Before moving on in this series we need to make a correction.
One antonym for cooperation is competition; another is individualism. In the context of the behavior we have been discussing, individualism, not competition, was the appropriate term to use.
The inferences we have made are not affected but it is important to have the concept right.
Let us go over the essentials again and in a little more detail. The essence of the argument was that the nature of the labor requirements of different staple diets could be so different as to socialize very different behavioral attitudes in the communities.
In an earlier post we had made the point that the alternative to unadulterated democracy was not dictatorship and more efforts at creating imaginative constitutional arrangements for transitional countries might yield better outcomes. We have already discussed the tragic consequences of attempts to introduce unadulterated democracy in British India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Now we can turn to see the outcomes of variations from pure democracy in some other former British colonies. The first interesting case is that of Malaysia – we focus on the variation itself and not on whether it was really a conscious attempt at imaginative adaptation. In this we rely on the chapter by Shamsul A.B. (Development and Democracy in Malaysia: A Comment on its Socio-Historical Roots) in the book that we have been using in the last three posts. The starting point was remarkably similar to the situation in India and Sri...