When you look at a map of the world, a few questions immediately come to mind, like “what’s
this?”, “what’s that?”, and of course “what’s the deal with all the blue stuff?”
[[I don’t need to tell you that that’s just how looking at a map goes, we’ve all
been there.
Humanity has been making maps for at least 5 years, and there’s no denying that they
are important to us.
Whether it’s getting us from our homes to the nearest coffee shop or from there to another
coffee shop, we use maps for a million different things.]]
Sometimes, we use maps to answer important political questions, like in this clip, for
example:
But sometimes we use maps not to *answer* questions like “where’s that place that
I want to bomb for some reason?”
or “how many Lebanon’s can fit inside Syria once you’ve already included Rhode
Island?,” but to *ask* questions instead.
That’s the case for maps like this one which begs the question: “how come all these countries
are way poorer than all these?”
There are many answers to this question, but the one we will focus on in this video is
imperialism.While many different factors can explain in one way or another the inequality
between countries, like geography, climate, natural resources, incidence of disease, and
so on, it is imperialism, the need for capitalism to expand and subject more of the world to
its control and logic, that can most convincingly explain why these differences have persisted
in a world where tremendous material wealth has already been achieved.
[[Unlike other explanations, using the framework of imperialism to understand the global divide
between rich and poor allows us to see that it is not by accident or fate that some countries
are kept poor, it is by choice.
Somebody’s choice.
In other words, imperialism explains the global balance of power and poverty.
But to understand this and the root of that power, we need to go back in time a little
bit.]]
Our modern world order and its rich/poor divide is undeniably rooted in the history of slavery
and colonialism.
While the history of the world is long and diverse, with each area and culture having
its own record of the sequence of important events that defines it, a common historical
juncture for many places is the white guys showing up and ruining it.
That’s the case for basically every modern country that’s not here, and practically
entire continents like Africa, which, despite its incredible diversity of cultures and characteristics,
has been pretty uniformly subjected to the violence and damaging effects of colonialism
and the trans-atlantic slave trade.
[[Before the arrival of the Europeans, Africa was a continent with tens of thousands of
cultures, some organized in ways that are easily recognisable to modern western eyes
with empire- or state-like structures, and others that operated on completely different
societal models without a good western analogy.
While the conventional narrative about Africa is one of a backwards continent that was quote
unquote “civilized” by European colonialism, a horrible and flat-out wrong justification
for the atrocities I’ll get to in a bit, Africa was actually developing side by side
with much of the rest of the world for centuries.]]
Historians note, for example, the advanced agricultural techniques like “terracing,
crop rotation, green manuring, mixed farming and regulated swamp farming” that made African
top-soil rich and fertile for centuries, and the domestication of plants like millet, rice,
and yams that was widespread on the continent.
While this agriculture was not as productive as that in Europe and Asia, this was probably
because land was abundant and the organization of production around family units instead
of feudal lords meant that self-sufficiency didn’t require the same maximization that
we saw in Europe, which ironically, eventually led to the degradation of European soil where
Africa had achieved a more sustainable model.
Then there were material goods.
While Europe’s industrial revolution had brought with it an abundance of goods, mass-produced
in shiny new factories, especially textiles, African goods like leather, copper, iron,
and cloth produced at the same time were praised for their craftsmanship, their durability
and their quality.
This is not to say that because it was happening at a smaller scale that Africa did not experience
abundance, though.
[[Like Europe, Africa produced surplus and used this surplus to trade, with complex economies
emerging between the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa prior to the advent of slavery
and colonialism.
What I’m trying to say here is that, while there were qualitative differences between
the countries that are now considered the Global North and the Global South, it’s
not always clear that these differences made the Global South worse off.]]
Some of the first european quote unquote “explorers” of the time say as much in their accounts
of the continent, which I’m not gonna read out loud because they’re long but I’ll
put an example on screen if you don’t trust me that Europeans thought Africa was pretty
cool and not “underdeveloped” like we might say today.
Like everywhere else in the world, development in Africa was incredibly inconsistent, but
even this extremely cursory overview of African development before colonialism and slavery
reveals that Africa, and more generally, non-western geographies, were not pre-destined to occupy
their role at the bottom of the global order like we might assume today.
[[But this eventually changed.
Back in Europe, things shifted, and for that we can look to the industrial revolution and
capitalism, the effects of which would end up ravaging the rest of the planet.]]
The simultaneous advent of the industrial revolution and capitalism produced stuff,
yes, but more importantly it produced new needs and new structures of power.
Specifically, capitalism produced the need to grow no matter what and the power of the
state to make that happen.
As you know, capitalism produces things by committing people to wage-labor.
Instead of meeting your needs individually, as a community, or through trade, all of which
happened under previous economic models, individual needs had to be met by working for someone
else and getting a little money back for it.
A few people owned things like factories, but the majority of people did not.
And, increasingly dispossessed of land and other means to self-determine, they traded
their time and labor on the machines owned by others for money they would then spend
on the products they had themselves made.
[[That’s all well and good for the capitalists who own these machines and factories, but
eventually, they started running out of space.
Domestic markets are not big enough to satisfy capitalists' incessant demand for growth,
and since stagnation means death, European capitalists and the states they increasingly
controlled started expanding beyond Europe in search of new ways to grow their businesses.]]
While spreading out they found America, or more accurately, first they found the Caribbean.
With its agreeable climate great for growing crops and its supplies of gold and silver,
the Americas were ripe for businesses to expand their productions and their profits.
But they ran into a problem.
There wasn’t a big enough European labor force to exploit these new lands, and many
of the people who lived there were either brutally murdered by Europeans taking it over
by force or by the diseases they brought with them.
So Europeans found another solution.
Using their advantages in ships and weaponry, and opening new trade relations, Europeans
bought slaves.
They made this new land profitable not by their own means, but with the forced labor
of slaves first captured in internal African conflicts and subsequently, in the most abject
conditions imaginable, transported to America.
[[It’s hard to convey in words how brutal this practice was and I don’t particularly
want to use some of the most graphic images of the time.
But needless to say that much of the wealth that Europe acquired by these means, and that
today places it among the top half of the world, was achieved through the control and
orchestration of this incredibly profitable and incredibly violent process.]]
Estimates vary wildly about how much this benefitted Europe in concrete terms and, conversely,
how damaging the slave trade was to Africa.
While we know that between 12.5 and 20 million people were ripped from the African continent
between the 15th and 20th century, estimates about the kinds of reparations that would
offset this loss, to use very callous economic terms, range from 100 to nearly 800 trillion
dollars.
In no uncertain terms, however, the slave trade was brutal for Africa and its path to
development and beneficial, if only by comparison at the very least, to the countries that orchestrated
it.
The combined effects of basing an entire economy on losing people that would otherwise produce
domestically, the violence of the European forces, and the sheer loss of brilliant minds
to death or kidnapping has no modern equivalent.
And this gives us a first piece of evidence for the North-South wealth gap.
[[But eventually the slave trade transformed.
Deficits in European nations were no longer met by trade and settler-colonies in the West.
In other words, Europe needed something new to feed the capitalist growth imperative.
Europe thus began converting many of its operations to a more direct control over land and resources.
In short, colonialism.]]
From gilded rooms thousands of miles away, European nations cut up the world amongst
themselves, most notably during the Berlin conference that launched the quote “scramble
for Africa.”
The result was another map on paper, but in more concrete terms, a new increase in violence.
European companies and governments set up shop in their new colonies at the barrel of
their improving weaponry and began exploiting their resources, land, and labor forces even
more brutally than they did their workers back home.
Attracted by the high profits of the colonies, a product of the lack of established capital,
the low price of land, the low wages of workers, and the cheapness of raw materials, capitalist
countries had found a new solution to their domestic economies becoming “overripe.”
[[Here again, we saw abject horrors I don’t really want to show you, mostly because YouTube
will age restrict this video.
Starvation, whippings, and mutilations were all popular methods of colonial control after
the tremendous violence of conquest had already been exacted.
The need to achieve growth and avoid capitalist collapse convinced Europeans to commit atrocities
in the rest of the world on a scale that’s hard to even comprehend.]]
On the economic side of things, the costs of this period are once again hard to estimate.
But not impossible.
One economist, for example, has calculated that British colonialism cost India 45 trillion
dollars in today’s currency between 1765 and 1938.
But that’s an estimate.
A very educated one, but an estimate nonetheless.
On the other side of the world, however, we can get at least one exact number.
The cost of Haitian independence.
Independence from French colonial rule after the Haitian revolution cost the country 150
million francs, five times France’s annual budget, and 21 billion dollars in modern currency.
That is a verifiable, 21 billion dollar head-start for France/a 21 billion dollar handicap for
Haiti, which doesn’t even count all the wealth extracted by the colonial process itself.
If we focus on the European side of the equation, colonies were often very profitable.
According to historian Walter Rodney, “In the mid-1950s, British investments in South
Africa were estimated at £860 million and yielded a stable profit of 15% or £129 million
every year.
[Similarly,] DeBeers Consolidated Mines made a profit that was both phenomenal and consistently
high – between $26 million and $29 million throughout the 1950s.”
[[In other words, if slavery hadn’t driven a big enough wedge between the rich and the
poor, colonialism would.
But colonialism would eventually end.
That is if you don’t count the 17 official colonies still recognized by the UN, like
Guam and French Polynesia, or the many more colonies that don’t get put on official
lists because they make ruling countries uncomfortable.]]
Nonetheless, we have a lot fewer colonies today than we used to.
The mid-20th century was a period of success for a number of anti-colonial revolutions.
Many countries won their right to independence in these revolutions, and to most this is
where the story ends.
It seems like the domination of colonial powers is over.
Sure Europe screwed over the rest of the world for centuries, but then they stopped.
[[So then why is there still a gap between rich and poor?
Can’t all these countries just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
No.
It’s not just that after years of colonialism and slavery the West had a head start and
the Global South had a handicap.
When it was forced to relinquish the direct control of colonial rule, the West made sure
it would never have to let go of the economic power it had built for centuries.
In other words, the formal end of colonialism wasn’t really the end after all.
Like credits after a Marvel movie, there was more to come.]]
Within a global capitalist economy, burgeoning independent economies were in a tough spot.
After decades of being used and exploited, former colonies had very little wealth still
in their control.
But they needed to trade with the countries that had formally exploited them for trillions
and never paid reparations back.
Trade is how most countries can secure basic needs.
Enter the IMF, the World Bank, and “Structural Adjustment Programs.”
[[The IMF, World Bank, GATT (which became the WTO), and even some Western countries
directly told newly independent countries that if they wanted to be included in the
international economy, and perhaps even get a loan to get them started, they would have
to follow a set of rules.
They would have to drop any tariffs on foreign goods, privatize any national industry, open
their country to foreign investment, and in every respect minimize the role of the state.
In sum, they had to open the doors to unbridled western capitalism.
With pretty awful results.]]
Not only were the loans really for the benefit of western organizations, a loan has to be
paid back with interest after all, the rest of the requirements often had and continue
to have devastating effects.
These measures ended up inviting many foreign-owned companies into former colonies.
Without the ability to level the playing field on international competition with protectionist
tariffs, or large-scale investments into national industries, infrastructure, and common goods,
Global South countries were taken over by multinational industries.
In the forced competition for shrinking export markets that the liberalization of trade produced,
the Global South was coerced into turning to western companies and their direct capture
of national resources.
[[Today, as an example, Canadian companies operate 75% of the world’s mining companies,
many of which are located in Africa and in Latin America.
In effect, resources that are located in the global south and extracted by the workers
of the global south were forcibly opened up to, and ultimately produce profit for Canadian
business interests, not for these exploited countries.
This is why the Global South is still so poor.
Because it’s not just Canada.]]
In just about every country in the Global South, in almost every economic sector, unprocessed
natural resources leave the country's borders, extracted by low-wage workers.
They’re then processed in the Global North into manufactured products, which in turn
are sold back at a higher price to meet the Global South’s basic needs.
[[Resources and profits go out, expensive goods and foreign companies come in.
Colonialism by the state has been largely recycled into colonialism by businesses and
their friendly international institutions.
One 27 year old Cuban lawyer described how this process worked out in Cuba in the 1950s,]]
a country that was no longer a colony of either Spain or the US, but still very much felt
like it was: “85% of the small farmers in Cuba pay rent and live under the constant
threat of being dispossessed from the land that they cultivate.
More than half the best cultivated land belongs to foreigners.
In Oriente, the largest province, the lands of the United Fruit Company and West Indian
Company join the north coast to the southern one.
There are two hundred thousand peasant families who do not have a single acre of land to cultivate
to provide food for their starving children.
[...] We export sugar to import candy, we export hides to import shoes, we export iron
to import plows [...]
[[In short, what the structural adjustment programs and the international capitalist
economy offered the Global South was predatory inclusion.
Exclusion from international trade could have been deadly to these countries impoverished
by centuries of extraction, violence, and exploitation, so even a deal that sucked and
pulled profits to the Global North was often sold as better than the alternative.]]
While some of these programs have been accompanied by economic growth in the Global South, it
is a much smaller growth than reflects the work done by poor countries since most of
the profit leaves for the North, and what growth does stay domestic mainly falls into
the hands of the Global South’s wealthy who willingly collaborate with foreign companies
for a cut of the profit.
Today, these practices continue in full swing.
Colonialism hasn’t stopped by any means.
In summary, the poverty of the world today is not an accident.
It’s the product of centuries of subjugation to imperialist forces, at the root of which
was the *need* for capitalism to expand beyond the borders of Europe, and the *means* to
inflict tremendous violence on the poor.
That this system continues today is no accident, it’s what makes the rich and powerful more
money.
And as long as there is no economic challenger strong enough to end this system, capitalism
will continue to rob the poor for the benefit of the wealthy.
In this episode we talked about the global south as a whole, but we specifically looked
at Africa.
If this video was interesting to you and you’d like to learn more about some of the wonders
created on the African continent, I highly recommend you check out Planet of Treasures:
Africa on CuriosityStream.
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