Description
Bangladesh is widely hailed as a development success story, yet its rapid economic growth has unfolded alongside rising inequality and deepening dependency on global markets. To make sense of this paradox, this paper situates Bangladesh's trajectory within the longer historical evolution of the Bengal region. Through a historical materialist lens, it challenges linear and Eurocentric assumptions that capitalism emerged in the region solely through British colonial intervention. By tracing transformations in land relations, production structures, and class formation from the Mughal period through to early colonial rule, it argues that pre-colonial Bengal exhibited hybrid socio-economic features that cannot be neatly categorized as feudalist or tributary. Drawing on Marx's later writings on non-Western societies and multi-linear theories of development, the paper demonstrates how capitalist relations selectively absorbed and reconstituted existing local structures rather than replacing them.
The British East India Company's corporate mode of extraction, rather than the Raj's civilizing rhetoric, served as the decisive turning point that subordinated indigenous forms of accumulation to global circuits of capital. Through this perspective, the paper situates Bangladesh's later development trajectory within a longer genealogy of uneven and combined development, illuminating how historical continuities in class and land relations underpin contemporary patterns of dependency. The analysis underscores the importance of attending to the regional specificity of developmental paths to identify distinct spaces of resistance and alternative possibilities of transformation.
