--- On Fri, 7/17/09, dredmond at efn.org <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
>
> A small detail called "colonialism". Those teeming peasant
> masses of yore
> are now cellphone-using, TV-watching city-dwellers, living
> in independent
> states. Neoliberalism tried to keep them in check with
> structural
> adjustment and debt peonage; they fought back via delinking
> and forex
> accumulation.
[WS:] Back then the Indian peasant masses of yore were on the receiving end of the capitalist core (Britain) industry as well - it was textiles rather than electronics, but the principle was pretty much the same.
I think you misinterpret the role of colonialism in European development - it was not the source of raw material and cheap labor, as many seem to believe, or at least not primarily, at least during the industrialization (19th century.) The main object of colonial policy was similar to that of chess, to preempt the adversaries of taking control of strategic locations. East Africa is a prime example - the Brits got involved there only to get rid of the Zanzibar-based Arab slave trade and later German colonial project in Tanganyika. The fact that Germany became a major European power without much access to colonies whereas Spain and Portugal lost their status as major power despite access to colonies provide further evidence to this point.
>From that pov, neo-colonialism was not much different - Americans got involved to thwart Russians or Chinese, and vice versa - not because the exploited tremendous riches. I suspect, that these neo-colonial policies were on balance a drain on the respective national economies.
Again, that does not mean that colonialism was not a lucrative business to individual British (or American) firms - as British capital retain ownership of much of the industry in post-colonial Africa - but from the macroeconomic (and macropolitical) perspective this was negligible. The chief significance of colonial domination to modern powers was strategic control and the capacity to keep other imperialists out - not economic exploitation.
If that interpretation is correct, the absence of old style colonialism makes little difference for the merging multi-polar world. It is likely that this will be the same old game, only played by different national actors (China, inter alia) and with different gadgets (electronics rather than textiles, and drone planes rather than gunboats.)
Wojtek