[PEN-L:3286] Jim O' Connor on AGF's World Economy 1400-1800

[Barbara Laurence <cns@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Between 1400-1800 the major nations/regions (and some minor ones)
diversified their peoples' consumption basket via foreign trade. At the end
of the mercantilist/absolutist era in the West, each major nation-state
followed an import substitute industrialization (ISI) foreign
trade/investment policy. The South did the same when they could (1930s,
WWII, through the early-late 1960's, in India's case later). Then
neo-liberalism and all that stopped this process (e.g., in Latin America
after the coups of 1962-64) and the South was forced into an export-led
industrialization strategy, which does not diversify the means of
production in the full sense that ISI did and does. Now each Western major
nation-state has acquired the diversified production base needed to produce
diversity in consumption. (Hence, foreign trade to a very large degree has
nothing to do with consumer wants but only the imperatives of capital
accumulation.) This is a hugely important change, not only in capitalist
history but also human history, and deserves its own dates (1800-present).
Asia, of course, was largely left out of this diversification process
mainly because of the absence of Western style nation-states, which after
all were the main causes of said deversification. Now Asia is trying to
catch up, but its export-led industrialization policies inhibit the
catching up process, so does Western imperialism, ecological
considerations, and other factors.

History is not without its ironies. The irony here being that France,
Germany, the U.S., Japan, etc., have become more and more alike, i.e., more
homogenous, precisely because they all became more diversified along the
same lines, i.e., wage labor, big corporations, commodity form of need
satisfaction, welfare state, the auto, etc.
Cheers,
Jim O'Connor