>No empirical evidence? The very countries we are sitting in once
>belonged to others--you may have heard of them. They would be
>included included in the definition of th south.
There's no question in my mind that the North's rise to wealth was greased by theft of resources and people from the South (though when I say things like that, Bob Brenner often writes me offlist to disagree). But today, I'm not so sure. My sense is that the world's poor regions are mostly outside the circuit of value production. I'm happy to listen to arguments to the contrary, but I've yet to hear one.
Doug