Brad, add South Africa and Zimbabwe! Capitalist industrialisation "needed" an articulation of modes of production between the mines/factories/plantations and artificially pre-capitalist "bantustan" zones where rural women and the environment provided a nice site of superexploitation in the reproduction of ultra-cheap labour power. More negative externalities, writ huge on the socio-ecological fabric. I'd guess (who can really measure!) that the median went way down from the 1890s through at least the 1950s as this system's logic fully unfolded. Patrick Bond email: pbond at wn.apc.org * phone: 2711-614-8088 home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa work: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa email: bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za phone: 2711-488-5917 * fax: 2711-484-2729