Between 1400-1800 the major nations/regions (and some minor ones) diversified their peoples' consumption basket via foreign trade. At the end of the mercantilist/absolutist era in the West, each major nation-state followed an import substitute industrialization (ISI) foreign trade/investment policy. The South did the same when they could (1930s, WWII, through the early-late 1960's, in India's case later). Then neo-liberalism and all that stopped this process (e.g., in Latin America after the coups of 1962-64) and the South was forced into an export-led industrialization strategy, which does not diversify the means of production in the full sense that ISI did and does. Now each Western major nation-state has acquired the diversified production base needed to produce diversity in consumption. (Hence, foreign trade to a very large degree has nothing to do with consumer wants but only the imperatives of capital accumulation.) This is a hugely important change, not only in capitalist history but also human history, and deserves its own dates (1800-present). Asia, of course, was largely left out of this diversification process mainly because of the absence of Western style nation-states, which after all were the main causes of said deversification. Now Asia is trying to catch up, but its export-led industrialization policies inhibit the catching up process, so does Western imperialism, ecological considerations, and other factors. History is not without its ironies. The irony here being that France, Germany, the U.S., Japan, etc., have become more and more alike, i.e., more homogenous, precisely because they all became more diversified along the same lines, i.e., wage labor, big corporations, commodity form of need satisfaction, welfare state, the auto, etc. Cheers, Jim O'Connor
