How did the colonies influence Industrialization?
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Answer:
Colonial Industrialisation, 1840s-1960s
William Gervase Clarence-Smith
Dependency theorists suggest that the law of comparative
advantage is a confidence trick, perpetrated and enforced by 'core'
countries to prevent 'peripheral' countries from industrialising. Leaving
aside the fetishisation of manufacturing implicit in this approach, this
paper seeks to demonstrate that there was more industrial growth than
is generally realised in the age of high imperialism, even in areas under
formal colonial rule. Industrialisation is defined as the application of
non-human energy and the factory system to the production of goods.
The impact of modern colonial policies was mixed, mainly
positive to 1914, and mainly negative thereafter. As long as free trade
predominated, the tropical world benefited from a roughly level playing
field, with the additional advantage that security costs were met in large
part by metropolitan taxpayers. A neo-mercantilist cycle followed from
1914. Protectionism was eroded after 1945, but only gradually, leaving
today's world less free trading and globalised than it was in 1914.
The periodisation adopted here runs directly counter to the one
that is generally accepted. The 'normal' story is one of muscular free
trade sweeping away existing 'industries', that is artisanal handicrafts,
and preventing modern ones from emerging. The later phases of
imperialism are credited with some timid progress, albeit too little too
late. It is argued here that this traditional way of looking at the problem
stems from an obsessive and unwarranted attention given to the
production of consumer goods for the internal market. When one
embraces a wider view of manufacturing, the period before 1914
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