ABSTRACT
The notion of a modern globally connected capitalist Asia appears to have been manufactured by the same “gurus” that promoted the Pacific Century in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This vision was baked in the image of Western modernity: a communicational interdependence with major financial nodes across the globe, increasingly footloose and cosmopolitan middle classes, and rising consumption. Two reactions to the normative agenda are possible. First, an early account of the political economy and society of an Asia observed through the lenses of an intrusive Portuguese colonial presence, Tomé Pires’ Suma Oriental (1515), serves as a critical mirror to “modern global Asia” by portraying a motley collection of pluralistic polities that exhibit military prowess, pleasure-seeking, and pious standards of behavior. In Pires’ account, these derive from a mercantile civilization that builds or relegates the greatness of political entities through material exchanges and the uses found for them. This mercantile civilization is not even capitalist in nature. It is simply pluralist. In this regard, “modern globalizing Asia” is itself an artificial alter-globalization that may come to ruin if it does not acknowledge the pluralistic foundations of its early historical identity. Second, Malaysia’s longest serving iconoclastic premier, Mahathir bin Mohamad, offers something of a “bookend” analysis of how capitalism might be reformed for an Asia that has encountered some structural limits to its capitalist trajectory. His is a humane capitalism that calls for social justice, equitable distribution of wealth, and the need for reforming global governance to suit a still struggling postcolonial state. Comparing these two visions centuries apart allows us to contemplate an Asian perspective on humane capitalism, positing a new variant of political economy I dub the “international relations of economics.”
