On 9/13/06, Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
CB: Point taken. Capitalism has created increased absolute poverty in its
colonies.
"Relative" to the lives many people lived before the coming of the European
imperialism and colonialism they are poorer now.
^^^^^^^
According to some schools of thought, capitalism creates absolute poverty in the "periphery" (Dependency Theory?). By international capitalist expansion, and historical xenophobia/racism the periphery got largely exported to the Third World, particularly Africa and that is how the colonies got impoverished. But capitalism has always created greater absolute poverty SOMEWHERE. Is this correct in terms of empirical historical facts?
I saw this review by Louis Proyect of Robert Biel's "The New Imperialism", apparently the most important recent work on dependency theory. Louis quotes Biel:
"....it is not just that there is one group of countries in the world which happens to be poor. The two are organically linked; that is to say, one part is poor because the other is rich."
http://clogic.eserver.org/2002/proyect.html
How well is Biel's position supported by data? It seems to me to be the central question in economic theory.
-raghu.
