How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
The gap between the rich world and the poor world was not always there, and it was not made by nature. This lens traces how it was built: the Atlantic slave trade, the plunder of the Congo, the opium wars, the colonial famines that killed tens of millions while grain was exported, and the long drain of silver and oil from Latin America. It scales up the account of primitive accumulation from the capitalism theme to the level of the world.
Anchor questions
- The rich world was not always rich. How did it get that way, and at whose expense?
- What did colonial powers actually do in the places they ruled? Who resisted, and how?
- How did famines kill millions in colonies that were exporting food? Who let that happen?
- When empires “left,” what did they leave behind, and what did they keep?
- Whose history of the world do we inherit, and whose is erased?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.
Books
- Walter Rodney (1942 to 1980), How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). The foundational statement that Europe’s development and Africa’s underdevelopment were one process, tracing the slave trade and colonial extraction as the engine of the gap between the two continents. The anchor for this lens. Marxists.org does not host this, contrary to what is often assumed, and Verso’s free anniversary ebook has expired. Paywalled: versobooks.com, and see the note on access for how to get it.
- Adam Hochschild (b. 1942), King Leopold’s Ghost (1998). A narrative history of the plunder of the Congo under Leopold II and the forced-labor rubber terror, and of the early international movement that exposed it. Readable and devastating. There is no scan of this book on archive.org at all, so there is nothing to borrow. Paywalled: panmacmillan.com. His Getty lecture on Congo is free, about 63,000 views: youtube.com
- Mike Davis (1946 to 2022), Late Victorian Holocausts (2001). Argues that the mass famines in India, China, and Brazil in the late nineteenth century were made lethal by colonial policy and market dogma, not by nature alone. Tens of millions dead in an age of “progress.” Free to borrow: archive.org
- Eduardo Galeano (1940 to 2015), Open Veins of Latin America (1971). A sweeping, literary account of how silver, sugar, rubber, and later oil drained wealth from Latin America to Europe and the United States over five centuries. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Eric Williams (1911 to 1981), Capitalism and Slavery (1944). The classic case that the Atlantic slave trade and Caribbean plantation slavery financed the rise of British industrial capitalism. Shared with the capitalism theme. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Julia Lovell (b. 1975), The Opium War (2011). A history of Britain’s opium trade and the wars it fought to force the drug on China, and of how those defeats shaped modern Chinese nationalism. A window on empire in Asia. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Vijay Prashad (b. 1967), The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2007). A political history of decolonization and the Third World project from Bandung onward, and the clearest bridge from this lens to the liberatory one. Free: archive.org
Films and video
- “Imperialism: Crash Course World History #35” (CrashCourse, John Green, 2012). Roughly 14 minutes, about 7.2 million views, the most-watched item across this theme. A fast survey of nineteenth-century European empire building and its technologies of conquest. Mainstream framing, useful as a shared reference to complicate. youtube.com/watch?v=alJaltUmrGo
- “Palestine 1920: The Other Side of the Palestinian Story” (Al Jazeera English, 2022). Roughly 47 minutes, about 5.5 million views. An archival documentary on the British Mandate and early Zionist settlement, grounding present-day Palestine in colonial history. From a Qatari state-funded outlet; name its vantage point for the room. youtube.com/watch?v=QUCeQt8zg5o
- “King Leopold II & Colonialism in the Congo” (The People Profiles, 2024). Roughly 79 minutes, about 690,000 views. A long-form account of the Congo Free State atrocities, a screening-length companion to King Leopold’s Ghost. youtube.com/watch?v=pYprPGkwG08
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially histories of Southeast Asian, Pacific, and Caribbean colonialism, and of resistance told from the colonized side.