ABSTRACT
Perry Anderson has argued that ‘Marx’s own conception of the historical time of the capitalist mode of production . . . was of a complex and differential temporality, in which episodes or eras were discontinuous from each other, and heterogeneous within themselves.’1 Although Anderson does not press this usage, his observation is especially pertinent to the advent of capitalism in the colonial worlds where, as Lenin and Trotsky observed in their theory of combined and uneven development, socio-economic conditions pertaining to pre-, nascent and ‘classical’ capitalism coexisted and overlapped. Without overlooking that even in contemporary Europe residual traces of archaic ideologies and customs remain, or that the sophisticated capital cities are contemporaneous with antiquated but stillfunctioning peasant societies – about which John Berger has written with empathy and critical distance in Pig Earth – the ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’ was structural to colonized societies and continues to be so in post-independence nation-states. For here vast rural populations living in village communities provided and continue to provide the material ground for the persistence of earlier social practices and older psychic dispositions.
