Just like to comment on some of what has been said about the role of the colonial trade in the industrialization of Europe; not about the role of the periphery, which is another matter. I want to thank Forstater for providing some of the more recent literature defending Williams's thesis, as I don't think arguments a la Ernest Mandel will do today. However, I must say that, at least on the basis of Fostater's summation, I find Darity's argument hardly convincing. Ajit's comment, however, is a serious one and I hope to pick it later on. What follows, now and later, are slighly revised commentaries I had sent earlier to the wsn and world-h lists, as part of a paper I started to work on again recently, which is on the 'rise of the West'. The idea that the colonial trade was crucial to the industrialization of Europe is (still) a commonly accepted claim among world-system theorists and Marxists, or really, the Left in general - this, despite the significant statistical evidence already put forward against this claim. One of the strongest, empirical challenges goes back to O'Brien's article "European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery" (EHR 1982), a well-known article which, notwithstanding Wallerstein's response to it in the same journal (1983), still awaits a serious answer from ws scholars. Among the many claims of this article is the highly damaging one that, if we agree with Bairoch's data that commodity trade between core and periphery amounted to no more than 4% of the aggregate GNP for Western Europe, and if we assume that core capitalists made such large profits as 50% on the trade turnover, and that they re-invested as high as 50% of their profits, the colonial profits re-invested would have amounted to only 1% og GNP, or 10% of gross investment.
