A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE (Part 16). This blog is a continuation of review of The Creation of World Poverty by Teresa Hayter, published in 1990.
Indians were more advanced in many fields
In India, the skill which was most clearly more developed than in Europe was the manufacture of textiles whose quality was much superior to that produced elsewhere. Indians had also advanced in other fields, for example, in the iron and steel industry. North Africa was on the whole more highly developed than the rest of Africa; in particular, it was responsible for some of the scientific discoveries on which later European progress was based.
Nutritional levels have deteriorated in many areas
It seems that, in the earliest societies of hunters and gatherers, and slash and burn agriculture, there was little hunger. But famines existed before the advent of the Europeans, and famines have been made, by hoarding and greed, from earliest times. In a number of areas, self-sufficiency in food and also in fertility of the soil have been destroyed; and people have become dependent, to a degree that did not exist before, on buying food which they cannot afford. Josue de Castro, in The Geography of Hunger, gives numerous examples to indicate that nutritional levels have deteriorated in many areas.
Capitalism and colonialism created the starvation, suffering and misery
Walter Rodney argues that: “Colonialism created conditions which led not just to periodic famine, but to chronic undernourishment, malnutrition and deterioration in the physique of the African people. If such a statement sounds wildly extravagant, it is only because bourgeois propaganda has conditioned even Africans to believe that malnutrition and starvation were the natural lot of Africans from time immemorial. A black child with a transparent rib-case, huge head, bloated stomach, protruding eyes, and twigs as arms and legs was the favorite poster of the large charitable operation known as Oxfam. But Oxfam never bothered the consciences of the people of Europe by telling them that capitalism and colonialism created the starvation, suffering and misery of the child in the first place.”
When the colonialists intervened agricultural devastation began
Agriculture in many parts of the world was quite highly developed before the period of European expansion, in some areas more so than it is now. The state authorities in India, China, Sri Lanka, Kampuchea and other places had built elaborate irrigation systems and hydraulic works, many of which have subsequently fallen into disuse. In Africa advanced methods were well known and used: for example, terracing, crop rotation, green manuring, mixed farming and regulated swamp farming. It was only when the colonialists intervened that the agricultural devastation, so familiar today, began.
Chapter 5: The Europeans Get Ahead
Why, from 1500 onwards, were there prodigious advances while the situation deteriorated elsewhere? The two phenomena are related. From the end of the 15th century the Europeans began to expand overseas, dominated large areas of the world, and were the first to develop the form of production known as capitalism. In the 17th and 18th centuries agriculture in Britain became increasingly capitalist in the sense that the land was concentrated into relatively large farms on which people worked for wages. The main distinguishing feature of capitalism is that it is a form of production in which the tools, materials and the land necessary for producing goods are no longer owned by the people who do the work, but by capitalists who employ laborers for a wage.
Two conditions are necessary
The organization of wage laborers into factories and mills made possible much greater efficiency in production, partly because mechanization could be introduced on a much larger scale and also because jobs could be broken down into simple, repetitive components and performed much more rapidly by a relatively unskilled workforce. For capitalist forms of production to develop, two conditions are necessary: a free labor force; and the accumulation of money capital in the hands of potential investors.