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Shipman, Alan; Chukwuma, Julia Ngozi and Dauncey, Emil
(2024).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429282348-25
Abstract
In his famous book entitled The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon, a prominent anticolonial intellectual, born in the 1920s on the Caribbean Island of Martinique, wrote:
[The] European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery… . The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too… . For in a very concrete way Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries: Latin America, China, and Africa. From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries toward that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.
(Fanon, 2001: 76, 81) While Fanon critically emphasised that Europe’s development was only possible because of its exploitation of its colonies, economic historians from the Global North had rarely voiced such an indictment. Many emphasised instead the internal, self-generating factors that may have promoted Europe’s (and later North America’s) early industrial dynamism: free enterprise, free speech and thought, accountable and democratic law-making, faster generation and application of knowledge, thrift and deferral of gratification, or a superior work ethic. This enabled them to focus on the supposedly benign effects of colonisation: spreading new practices, ideas, technologies, and forms of social, cultural, economic, and institutional organisation that removed constraints on their hosts’ ‘development’, even if while so doing they also spread devastating diseases and religions whose appeal at home would soon decline.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
