Economic History Seminar

Du 06/09/2023 de 12:00 à 13:30

R1.09

BACH Maria (Lausanne)

Emancipatory National Accounting

Separated by thousands of kilometres of land and sea, two economists produced national income estimates in the late 1860s. An Indian economist, Dadabhai Naoroji, calculated India’s first ever national income estimate for years 1867-8 and 1870-71. A North American economist, Ezra Seaman, worked out one of the first estimates for national income and domestic product for 1866 and 1869. Although on different continents, with different circumstances, both Naoroji and Seaman argued that if they could measure the size of their economies, they could understand their progress. This statement seems evident today when economic measurements like the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are printed in widespread media and publications daily. The practise of measuring our economy, however, had only just began in the 1800s. Others argue that it started much later in the 1930s-40s when the international standards for national accounting were established. While there is growing literature exploring the links between accounting and imperial processes, there is much less on how economists from what we call the Global South today have counted their own economies. Shifting the focus to economists from the Global South, rather than colonisers, offers room for new perspectives on what national accounting did for the Global South. Studies that examine the imperial practises of counting their foreign territories have uncovered how national accounting was yet another tool to govern, control and suppress the populations of the Global South. My study shows the contrary: natives of the Global South used national accounting as an emancipatory tool. Studying instances of national accounting in the Global South can give us further insight into how and why measuring happens, and how it reflects and shapes our reality. Examining the North American case alongside the Indian case could reveal new insights. India was only starting its nationalist movement in the early 1870s. North America had been independent for almost hundred years. The comparison could then identify differences of doing national accounting in a free versus a colonised country.