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How about the Arab sex slave trade in White women?

Andre Gunder Frank

Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Wallerstein

NICS

Leftist Reactions against Refuting Facts

European Royal Feast

Diffusion of European Technology Is the Ultimate Factor

It does not matter that economic calculations would demonstrate that the total sums of money invested by slave traders in the process of industrialization amounted to less than 1% of the total capital invested during the key period of industrialization between 1760 and 1810, as was argued by Roger Anstey in his extensive 456 page book,(1975). This book is now a blanc space in the internet , whereas Williams's 1944 thesis remains sacrosanct in academia, elaborated celebrated , and imitated a thousand fold.The role that millions of British farmers and workers played, together with British institutions, with their greater protection of property rights, openness to merit, including the unsurpassed presence in Britain of numerous schools and societies dedicated to the application of scientific ideas, were somehow not "crucial" but parasitic on the hard work of Africans in the Americas. How could so many academics believe that a transformation, the industrial revolution, so uniquely dependent on scientific knowledge , favourable institutions,a population with aptitudes, foresight, frugality, and devotion to hard work — components never found before in unison — was made possible by slavery, a typical feature found in numerous societies throughout history, none of which industrialized?But the effort to inflict moral culpability on Europeans would not be restricted to their past historical actions. It was argued with increasing intensity from the 1960s on that theprosperity Europeans and North Americans were enjoying was being made possible through their control of a capitalist world economic order systematically engaged in the exploitation of "peripheral" non-White nations. The most important advocate of this idea was the Jewish émigré Andre Gunder Frank (1929-2005), starting with his two books,(1967), and(1969). These books spearheaded Frank into international fame only a rare few academics ever attain, with countless visiting professorships and seminars at dozens of universities around the world, active involvement in leftist politics in Latin America, and numerous honours, most recently "the Andre Gunder Frank Memorial Library" at the Art Nouveau building of the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga.The backwardness of Latin America, Frank insisted, was not due to to a supposedly feudal subsistence economy; on the contrary, Latin America was capitalist from the moment it was incorporated into a European dominated world market in the sixteenth century. This world market entailed a situation in which Latin Americans suffered a balance of payments deficit, resulting in the continuous transfer of a "surplus" from "satellite" nations to "metropolitan" European nations. This surplus transfer provided the capital necessary for the development of European nations at the cost of the "underdevelopment" of Latin America. Whites were still benefiting from this system of exploitation in the twentieth century. The slave plantations, the mineral mines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the "free trade" deals of the nineteenth century, and the multinationals of the current era, were all equally exploitative, employing different mechanisms of surplus extraction through the same process of capitalistic exploitation.Frank would come up with a very effective phrase to inflict guilt on prosperous nations: "the development of underdevelopment". Western nations only developed, and continued to be wealthy, because they dominated a world economy characterized by the extraction of surplus from peripheral nations. The nations outside European lands were not "undeveloped", less developed than European nations, they were "-developed" in the course of the last centuries. The nations of Europe were not really more advanced than non-European nations in the sixteenth century; rather, they became more advanced through the underdevelopment of the rest of the world. This process of "development of underdevelopment" was still going on in the twentieth century, and the only way for Third World peoples to ever achieve development was to bring about communist revolutions in their lands and "de-link" their economies from the Western capitalist order.The White working classes could no longer be counted on to make Marxist revolutions; as it was, Lenin was already arguing in the early 1900s that the British, French, and German working classes were more interested in reforming capitalism than overthrowing it, because they were benefiting from the imperialist exploitation of non-European lands, becoming a "labour aristocracy" . Frank and others would push this idea further to argue that Third World peoples would be the true revolutionary agents. There were complaints from "classical" Marxists who believed that true communist revolutions could only succeed in advanced capitalist nations facing the "contradictions" of "over production" and "falling rates of profit" Marx had written about. But there was no stopping those who were anchoring their ideas in actual movements of "national liberation" and "communist development" across the Third World during the 1960s and 1970s.It did not matter that the British Marxist Bill Warren published an article in 1973,, persuasively demonstrating, through detailed empirical data, that capitalist development was rapidly taking place in at least some Third World countries. Warren explained that even if remitted profits exceeded foreign investment, development was possible (and real) since economic change was generated "in between" the inward flow of investment and the outward flow of repatriated profits. This was plain economics, but Warren was immediately chastised for his inability to understand the nature of capitalism as an imperialistic system inherently exploitative and hierarchical; the "development" of the Third World was a mirage bedeviled by huge debts, authoritarian governments, and "disarticulated growth" . Warren tried to elaborate his ideas into a book, only to die in 1978 with an unfinished manuscript, forgotten as a old White male with no business writing about Marxism.Instead, the 1970s and 1980s would see the rise into world wide prominence, unsurpassed in the annals of academia, of Immanuel Wallerstein, with the publication of(1974), and(1980). Today Wallerstein is a guru that cannot be refuted no matter how much empirical evidence has been stacked against his theory. Crowned as a "father of world history" , with journals dedicated singularly to his ideas, centres and all, as well as a permanent "section" in the American Sociological Association, this ethnic compatriot of Frank would inflict a large dosage of moral guilt on Europeans across the world.In its essentials, Wallerstein did not say anything that was not already contained in the writings of Frank. What was new in him was the extent to which he set out to demonstrate that the entire course of European modern history could only be properly understood in terms of its imposition of a "world capitalist system". He was quite adept in persuading thousands of impressionable readers that his books were unlike any others in the way they sought to comprehend the "whole" beyond the histories of "isolated" countries, isolated economies, isolated political events. By emphasizing the way he sought to comprehend the entire economy of the world, the relations of all countries to the "world system", he did appear to be offering a truly comprehensive account. Marxists were elated, here they were, with two volumes at hand, feeling that they were dealing with the biggest subject of all, the totality of human relations across the world, how the dynamics of all countries were determined by their role within the totality of the world system. The economy was not only, as in Marx, the substructure which conditioned superstructural phenomena; it was the whole world, a "world capitalist system" pulsating according to the single logic of capital accumulation, conditioning the historical patterns of development across all the parts trapped within the system.In truth, Wallerstein was offering one of the most reductionist accounts of modern world history ever conceived, taking one single aspect of the totality of human relations, world economic exchanges, and raising it to be the whole within which everything else would be comprehended. Everything was about the supposed wealth Europeans had extracted from others, in terms of which everything else in European history was explained, the Renaissance, the voyages of discovery, the Scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial revolution.The thesis of his multi volume work,, was extremely simple; basically, it stated that a world division of labour had been created from the sixteenth century onward by militaristic European states. Once these European nations had positioned themselves at the top of the capitalist system, they imposed a division of labour with themselves as the producers of manufactured goods, using different types of labour, from wage to slave labour in various parts of the world, while relegating colonized areas to the production of raw materials for export to meet the requirements of capitalist accumulation in the "core" advanced nations. Core nations had strong states with which to police this unequal economic order, buy out their working classes with higher wages; whereas peripheral nations had weak states at the mercy of the dictates of European leaders and capitalists.One of the central tenets of Wallerstein's theory was that once a nation was subordinated to a peripheral role, as exporter of raw materials with a weak state, it would not be able move up the economic ladder into a high income economy. The only way out from the world system was communism, not "state capitalism" as in the Soviet Union, but true communism as in Maoist China. Facts, however, were to prove his theory wrong, most importantly the rise of the so-called Newly Industrialized Countries, or NICS: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Hong, Singapore, and even Mexico and Brazil, through the 1970s and 1980s. The Asian NICS in particular experienced spectacular growth in GDP per capita, breaking with their traditional role as peripheral nations supplying raw materials and agricultural goods to the core countries, becoming major exporters of high tech goods, radios, watches, vehicles, petroleum products, electronics, and telecommunications equipment, combined with substantial improvements in life expectancy, infant mortality, backed by strong governments.Wallerstein and his docile pupils would have none of this, coming up with all sorts of circumstantial reasons to account for the NICS. Taiwan and Korea, they argued, had benefited from the less exploitative nature of Japanese imperialism, which developed an infrastructure in these countries; South Korea and Taiwan carried out extensive land reforms and benefited from their geopolitical situation during the Cold War as recipients of massive aid and loans, and they had strong states built on the Japanese model, with the state playing a key role in the promotion of industrialization. The problem with all these excuses is that they don't refute the fact that these nations, through their own internal dynamics, did escape their peripheral position in the world economy. The world system is not the bet it all totality and primary historical force Wallerstein claimed for it.What the praising of Japanese imperialism showed instead is that the enemy of world systems theory is not imperialism per se, but Western imperialism. The fact is, however, that Japanese imperialism was driven by brutal actions and notions of racial supremacy . The difference is that contemporary Japanese culture is not dominated by a hostile elite trampling relentlessly upon Japanese past actions. It is also the case that Asian NICS were ruled by nationalistic elites committed to the development of their nations, investing heavily in education and beneficiaries of a disciplined labor force. The Japanese today can look back in pride at their actions in Korea and Taiwan Another fall back argument by world system theorists is that the periphery, with the exception of a few "circumstantial" examples, has experienced an "absolute decline" in its living standards over the last decades, and that this decline shows that the ability of countries to move from low income status to a higher income status is still "severely limited". Yet, according to World Bank statistics, in just the brief period from 2008 to 2013, seven countries moved from upper-middle income into a higher income category; nine countries moved from low income to lower-middle income, and fifteen from lower-middle income to upper-middle income.One would think that world systems theory would not survive these refuting facts, but all the introduction sociology texts I have examined over the last 20 years still employ world systems theory as the main point of reference to understand development issues. "New" theories are "offshoots of the world systems approach". A "new" theory known as "global commodity chains" simply looks to the spread of manufacturing into former low income economies as part of the way the capitalist system has now spread its processing of goods in multiple places on the globe with the "lowest wage" processing steps still taking place in many "impoverished" nations stuck at the bottom. This new approach "stems" from world systems theory A very effective discursive strategy employed by leftists to continue inflicting guilt on Europeans, despite Third World development, has been to focus on the "widening gap" between rich and poor countries in technological innovations. Many developing countries cannot afford modern technology but have remained, at best, "technology adopters", or, at worst, "technologically disconnected". While the percentage of people in the world living in extreme poverty declined by about 36 percent from 1900 to 2015, the actual number of extremely poor people increased "sharply" from 290 million to 403 million due to overall population growth.These facts, which no longer have any connection to European "underdevelopment" but simply point to the persistently superior performance of Europeans, are nevertheless being used by leftists to make the argument that Europeans must be held morally responsible for "restricting" immigration from poor countries and thus not allowing poor people to improve their standard of living. This is the argument of Roberto Korzeniewicz and Timothy Moran make in their "new and imaginative" book,(2010), "winner of the 2010 Best Book Award from the Political Economy of World Systems Section of the American Sociological Association". They call for the elimination of all restrictions on the ability of people from low income countries to immigrate to Western nations, as a "main" solution to global inequality. Westerners, they insist, have a moral obligation to open their borders to billions of immigrants, otherwise their are morally culpable for world poverty. European peoples should not be allowed to have a sense of citizenship based on identification with a nation or a culture, as this excludes those who have a different national identity, which is a source of inequality in the world.These arguments are not only pathological in their complete disregard for European ethnic identity, but constitute a complete inversion of reality. Rather than causing underdevelopment, Europeans have been the ultimate developers of the world. Without the diffusion of European inventions there would have been no development anywhere. But since WWII, with the spread of cultural Marxism, Europeans were made to feel there was something immoral about their affluent status, and so the most asked question in economics has been: Why are Western countries so much richer than others? The most influential answer was that European development came at the cost of the underdevelopment of others.Of course, there were other answers to this question; a very popular one expressed recently, not really original, but well argued, came in the book,(2012), by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. They argue that development depends ultimately on the existence of "inclusive" political institutions that are open to innovators, protect property rights, and thus encourage inventions and economic growth. In contrast, countries with "extractive" institutions are dominated by monopolistic elites who view the state as a means of acquiring wealth, giving preference to their clients and kin members, relying on unfair regulations, rather than allowing the profit motive to express itself freely in an open environment in which the most talented innovators can find opportunities. This argument has been effectively criticized for relying on a single factor explanation, ignoring the role that geography, geopolitics, and cultural beliefs have played. It has been correctly pointed out that Germany under Prussia's authoritarian rule, Japan under the non-democratic Meiji Restoration, South Korea and China under authoritarian institutions that were not "inclusive", all managed to achieve industrialization.Yet, after one examines all the varying factors involved in the developmental experiences of non-European nations, the truly ultimate factor, the one variable that stands apart as the most important, has been the diffusion of technologies invented by European nations. Geographical conditions, type of governments, and cultural values have undoubtedly played a role in allowing, encouraging, or obstructing diffusion, but the rider in all cases of non-European industrialization has been the diffusion of European inventions, not whether non-Europeans were able to invent new technologies. All the countries that developed after England, except for European countries, which contributed many inventions and innovations, managed to industrialize only in the degree to which they created the setting for the assimilation of European technologies. Japan, China, South Korea did not industrialize thanks to domestic inventions but only insofar as they carried out political reforms conducive to the integration of technologies invented by Europeans. Only after they industrialized, Japan first, and now South Korea, Taiwan, and China, are we witnessing domestic inventions.Moreover, it should be noted, that the modernization of the political institutions, upon which Asians relied to create the framework for the adoption of European inventions, was itself a European creation. Europeans were not responsible for creating liberal-democratic states only; they were also great rationalizers of institutions and governments, which sometimes came together with liberalism, but not always, as the case of Germany showed with excellence. The German path has been called "authoritarian modernization from above", that is, industrialization led by the old agrarian Junker class in cooperation with the new industrial class, both committed to the creation of an efficient rational state and capitalist economy, by means of universal conscription, centralization of power, state promotion of industry, technical training of future state officials, emphasis on a scientific (but also a nationalistic-authoritarian) curriculum. Japan's industrialization is unthinkable without a consideration of their adoption of this "German model" of rational authoritarianism Therefore, the question should never have been how Europe underdeveloped the Third World, but why did Westerners came to hold themselves morally culpable for the poverty of other nations when it should have been evidently obvious that without diffusion of their technologies no development would have been possible anywhere outside Europe.