Canadian intellectual, Ricardo Duchesne, has done fine work in defence of White European civilisation, particularly by debunking historical material from the Left. In the post below he tackles the leftist dependency/imperialism/colonialism thesis that Western civilisation only achieve greatness (something the Left contests as well), by exploiting the rest of the world. One of their arguments is based upon the slave trade, but even here slavery was mainly in agriculture and plantations, rather than industry, which usually required much more skilled workforce, than slaves. Ultimately, even in agriculture, machinery replaced slave labour in any case. As Duchesne notes: "the total sums of money invested by slave traders in the process of industrialization amounted to less than 1% of the total capital invested during the key period of industrialization between 1760 and 1810, as was argued by Roger Anstey in his extensive study, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (1975)."
In the extract below, Dr Duchesne presents a critique of the Marxist views of both Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, who basically argued that it was the imperialism of the West via colonialism that led to Western advancements. Contrary to this Duchesne shows in his work that the West would have achieved greatness even if these Third World countries did not exist. In fact, it has been the diffusion of technologies from the West that has generated development in these countries, that Frank and Wallerstein saw as oppressed. Japan, China and South Korea have all developed through the diffusion of Western technology, rather than any sort of imperialism model, which is but another Marxist fairy tale.
https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2024/07/europeans-developed-not-underdeveloped-the-nonwhite-world
"One of the biggest historical lies inflicted on millions of white students is the claim that Western civilisation achieved its greatness, industrial economic take-off in the eighteenth century, and subsequent mass affluence in the twentieth century, by conquering, enslaving, and under-developing the rest of the world. In reality the diffusion of European technology has been the ultimate factor responsible for development outside the West.
Not a month goes by without a headline that Whites "should return stolen lands to Indian tribes". Another falsehood is that Europeans deliberately introduced slavery into Africa, when they simply made use of an established practice going back a thousand years and were instrumental in its demise on moral grounds.
A very influential book expressing these views is Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944), which argued that an inequitable "triangular trade" pattern, based on the slave trade and the production of colonial goods in American plantations, played a "critical role" in British industrialization. The British would not have been able to pay for new industrial technologies were it not for the huge profits they obtained from the selling of slave-produced "tropical goods" such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton to European consumers.
It does not matter that economic calculations would demonstrate that the total sums of money invested by slave traders in the process of industrialization amounted to less than 1% of the total capital invested during the key period of industrialization between 1760 and 1810, as was argued by Roger Anstey in his extensive study, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (1975).
The role that millions of British farmers and workers played, together with British institutions, with their greater protection of property rights, openness to merit, including the unsurpassed presence of numerous schools and societies dedicated to the application of scientific ideas, were somehow not "crucial".
But the effort to inflict moral culpability on Europeans would not be restricted to their past historical actions. It was argued with increasing intensity from the 1960s on, that the current prosperity Europeans were enjoying was being made possible through their control of a capitalist world economic order systematically engaged in the exploitation of "peripheral" non-White nations.
The most important advocate of this idea was Andre Gunder Frank (1929-2005), starting with his two books, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967), and Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (1969). These books spearheaded Frank into international fame only a rare few academics ever attain, with countless visiting professorships and seminars at dozens of universities around the world, active involvement in leftist politics in Latin America, and numerous honors, most recently "the Andre Gunder Frank Memorial Library" at the Art Nouveau building of the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga.
The backwardness of Latin America, Frank insisted, was due to a situation in which Latin Americans suffered a balance of payments deficit in the world economy, resulting in the continuous transfer of a "surplus" from "satellite" nations to "metropolitan" European nations. This surplus transfer provided the capital necessary for the development of European nations at the cost of the "underdevelopment" of Latin America. Frank would come up with a very effective phrase to inflict white guilt: "the development of underdevelopment". The nations outside European lands were not "undeveloped", less developed than European nations, they were "under-developed" in the course of the last centuries. This process of "development of underdevelopment" was still going on in the twentieth century.
The next most influential advocate was Immanuel Wallerstein. His two volume work, The Modern World-System, vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1974), and The Modern World-System, vol. II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (1980), would bring him an international reputation rarely unsurpassed in the annals of academia. Wallerstein became an irrefutable guru; no matter how much empirical evidence was stacked against his theory, he would be crowned a "father of world history", with journals dedicated singularly to his ideas, research centres and all, as well as a permanent "section" in the American Sociological Association.
His argument was extremely simple; it stated that a world division of labour had been created from the sixteenth century onward by militaristic European states. Once these European nations had positioned themselves at the top of the capitalist system, they imposed a division of labour with themselves as the producers of manufactured goods, using different types of labour, from wage to slave labour in various parts of the world, while relegating colonized areas to the production of raw materials for export to meet the requirements of capitalist accumulation in the "core" advanced nations. Core nations had strong states with which to police this unequal economic order, buy out their working classes with higher wages; whereas peripheral nations had weak states at the mercy of the dictates of European leaders and capitalists.
Wallerstein's theory insisted was that once a nation was subordinated to a peripheral role, as exporter of raw materials with a weak state, it would not be able to move up into a high income economy. The only way out from the world system was communism, not "state capitalism" as in the Soviet Union, but true communism as in Maoist China. Facts, however, were to prove his theory wrong; most importantly the rise of the so-called Newly Industrialized Countries, or NICS: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Hong, Singapore, and even Mexico and Brazil, through the 1970s and 1980s. The Asian NICS in particular experienced spectacular growth in GDP per capita, breaking with their traditional role as peripheral nations supplying raw materials and agricultural goods to the core countries, becoming major exporters of high tech goods, radios, watches, vehicles, petroleum products, electronics, and telecommunications equipment, combined with substantial improvements in life expectancy, infant mortality, backed by strong governments.
Wallerstein and his pupils would have none of this, coming up with all sorts of circumstantial reasons to account for the NICS. Taiwan and Korea, they argued, had benefited from the less exploitative nature of Japanese imperialism, which developed an infrastructure in these countries; South Korea and Taiwan carried out extensive land reforms and benefited from their geopolitical situation during the Cold War as recipients of massive aid and loans, and they had strong states built on the Japanese model, with the state playing a key role in the promotion of industrialization. The problem with all these excuses is that they don't refute the fact that these nations, through their own internal dynamics, did escape their peripheral position in the world economy. The world system is not the totality and primary historical force Wallerstein claimed for it.
How could so many academics believe that a transformation, the industrial revolution, so uniquely dependent on scientific knowledge, favorable institutions, and a population with aptitudes, foresight, frugality, and devotion to hard work, was made possible by slavery and extraction of resources, features typically found in numerous societies throughout history, none of which industrialized? All these arguments constitute a complete inversion of reality. Rather than causing underdevelopment, Europeans have been the ultimate developers of the world. Without the diffusion of European inventions there would have been no development anywhere. Of course, there have been other answers to the question why Europe industrialized first.
A very popular book is Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012), by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. They argue that development depends ultimately on the existence of "inclusive" political institutions that are open to innovators, protect property rights, and thus encourage inventions and economic growth. In contrast, countries with "extractive" institutions are dominated by monopolistic elites who view the state as a means of acquiring wealth, giving preference to their clients and kin members, relying on unfair regulations, rather than allowing the profit motive to express itself freely in an open environment in which the most talented innovators can find opportunities.
But this argument, strong as it is, has been effectively criticized for relying on a single factor explanation, ignoring the role that geography, geopolitics, and cultural beliefs have played. It has been correctly pointed out that Germany under Prussia's authoritarian rule, Japan under the non-democratic Meiji Restoration, South Korea and China under authoritarian institutions that were not "inclusive", all managed to achieve industrialization.
After one examines all the varying factors involved in the developmental experiences of non-European nations, the truly ultimate factor, the one variable that stands apart as the most important, has been the diffusion of technologies invented by European nations. Geographical conditions, type of governments, and cultural values have undoubtedly played a role in encouraging or obstructing diffusion, but the rider in all cases of non-European industrialization has been the diffusion of European inventions, not whether non-Europeans were able to invent new technologies.
All the countries that developed after England, except for European countries, which contributed many inventions and innovations, managed to industrialize only in the degree to which they created the setting for the assimilation of European technologies. Japan, China, South Korea industrialized insofar as they carried out political reforms conducive to the integration of technologies invented by Europeans. Only after they industrialized, Japan first, and now South Korea, Taiwan, and China, are we witnessing some domestic invention."