I would like some reccomended reading for a University project based on imperialism and the debt owed by western “advanced” society to the third world. I already have the basics — Lenin, Fanon, Liberalism - A Counter History, Inglorious Empire, Late Victorian Holocausts and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa — so i’m looking more towards how the people and societies of the first world got so rich, rather than the details of the crimes of empires (but both are good). The books don’t have to be by leftists, but obviously it would be preferred. Thanks.
These are very historical, but that’s kind of what you want.
- Anyway, Fernand Braudel’s three part series, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, is a fantastic account of the rise of the West and its material culture. (Vol 1, 2, and 3 here)
- Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century builds off of Braudel’s research is particularly concerned with capital formation and long business cycles in the imperial core, and explains really well how the three hegemons (the Dutch, the British, the Americans) were created.
- For a more general history of the world, with an eye towards why the West got so fabulously rich, check out John Darwin’s After Tamerlane.
- For some counterfactual history of why the West got rich and the East didn’t, I recommend ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age by Andre Gunder Frank, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz, and Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm.
- Check out The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood for a specific look at how the capitalism virus spread from England to the rest of the world.
Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century by John Smith
Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism by Kwame Nkrumha
Fuck, I should have been more specific. I am not looking for 20/21st century imperialism, but much more so in the 18th and 19th centuries.
An interesting perspective, though perhaps a little bit outside of the scope of your research would be Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans. It’s not really about imperialism, but about economic development. Chang looks at the policies rich countries used to become high productivity industrialized societies, and then shows that this is the exact opposite of what IMF, World Bank etc. demand from poor countries.
