Free Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her by Dinesh D'Souza

CHAPTER 12
    A GLOBAL SUCCESS STORY
    The end of empire has been accompanied by a flourishing of other means of subjugation. 1
    K WAME N KRUMAH , N EOCOLONIALISM
    W e live today in a world of economic globalization—a global marketplace that has been decisively shaped by America and the West. Progressives claim that the first step in this globalization was the direct colonialism of the British and the French, and it has been followed by America-led “neocolonialism,” another form of economic exploitation that amounts to theft. To a generation that grew up in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s, nothing seemed more obvious than that colonialism itself was theft on a grand scale. Britain, for example, took cotton and other raw materials from India, converted them into finished products in the factories of Manchester and Liverpool, and then sold those products domestically and internationally. Indians would end up buying shirts manufactured in England with Indian cotton—while the Indian handlooms closed down.
    Yet for the British to purchase cotton at the Indian market price does not seem, by itself, to constitute theft. The Indian farmers had been selling at that price to the Indian handloom mills. Nor can the British be faulted for using the machines of the Industrial Revolution to efficiently convert cotton into cloth, nor for selling that cloth to Indians more cheaply than the Indian handlooms could. Not only were British manufacturers not stealing from the Indian people; they were actually giving them a better deal than they were previously getting from the Indian mills. Moreover, there is a deeper factual point that often goes unrecognized in the anti-colonial literature. In that literature we read innumerable claims to the effect that “the Europeans stole rubber from Malaya, and cocoa from West Africa, and tea from India.” But as economic historian P. T. Bauer points out, before British rule, there were no rubber trees in Malaya, nor cocoa trees in West Africa, nor tea in India. The British brought the rubber tree to Malaya from South America. They brought tea to India from China. 2 And they taught the Africans to grow cocoa. In these cases, far from “stealing” native resources, the British deserve credit for introducing profitable crops that benefited the native economies as well as British global trade.
    Even more broadly, it makes no sense to claim that the West grew rich by taking everybody else’s stuff for the simple reason that there wasn’t very much to take. Most Third World countries were desperately poor before colonization, so they could hardly be worse off in material terms after the colonizers went home. How, then, did the West become affluent if not by stealing from Asia, Africa, and South America? The reason is the West invented some new things that didn’t exist before. These inventions were modern science, modern technology, and modern capitalism. Science here refers not merely to invention but to what Alfred North Whitehead terms “the invention of invention,” a new mechanism for generating knowledge and convertingthat knowledge into usable technological products. Capitalism here refers not merely to trade but to property rights, contracts, courts to enforce them, and later limited liability, credit, stock exchanges, insurance, and the whole ensemble of institutions that Adam Smith outlined in the Wealth of Nations . Science, technology, and capitalism are Western institutions that developed due to internal causes, from the scientific revolution to the Industrial Revolution.
    The impact of the West in transforming developing countries for the better was noted in the nineteenth century by, of all people, Karl Marx. Marx credited colonialism with transforming feudal society into modern industrial society. “England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society,” Marx acknowledged. In particular, “It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed