>Capitalism is a world system. No generalizations can
>be made about Hong Kong unless you trace its historical roots in the global
>banking system. The "success" of places like Hong Kong or Switzerland are
>dialectically related to the failure of Indonesia and the former Yugoslavia.
On an instinctive level, I know this is true, though I'd probably want to pair, say, the Netherlands and Indonesia, and the U.S. and Mexico. I have no doubt that the initial European takeoff was fundamentally dependent on colonial plunder. But just how much does the prosperity of the First World depend on the immiseration of the Third today? How much value is actually extracted from the neocolonies? I mean this as a real question and not a provocation.
Doug