new historiography, “Continent of Labour,” to reimagine Asian labour movements. In this first part of the article, the author argues against the modernisationist view that models Asian labour on the Global North. It critiques “Global Factory” literature and works for inadvertently sustaining Eurocentrism by overlooking Asian labour’s agency and placing Asia outside global capitalism. 

If global capitalism relies on slavery or precarious workers on one side and relatively well-paid free wage workers on the other, which of these counts as “real” labour in the capitalist world-system? For a long time, we have been told that the latter is real. On the contrary, the former is regarded as a thing of the past that somehow still exists in the present. The former is treated as a relic of the past that merely lingers into the present, while the latter is tasked with advancing toward the future. This is the modernisationist epistemology that still shapes not only our understanding of capitalist development but also our view of the labour movement. In modernisation theory and its historicist imagination, the West’s capitalist development represents Asia’s future. ¹

By the same logic, labour in the global North—including its institutional forms, legal rights, trade unions, and bargaining structures—appears as the model that Asian labour movements must eventually reach. As a result, many labour “experts” in Asia, both researchers and activists, have fixed their gaze on the West, constantly seeking models from Europe or North America and lamenting what the distorted faces of Asian labour in the Euro-American mirror. Yet perhaps the more urgent task for Asian labour movements is to move out of this epistemology rather than to “move out of the past.” The past is richer than the mirror suggests—rich enough to offer resources for new strategies for labour in Asia.  What we need is an epistemological shift in how we understand Asia’s capitalist economies and, more importantly, Asian labour in relation to global capitalist transformation. 

This long-overdue shift can begin by reimagining Asia not as “the global factory” but as “the continent of labour.” This requires a departure from the conventional historiography of Asian development that has prevailed since the rise of Europe. It calls for a new historiography that places Asian labour—and thus Asian capitalism—at the centre of the totality of global capitalism. This is not merely theoretical juggling. However impractical it may seem, such a shift is essential for overcoming the impasse currently facing labour movements in Asia. No strategy can transcend the authority of the history that frames it. Only by rewriting the history of the past can we rewrite the strategies for the future.

Global Factory

“Global factory” is the name given to East Asia since the so-called East Asian Miracle—a label the World Bank gave in 1993 to the series of economic growth in the eastern part of Asia. Ever since the rise of the second- and third-tier East Asian economies—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the ASEAN economies, and China—social scientific literature on the region has centred on its rapid economic growth and emergence as a global manufacturing hub. I refer to this body of work as the global factory literature, which encompasses a wide range of analyses of Asia’s capitalist development. Its early stage was exemplified by the “miracle” literature focusing on the imagined notion of the developmental state, which explained East Asia’s growth through efficient state intervention and brought the region back into mainstream academic debates.²

Emphasising strengths rather than presumed flaws, and grounded in detailed empirical research, these studies began to recognise East Asia as more than a stagnant or inward-looking region. Yet the development of East Asia’s emerging economies was still described as a “miracle”—something that should not have happened under normal circumstances—and thus mythologised through images of tigers and dragons. What, then, was Asia’s “normal” status in this framing? It was depicted as backward, traditional, stagnant, despotic, inward-looking, and as a continent without history. Most of the global factory literature maintained an older Eurocentric historiography by portraying capitalism as something formed solely in Europe, which alone acquired modernity and then diffused to a backward Asia. Asian characteristics were thought to combine with this diffusion to produce a distinct but derivative “Asian capitalism,” a parallel version of the capitalism of the West or global North.

These features of the early global factory literature can be traced back to the nineteenth-century framing of Asia. This framing was generated in the early modern period, flourished during colonialism, and eventually crystalised into an orthodox worldview premised on a temporal rupture between tradition and modernity and a spatial division between the West and the Rest. What was this nineteenth-century frame? It was a European view of Asia structured around the concept of oriental despotism—a notion that portrayed Asia as static, without internal dynamism or history, and essentially frozen in time. Inherited from a lineage stretching from Aristotle to Bernier, Montesquieu, and Hegel, this tradition identified Asia with superficial natural and social characteristics: arid soil, the supposed necessity of a centralised state to undertake gigantic public works, the passive submission of idyllic village communities to absolute state power, the absence of freedom, a state monopoly over land, the lack of private property, and consequently the absence of any seed of capitalism.³ Through sweeping generalisations about societies such as Turkey, Persia, India, and China under the rubric of oriental despotism, nineteenth-century European thinkers placed these societies at the bottom of the unilinear hierarchy of human civilisation, with capitalist Europe at its summit. 

The rise of Asia as a global centre of manufacturing and an engine of world economic growth over the past few decades has led to a partial modification of the Western habit of viewing Asia as a backward periphery. Unlike the miracle literature of the twentieth century, more recent global factory literature describes Asia’s ascent as a resurgence rather than a miracle, and it anticipates the arrival of an Asian or East Asian century.⁴ In doing so, twenty-first-century global factory literature acknowledges Asia’s inherent dynamics prior to the arrival of the West and its active role as an integral part of global capitalism. 

Some heterodox scholars have gone further, challenging the earlier view that modern history is essentially the diffusion of European capitalism. They revise global history with Asia at its centre. For example, in ReOrient (1997), Andre Gunder Frank emphasises Asia’s long-standing superiority in the global economy throughout human history, interrupted only by a brief exceptional period between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Frank, the twenty-first century marks the “normalisation” of global history, in which East Asia reorients—or “re-orientalises”—the global economy, while Europe returns to the peripheral position it had previously occupied.⁵ Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing likewise not only recognises the centrality of the Chinese economy in the pre-modern world but also envisions the possibility that China might produce a sustainable alternative to contemporary neoliberal development, building a market economy without capitalist domination.⁶ 

However, despite recognising Asia’s historic and contemporary importance, these heterodox scholars do so by locating Asia in a parallel universe to global capitalism rather than treating it as an integral component of it. Frank portrays global economic history as the evolution of a single, timeless, world-scale trading system. In doing so, he replaces the history of capitalism since the sixteenth century with an analysis of the cyclical rise and fall of a transhistorical global market.⁷ This allows him to “relocate” Asia within global history only by deleting from view the anomaly of capitalism—precisely the period in which Asia suffered a subordinated position under European imperialism. 

Arrighi, similarly, relocates Asia within global economic history by imagining the persistent existence of a non-capitalist Chinese market economy from the Song dynasty to the twenty-first-century People’s Republic of China. For Arrighi, what is historically exceptional is not China’s long-standing pre-modern dominance but its decline during Europe’s rise. He characterises China’s historical development as one of market expansion without capitalist domination, a trajectory that allegedly succumbed to the aggressively expanding European capitalism backed by superior military force. With the late-twentieth-century Open Door reforms, Arrighi argues, China resumed its once-disrupted, non-capitalist path of market-based development. Imagining China as still following a centuries-old developmental trajectory without capitalist domination, Arrighi concludes that China is neither capitalist nor neoliberal—even though it possesses the world’s largest capitalist labour force, supplies labour to manufacturers across the globe, and plays a central role in the neoliberal accumulation of global capital by producing goods for the world market. 

For both scholars, the Eurocentric view of Asia is overcome only at the expense of the actual history of blood and sweat that built capitalism in East Asia. By relying on Adam Smith’s notion of a transhistorical or “natural” market economy—in which individuals have supposedly exchanged goods and services in their pursuit of their self-interested, expanded the division of labour, increased productive capacity, enhanced wealth, and accumulated it in the form of private property since the birth of human civilisation —and by assuming that Asia has followed such a developmental path from its origins despite a temporary disruption by European capitalism, both scholars construct a parallel universe of Asia alongside European capitalism. In doing so, they remain bound to the nineteenth-century European imagination of Asian immutability. Overly preoccupied with searching for non-European “others,” now framed as superior alternatives to the West, they fail to move beyond either orientalist or reverse-orientalist understandings of Asia. They end up imagining that “the Other” has existed in a world running parallel to European modernity and capitalism.

At the centre of this historiographical limitation lies the absence of Asian labour and its agency. Their narratives identify Asia’s central place in the global market economy without examining the social relations through which Asian labour has been mobilised to produce the goods being exchanged—as if they simply emerged from the soil, both in the past and the present. Consequently, much like the earlier global factory literature that reinstated only Asian states and capital at the centre of analysis, these accounts leave Asian labour outside history.

Marx’s orientalism and epistemological shift   

There is no need to imagine Asia as existing outside global capitalism or to construct a parallel universe of an Asian market economy in order to recognise its historical significance. A far more productive approach is to bring Asian labour back into the historiography of global capitalism. Re-centering labour in our understanding of the global economy—both before and after the rise of capitalism—reveals the vast scale and significance of Asia in comparison with other regions. This is especially evident in contemporary global capitalism, where Asia’s workforce makes up more than 55 per cent of the world’s total, compared with roughly 10 per cent in Europe and about 5 per cent in North America.⁸

To shift our attention to the labouring population, it is much more effective to recall Karl Marx than Adam Smith. This is not because Marx was free from Eurocentrism or orientalism—he certainly was not, and he himself was shaped by the nineteenth-century frame. In the Communist Manifesto (1848), the young Marx and Engels wrote that China’s destiny had now come to an end and that “Chinese walls” were destined to break down “before the cheap prices of [the] commodities” of the bourgeoisie.⁹ They went on to claim that these cheap capitalist goods forced “the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate”.¹⁰ 

Marx’s first formal reference to the “Asiatic mode of production” in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) assigns Asia the most primitive status.¹¹ Yet neither in the Critique nor in the sections on “Forms Preceding Capitalist Production” in the Grundrisse written between 1857 and 1858¹² did he clarify the social relations underpinning this mode or the evidence behind it. Marx relied on the inherited trope of “oriental despotism,” which, based on partial evidence and sweeping generalisation, collapsed diverse Asian societies into a single ideal type characterised by the passive submission of people to almighty states, attributing this to the supposed need for large-scale hydraulic works in an arid environment. In 1853 Marx described China as marked by “superstitious faith,” “hermetic isolation,” and “hereditary stupidity”,¹³ and India as unchanged “since its remote antiquity”¹⁴ with “no history at all”.¹⁵ His dismissal of India’s social relations and his belief that British colonialism could bring necessary “revolution” are evident in his assertion that England was the “unconscious tool of history”.¹⁶

Yet Marx’s writings also show a subtle shift in his view of the non-European periphery. He soon abandoned the idea that imperialist violence was historically progressive for Asia. The term “barbarian,” earlier applied to Asians, was redirected toward Europe, as he criticised “the inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation”.¹⁷ His writings on the American Civil War recognised colonialism and slavery outside Europe as major triggers for European capitalist development,¹⁸ while Capital situates colonial expropriation as an essential precondition for Europe’s ascent.¹⁹ Marx also began to see anti-colonial struggles as potential catalysts for revolutions in Europe.²⁰ By recognising that the periphery did not have to undergo the same capitalist development as Europe in order to discover the basis for post-capitalist transformation—and by acknowledging that this basis could be found in “non-capitalist” communities in the periphery—Marx distanced himself from the unilinear and stagist model of human development laid down by classical political economy since Adam Smith.  

What, then, changed Marx’s view? Marx initially focused on the revolutionary role of capital and Europe, seeing colonialism as a means of spreading productive forces to all corners of the globe. Consequently, the working masses in the colonies—unlike the European proletariat—were regarded as passive subjects whose emancipation from archaic rulers would be carried out by imperial capital on their behalf. However, widespread resistance—from the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) to the Sepoy Mutiny (1857–1859)—revealed that Asians were not passive subjects of despotism. This realisation helped Marx move away from the idea that capital, rather than people, held the emancipatory potential. The agency of ordinary Asians, who were involved in socio-economic transformations in which European empires, local rulers, and newly emerging social classes battled against one another, became the new point of departure for this epistemological shift.

Although Marx never produced a full analysis of Asian social relations or clearly abandoned Eurocentrism in his major works, his recognition that developments in Asia and other peripheries were integral to global capitalism allows us to understand Asia not as external to capitalism but as constitutive of it. Following Marx’s later emphasis on agency, analyses of Asia must avoid static assumptions and instead centre the changing social relations through which ordinary people shape historical outcomes. 

Notes:

1. For modernisation theory, see Rostow, Walter. W. 1959. “The Stages of Economic Growth.” The Economic History Review 12 (1): 1-16; Rostow, W. W. 1990. The stages of economic growth: A non-communist manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge university press. For a critique of historicism, see Chakrabarty, D. 2009. Provincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ↩︎
2. For classic developmental state literature, see Amsden, Alice. H. 1989. Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Haggard, Stephen. 1990. Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries. Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Johnson, Chalmers. 1982. MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975. Stanford: Stanford University Press; Wade, Robert. 1990. Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ↩︎
3. Anderson, Perry. 2013. Lineages of the Absolutist State: Verso, 462-472; Cumings, Bruce. 2005. “We look at it and see ourselves: Fantasies of Korea”. London Review of Books; Wang, Hui. 2005. “A New Way to See World History: An Asia that Isn’t the East.” Le Monde Diplomatique February 2005, https://mondediplo.com/2005/02/02asia. ↩︎
4. Mahbubani, Kishore. 2009. The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. New York: Public Affairs; Mason, Andrew. D. and Shetty, Sanjay. 2019. A Resurgent East Asia: Navigating a Changing World. Washington DC: World Bank. ↩︎
5. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. ↩︎
6. Arrighi, Giovanni. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-first Century. London: Verso. ↩︎
7. Mielants, Eric. H. 2007. The Origins of Capitalism and the “Rise of the West”. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 13; Anievas, Alexander, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. 2015. How the West came to rule. London: Pluto Press, 21.  ↩︎
8. https://ilostat.ilo.org/topics/population-and-labour-force/ ↩︎
9. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1998 [1848]. The communist manifesto. London: Verso, 39-40. ↩︎
10. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1998 [1848], 39-40. ↩︎
11. Marx, Karl. 1971 [1859]. A contribution to the critique of political economy. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 21. ↩︎
12. Marx, Karl. 1993 [1973]. Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books. ↩︎
13. Marx, Karl. 1853c. “Revolution in China and in Europe.” In Karl Marx–Frederick Engels Collected Works (MECW), Vol. 12: 93–100, 94. ↩︎
14. Marx, Karl. 1853a. “The British rule in India.” In Karl Marx–Frederick Engels Collected Works (MECW), Vol. 12: 125–133, 128. ↩︎
15. Marx, Karl. 1853b. “The future results of British rule in India.” In Karl Marx–Frederick Engels Collected Works (MECW), Vol. 12: 217–222, 217. ↩︎
16. Marx, Karl. 1853a, 132. ↩︎
17. Marx, Karl. 1853b, 221. ↩︎
18. Anderson, Kevin. 2010. Marx at the margins: On nationalism, ethnicity, and non-Western societies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 187-188. ↩︎
19. Marx, Karl. 1990 [1867]. Capital, Vol. 1. New York: Penguin, 915–918. Also see Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman 2020. “Marx and the Indigenous” Monthly Review, 71(9): 1-19, 2–6. ↩︎
20. Anderson 2010, 144. ↩︎