Week 3. Unjust Legacies of Colonialism. (1) The Prebisch-Singer Thesis Continued: Are the Gains from Trade between Rich Countries and Poor Former Colonies Distributed Unjustly? (2) Do the Metropolitan Areas in the Developed Capitalist Core Unjustly Exploit the Satellite Countries in the Underdeveloped Poor Periphery, and thus "Underdevelop" Them? The Analogy with Marx's Theory of How Capitalists Exploit Laborers (3) Did European Colonialism and Capitalism Create a Single Unified World Order, which Exploits and Underdevelops the Periphery in this Way? The Idea of the Modern World-System.
Then read: H. W. Singer, "The Distribution of Gains between Investing and Borrowing Countries," American Economic Review 40 (1949): 473-485
Then read: Paul Bairoch, "A Long-term Deterioration in the Terms of Trade?" Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (UChicago Press, 1993): 111-118
Next: Andre Gunder Frank, "The Development of Underdevelopment," Monthly Review 18 (1966)
Presents two general assumptions: that the metropoles tend to develop and the satellites to underdevelop, and
that the metropoles suck capital out of the satellites for their own enrichment, thus underdeveloping the
satellites. From this, it generates five hypotheses which it recommends for testing, including the celebrated and
reviled hypotheses that (1) satellites experience their greatest development when their ties to the metropole
are weakest, and (2) the satellites which are the least developed today are the ones with the closest ties to
metropoles in the past.
Finally: Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Modern World-System as a Capitalist World-Economy: Production, Surplus-Value, and Polarization," "The Rise of the States-System: Sovereign Nation-State, Colonies, and the Interstate System," World-Systems Analysis, pp. 23-59
So you'd like to know more…
Allen W. Wood, "What is exploitation?" "The vulnerability of labor to capital," Karl Marx, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2004): 242-246, 246-253.
Richard A. Brecher and Ehsan Choudhuri, "Immiserizing Investment from Abroad: The Singer-Prebisch Thesis Reconsidered," Quarterly Journal of Economics 97 (1982): 181-190
Albert O. Hirschman, "Foreign Trade as an Instrument of National Power," National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, Expanded ed. (UCalifornia Press, 1980): 13-33
Graziella Bertocchi and Fabio Canova, "Did colonization matter for growth? An empirical exploration into the historical causes of Africa's underdevelopment," European Economic Review 46 (2002): 1851-1871
Finds that the degree to which an African country was colonized has an increasing negative impact on that
country's post-colonial growth performance. So it finds evidence in Africa for a political version of Frank's
hypothesis (2) above: that if an African country was more of a tightly-controlled and economically worked political
colony, then its growth performance will be worse than those that were less controlled and worked.
D. K. Fieldhouse, "After Colonialism: The New International System," The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence, and Development (Blackwell, 1999): 258-355
Kenneth Sokoloff and Stanley Engerman, "Institutions, Factor Endowments, and Paths of Development in the New World," Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (2000): 217-232
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, "Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution," Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (2002): 1231-1294
Kwame Anthony Appiah, "African Identities," In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, pp. 173-180
Alex Spillius, "Barack Obama tells Africa to stop blaming colonialism for its problems," The Telegraph, 9 July 2009
Samir Amin, Global History: A View from the South (Pambazuka, 2010)
Ian M. D. Little, "Dependency and Underdevelopment," Economic Development: Theory, Policy, and International Relations (Basic Books, 1982), pp. 218-266
A thoughtful critique, from a neo-classical economics standpoint, of the varieties of dependency theory, from the structuralism of Prebisch to the exploitative underdevelopment of Frank. Helpfully overviews the main ideas of all the leading contributions to dependency theory.
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Howard UP, 1981)
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton UP, 2001)