Global rift: The Third World comes of age

by Leften Stavros Stavrianos

Book by L.S. Stavrianos

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World History, Economics, Sociology

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Naeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is perhaps the most important I have read in my lifetime. It helps me place my life in the history of the planet and helps me see how each part of the world is connected to every other.

Global Rift came out in 1980. There is still no book like it. It is the closest thing we have to a history of the 3rd world. It starts in the 16 century and takes us into the 20th. 800 pages of what is otherwise carefully hidden history by the orthodoxy.

Below I reproduce section C and the conclusion to our, “Units, Markets, Relations and Flow: From Mainstream IPE’s Interacting Parts to Heterodoxy’s Unfolding Wholes” with David Blaney for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, (published on line: April, 2018). The article compares three books: K.N. Chaudhuri'Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History and L.S. Stavrianos' Global Rift. All three books are must reads for anyone taking seriously the history of the "Third World."

C. Stavrianos’s Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (1980)

Global Rift presents a systematic and relational history of the First and Third Worlds, in which both are constituted by the “structure and dynamics of the whole” (23). Stavrianos stresses the unique dynamism of European capitalism as it incorporates all other regions of the world as part of its own logic, so that the wealth of Europe and poverty in most of the regions of the rest of the world are interconnected. While Stavrianos invariably explores internal political, economic, and cultural aspects of particular societies, his aim, like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, is to highlight the neglected “indivisible whole” – the external, interactive, and systemic ways that both wealth and poverty are produced in a global political economy. Other theorists and other books, including Wolf’s, present similar accounts of the “great stream” of “social process,” but none have quite the range and depth of detail of Global Rift.

Stavrianos demarcates capitalism both temporally and spatially, according to criteria similar to Chaudhuri’s Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Temporally, he locates four periods of European capitalist expansion: (1) 1400-1770, in which the European “center” or “core” is engaged in commercial capitalism and colonialism is largely confined to the Americas; (2) 1770-1870, in which the center, primarily Britain, is engaged in industrial capitalism and there is a “waning colonialism” in the periphery; (3) 1870-1914, which he describes as the era of “monopoly capitalism” and world-wide colonialism; and (4) 1914-1980 (when the book was published), in the core must actively defend monopoly capitalism in the face of “revolution and decolonization,” which when subdued produces “neocolonialism” (41). These periods correspond to spatial delineations produced by and within spreading capitalist relations: the space which initiates and sustains capitalism (the core); that which the core has incorporated into its own dynamics (the Third World); that which begins to encounter European Capitalism but is not yet integrated (the periphery); and spaces that remain external to global capitalism. In short, as capitalism develops and intensifies, more and more of the peripheral and external spaces become internalized as the Third World. It is this dynamic social process and the spatial striations and inequalities it produces that Stavrianos wishes to reveal. By identifying these broad systemic patterns, he allows readers to see how particular spaces or societies in a particular time fit into the contours of capitalism as a global phenomenon.

For example, in the initial period of the emergence of West European capitalism, he shows how the Third World originated in the incorporation of the somewhat distinctive Eastern European region into the trade, investment, and production circuits of Western Europe (Chapter 3), extended quickly into Latin America (chapter 4). Some spaces remain “peripheral” at this stage: Africa, despite the centrality of the slave trade, and the Middle East, meaning the Ottoman empire, remain not yet penetrated by European capitalism (chapters 5 and 6). Asia, primarily India and China here, are largely spared capitalist penetration and remained an “external area” (chapter 7). Stavrianos performs three more tours of the world – each exploring the relation of core and periphery in successive periods of capitalist development.

The key and consistent point for Stavrianos, then, is that the First and Third Worlds are not simply products of separable and uneven internal developments. Rather, they are relationally co-constituted within an “indivisible whole,” with wealth on one side and poverty on the other. Indeed, “the phrase ‘Third World’ connotes those countries or regions that participated on unequal terms in what eventually became the global market economy” (31-2, emphasis added). For Stravrianos, the co-constituted structural inequalities central to capitalism profoundly distort human development as a whole, though the effects fall most fatally on the Third World, challenging claims of market-induced harmony. Though Stavrianos’ recognizes capitalism’s transformative role, including the expanding human productivity released by the restless pursuit of profit, he places greater ethical weight on the devastation wreaked on the economics, politics, and culture of the conquered societies (35-7). Capitalism utterly reshapes them: “This was a total and all-encompassing process, for the culture as well as the economies of those societies were profoundly distorted and remodeled in order to satisfy the demands of the global market” (37, emphasis added).

The burden of the text, and picking up the story of European expansion where Chaudhuri ends, is to show how the encounter between European capitalist expansion and the Third World imposes new relationships that incorporate the latter. Here Stavrianos relies, interestingly, on Joseph Schumpeter’s distinction between economic development and economic growth (1961, 63): Economic development “calls forth…qualitatively new phenomena” that “are not forced upon it from without but arise by its own initiative, from within,” whereas “mere economic growth” involves “processes of adaption… [of] the same kind as changes in the natural data.” Though Schumpeter’s major concern is not global dynamics but rather challenging the static character of equilibrium analysis (McNulty 1968; Legrand and Hagemann 2017), Stavrianos pounces on this distinction between internally created qualitative economic changes (development) versus economic changes that follow from externally initiated and generated processes (economic growth) to organize his narrative.

The distinguishing feature of Third World status besides low incomes, Stavrianos insists, is “growth determined by foreign capital and foreign markets rather than by local needs” (4). Externally determined growth fosters “vertical economic linkages” that tie raw material extraction and agricultural production in the Third World to demands in the “metropolitan centers.” By contrast, “horizontal economic linkages” more fully integrate local production and local needs and support local employment and incomes (39-40; emphasis added). Though the development of the “indivisible whole” of global capitalism may foster some “trickle down” for the First World working classes (267, 270, 439, 794), the dependence of Third World economies on growth via vertical economic ties means that incomes and wealth tend to “trickle up” (794):

"The people of the Third World experienced no corresponding improvement in living standards. For them the impact of the West was a wrenching experience, in which everything was turned upside down and inside out. This was inevitable, for all Third World societies, by definition, were integrated into the world market economy, with unavoidable disruptions and distortion of their traditional institutions (267)."

Thus, Stavrianos arrives at an elegant relational definition of the Third World:

“the Third World is not a set of countries or a set of statistical criteria but rather a set of relationships—unequal relationships between controlling metropolitan centers and dependent peripheral regions, whether colonies as in the past or neocolonial “independent” states as today (40)."

In all of this, Stavrianos asserts, the “interests of the colonies were automatically subordinated to those of the mother country” (55). After all, “the purpose of the colonies was to provide markets for manufactures, to supply raw materials that could not be produced at home, to support a merchant marine that would be valuable in wartime and to engender a large colonial population with manpower” (55-6). Colonial underdevelopment appears a natural and automatic corollary of the expansion of capitalism.

But can we be so certain that this subordination is natural and automatic? Why do the capitalism’s systemic inequalities map largely, if not always neatly, onto a European and North American Core and a Latin American, African and Asian Third World periphery? Creating and sustaining vertical ties with the colony follows an economic logic, certainly, but seems insufficient.

Stavrianos’ explanation seems to rely on the additional factors of political competition/chauvinism and practices informed by doctrines of white supremacy. Western Europeans did not imagine their colonies as part of the home nation, territory, or culture. Nor did they consider the peoples of these areas as necessarily equally human. In either case, the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas are thought of as something apart and, thereby unworthy of full ethical or legal consideration. Near the end of the book where he highlights the limits of worker internationalism, Stavrianos’s narrative makes explicit the role of multiple logics – the logic of capitalism but also that of the Westphalian state-system and perhaps that of white supremacy. It is not true that “working men have no country;” “Far from a world dividing along class lines, it is state frontiers that are decisive and meaningful” (631). Indeed, the “evolving world system is dominated not by class interests but by nationalist considerations” (631). Thus, changing our world is not merely a matter of restructuring the global economy. It requires “a comparable restructuring of national units” (812).

This last comment hints at an important narrative shift: Stavrianos, more so than Wolf, begins to show that European capitalism’s expansive dynamism is met head-on by Third World resistance and rebellion. Though initial rebellions and wars of resistance against European invasions and colonization across the Third World were largely unsuccessful, appearing only as a “gestation phase” of “uncoordinated resistance” (432), these events were not isolated. They all reacted to the same cause – capitalism’s logic of incorporating each space into its own logic and dynamics (424). And yet, these events were separated from each other and the failure, apart from Japan (chapter 17), to resist “imperialist onslaught” resulted directly from lack of “any international mutual support,” while “the imperialist powers aided each other all over the globe.” The Twentieth Century brought a change, where, slowly but surely, these movements overcame their isolation as mutually supportive struggles for national independence and liberation. These struggles’ efforts to “break with” a “trauma” created by 500 years of history became the “center of global revolutionary initiative” (431-2).

Of course, capitalist counter-revolutionary forces were not idle. They responded with mobilizations of their own political, economic, cultural counterrevolutionary strategies, as Stavrianos labels them (pp. 433-483). He announces that the future of our world depends on the “nature, strength, and interaction of global revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces” (432) and his less hopeful prognosis has been vindicated by events already unfolding as he writes the final sections of Global Rift. Skyrocketing oil prices, Third world debt, stagflation in the core, and draconian monetary policy combined with assassinations, support of dictators tied to the interests of capital, and intensified counter-insurgency to weaken and fracture the Third World movement and its demands for an international order serving and reflecting national needs, ideals, and goals. As reactionary forces gained the geopolitical-economic upper hand, theories diagnosing and protesting global inequality were gradually marginalized in respectable academic discussion in the US (Blaney and Inayatullah 2008), just as neoclassical economics reasserted its predominance, erasing nearly any other voice. It is at this moment that liberal institutionalist International Political Economy (IPE) assumed a dominant position in the academy of the US imperial core, obscuring attention to the “indivisible whole” with its privileging of unit-level explanations. Yet, the struggle continues because, according to Stavrianos and as theorized by others (Escobar 1995; Santos 2007), the “problem of how to attain autonomous economic development remains unresolved, both in theory and practice” (796).

Conclusions

Despite the majesty of these works, they have had remarkably little impact on the IPE mainstream in the US. Cohen, as noted, suggests that US scholars favor more parsimonious, unit-level explanations because of their rigor and scientific status. Reading Chaudhuri, Wolf and Stavrianos might indicate a different answer: that social theory is an effect of empire and continuing domination (Wolf: 13, 389-90; Stavrianos: 37-8, 793-4, 800; Chaudhuri: 22-4 ; Blaney and Inayatullah 2008: 669). More precisely, methodological individualism or internalism lends support to existing inequalities by erasing colonial conquest and continuing structures of domination from the intellectual agenda. This erasure is as much political and ethical as epistemological or ontological, since the unit-level bias informs IPE’s strident idealism, specifically its characterization of international relations as a market-like space producing collective goods. Thus, we can surmise that our authors’ efforts to restore concern with colonialism and domination to the agenda of IPE is precisely what produces resistance to recognizing their work. As we put it elsewhere, “We can read international relations, then, as the refusal to recognize the denial involved in its own constitution” (Blaney and Inayatullah 2008: 670).
Stressing this point risks downplaying the most important intellectual contribution. What our authors point towards is not the whole over the parts or structure over agency, as it is often put, but process and flow. To make the point, we distinguish our view from Anthony Giddens’ discussion of the “duality of structure,” which we fear retains what Giddens was trying to overcome, namely, the “dualism” of agents and structures. In our view, Giddens’ turn from “dualism” to “duality” refers to what we have called “flow” (see Inayatullah 2017). Flow is the simultaneity that expresses how structures are created from the actions of individuals, who themselves act according to these structures, while both change constantly within this process. By employing the term “duality,” Giddens rightfully concedes that we cannot grasp the totality of dynamic social relations all at once. Therefore, the reified entities called “agents” and “structures” represent truncated but necessary ways of speaking about a dynamic and fluid process. Closer to home, we see Alexander Wendt (1987) drawing on Giddens to produce precisely this misreading in his seminal engagement with the structure-agent problem, sustaining more than overcoming this reified separation of “agents” from “structures.” We suggest that an analysis and appreciation of these three seminal books starts here – with the herculean theoretical and historical effort to overcome both a “dualism” and “duality” of structure and arrive instead at “flow.”

We recognize, however, that working through the question of structure and agency is not a matter of logic merely. Rather it is a political battle that is both internal and external to the orthodoxy but which the orthodoxy must regard as external.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before my review, an anecdote: a couple years ago I sat down for lunch in midtown Manhattan with my ol' international relations professor Naeem Inayatullah. I had Naeem for just one class at Ithaca College, but we have maintained a correspondence over the past decade and a half. Naeem has a unique way of teaching, of showing you how to learn, and he was patient with me over the years. Despite having an insightful mind I wasn't doing enough critical thinking. But in that one class on international conflict the fascinating thinker planted seeds in my skull that would change my worldview -- once I really started to examine issues and my own beliefs. Were my beliefs really my own?

Over lunch Naeem began telling me about his courses on Afghanistan. He had read a number of terrific books. I took it as a challenge to read them. Since that lunch (during which I drank cognac to Naeem's lasting fascination) I have read every book he's recommended over the past two or three years. Global Rift by L.S. Stavrianos is the latest.

* * *

I wish I had been given this book to read at 15, not 35. I had never even heard of L.S. Stavrianos, a prodigious scholar of world history, before picking up Global Rift. Stavrianos explains the last 500 years as the conquest of capitalism and resulting emergence of economically dependent regions which we call the Third World. To Stavrianos, the Third World did not emerge in the 20th century, however, and his thesis may shatter your deepest held notions that capitalism is inevitable progress, that it only produces wealth eventually for everyone who participates in the market economy.

Stavrianos conceptualizes history in several stages: 1) the emergence of the Third World from 1400-1700, the era of commercial capitalism -- or mercantilism -- and New World colonialism. This part examines the European discovery of America as well as economic intrusion of the "metropolitan center" (western Europe) into coastal Africa and Asia, 2) the Third World as a global system, 1770-1870. Capitalism has -- to varying degrees -- transformed much of the planet by this time, 3) the era of industrial capitalism and waning colonialism, 1870-1914, and 4) the Third World struggle for independence. This is the era Stavrianos refers to as defensive monopoly capitalism, revolution and neo-colonialism, leading up to the time of publication, 1980.

What Stavrianos accomplishes in 890 pages is staggering, a scholarly analysis of capitalism's transformational power that reduced self-sufficient societies to dependency on the international market. He penetrates every region of the globe, detailing their unique histories before the seminal transformation took place: when international trade shifted from a trade in luxuries to a trade in necessities of raw materials and food, a process that developed over time and at different rates across the continents. He plunges into the attempts of pre-capitalist societies to avoid this dependency, a struggle to hold on to the 'self' against the pull of the 'other.' In the final analysis, most of the planet by the 20th century was part of this relationship: wealthy nations exporting cheap, finished goods to poor nations (destroying native attempts at manufacturing) in exchange for the raw materials and foodstuffs that drove the engines of western economic expansion. This was done through the implement of colonialism/imperialism.

In short, Stavrianos explains why I was able to grow up wealthy while my neighbors in central and Latin America grew up poor, why I was able to buy cheap food while others starved in lands so fertile they could have fed their populations many times over. No, economics is not zero sum. On the contrary, the wealthy nations benefited exponentially from their exploitation of the Third World, accumulating the capital (from slaves in Africa to aluminum in Bolivia) necessary to create so much wealth.

Stavrianos demonstrates that capitalism's affect on pre-capitalist societies transcended economics; by monetizing these societies -- their lands, transactions, etc., -- capitalism fundamentally and powerfully transformed them; the old way of doing business, if you will, was wiped out. The new rules of the international market economy would be the only rules. For example, land in country A that may have been used to feed the population through agriculture was turned into a vehicle to generate wealth for the EXTERNAL marketplace; instead of growing corn or wheat, Country A's land would be used for grazing livestock to sell beef or pork on the international market. External nations or corporations would acquire or buy the land through outright conquest or concessions granted by native rulers whose power relied on keeping these nations or corporations satisfied in a variety of ways, most commonly via lopsided trade agreements.

Whether it was food or raw materials, native populations drew little benefit from producing for the system of global trade -- and this is crucial to understanding this book -- that Stavrianos demonstrates created vertical economic relationships: wealth would flow out of the producing nation to the capitalist center. Britain could not have embarked, Stavrianos argues, on the industrial revolution without the capital it accumulated through the exploitation of its colonial possessions, like the slave labor sugar plantations of the West Indies. As a result, there was economic growth for the Great Britains but not economic development in Third World countries. Without economic development, Third World nations from the 16th century to present were and are placed in a state of dependency. Their people starve(d), suffer(ed) from want, and their cultures were/are transformed for the worse: their definition of value -- of what was valuable -- changed. As mentioned, land, for instance, was turned into a commodity that was owned to produce wealth, not food. No, these pre-capitalist societies were not tugged from a Golden Age. These self-sufficient peoples were not wealthy, as we would define wealth today. But capitalism's legacy was to reduce these societies to poverty. From region to region, continent to continent, century to century, Stavrianos illustrates how this transformation took place. Today millions of people still suffer from the lack of horizontal economic relationships within their own nations.

These are generalities. I'm not inclined to drop too far below the 10,000-foot level because explaining the complexities in Russia or China or Latin America or Egypt would require an enormous amount of time; my advice is to read the book! Explaining the general pattern of this history is the aim of the review.

Now for my problems with Stavrianos -- and they are hard to overlook despite the overall brilliance of his analysis. His explanation of Chinese history is among the best I've read. Yet when he summarizes the legacies of Mao's revolution, he somehow omits the estimated 30 million!!! excess deaths caused by The Great Leap Forward. So while he ably details the consequences of the poverty produced by capitalist exploitation through colonialism/imperialism in China prior to WWII, he overlooks the far worse consequences of Communism. I would like to know his explanation for this omission, but Stavrianos is deceased.

And because he is no longer with us we cannot ask what he thinks of the world today, because it looks different than he might have imagined. Stavrianos argued the social revolutionary movements of the 20th century were an attempt to break from or avoid the dependency on global capitalism that covered most of the globe. He views the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions through this reactionary prism, as well as other minor and less successful revolutionary movements. To Stavrianos, these revolutions were just the beginning. He expected more upheavals to follow.

History has proven him wrong. Globalization rules the day; capitalism is the only game in town even after the latest financial meltdown nearly destroyed the U.S economy. Communism is all but dead, even in China's economy (not politics).

Despite these problems Global Rift is a must-read. For 890 pages you will remove the prism through which you have viewed history if you grew up like I did, a middle-class citizen of the United States who rarely questioned capitalism as inevitable progress, or deeply thought about why I grew up with so much while a place like Haiti -- just miles away -- had so little. Like Naeem, L.S. Stavrianos has shaken up my view of things. As my focus returns, I see the world -- and myself -- in a different light.

[mike osman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very ambitious book which tries to explain how each region of the world was absorbed into the European led world economy in the modern period, and reactions to European colonial power. The book is good as an overview, and allows for interesting comparisons. It focuses on social structure in each region. The book is a little bit dated, and at one point Stavrianos predicts there would be another left-wing revolutionary wave in the last two decades of the 20th century. One should perhaps not hold that against him, because prediction is hard; even the CIA did not realize the Iron Curtain was falling as it was happening.

[Moin Shehzad · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best book of world economic history.

[Greg Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need to buy this book and reread.

I wish I could find more books that examine global history through this lens. Frustrating that as someone who has studied history and political economy, many of the books presented to me don't compare to this.


One gripe: In discussing Mao's Great Leap Forward, there was virtually no (I may have missed it of course) mention of the millions of people died. Stavrianos doesn't seem to take this into account. i wish he would have addressed it more significantly. Famine and agricultural failure have a long history in countries organized for mono-cultural production and to meet the demands of the global capitalist economy.

I need to read my book about Yemen.

I want to visit Vietnam.

People to read about: Samori

Read more by historians: Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann

Other books it mentions: Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Broad and Alien Is the World by Ciro Alegria, The Gun and the Olive Branch by Hirst, Beyond Economics by K. Boulding, and A Daughter of Han by Ning Lao T'ai-t'ai.

Moshe Dayan, chief of staff of Israel's Defense Force gave this speech in 1953 at a funeral for a "young Israeli pioneer killed by Arab marauders": "Let us not today fling accusations at the murders. Who are we that we should argue against their hatred? For eight years now they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes, we turn into our homesteads the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home. Let us not shrink back when we see the hatred fermenting and filling the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who sit all around us. Let us not avert our gaze, so that out hand shall not slip. This is the fate of our generation, the choice of our life-to be prepared and armed, strong and tough-or otherwise, the sword will slip from out fist, and out life will be snuffed out."

[Tommy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dependency theory line. Western Europe created the "third world" first in Eastern Europe (source of lumber/grains for the West) then the rest of the world by being much to dynamic in a world of static minds. The early history at the beginning of the book has some interesting things to say but as it gets closer to the modern world the bias becomes more obvious... it takes Marxism-Leninism at face-value and points towards ethnic nationalism and protectionism as an answer to "underdevelopment" in the third world. Some of the policy options on the table included "eliminating" "minority compra­dor" elements.
There's a typical intellectual disdain for any form of mere entertainment and the desires of the stupid common people who were to easily wooed by Coca Cola instead of their own traditional noble indigenous intakes. It's called "cultural imperialism" when people started looking towards foreign corporations instead of their governments for coloured televisions, of all things, instead of whatever their governments had on the menu for them.
I had to stop reading at the cringe worthy praise of Maoist China as a successful model of "development" (hopefully the eternal Juche idea got just as much love for its more persistent adherence to a line of "independence" in retrospect).

In short, the Cultural Revolution promoted what foreign observers have termed "a policy of positive dis­crimination," which is comparable to the "affirmative action" intro­duced in the United States on behalf of underprivileged minorities.

[Sara-Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

'We submitted because we must; we were not a military Power. But do you suppose our sense of justice was not outraged? Or later, when every Power in Europe on some pretext or other has seized and retained some part of our territory, do you suppose because we cannot resist that we do not feel?...It is the nations of Christendom who have come to us to teach by sword and fire that Right in this world is powerless unless it is supported by Might. O, do not doubt that we shall learn the lesson! And woe to Europe when we have acquired it!'

A High Chinese Offical (1906)

[Rabble · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great history and context of european imperialism and colonialism.

[Brenden]

Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age by L.S. Stavrianos (1981)

[Brent L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that I find myself returning to again and again to explore the connections between the period of Great Power imperialism and its continuing effect on events of today.

[Carl Webb]

Best world history book from an anti-imperialist perspective.