ABSTRACT
I have already argued that the idea of a ‘third world politics’ makes sense only in the context of a single world. Before the creation of a global political order, and the global economy to go with it, the infinitely varied political structures of Asia, Africa and the Americas possessed no common features which could bring them together as a single category for analysis. The importance of European colonialism is that it was, more than anything else, the means by which this global political and economic order was created. In the process, societies with their own internal structures and dynamics became linked with, and subordinated to, a set of global interactions and institutions with a dynamic of its own. By far the greater part of what is now known as the third world was, at one time or another, subjected to formal colonial rule by one or another of the states of the western European seaboard. Even those societies which retained their independence were obliged to come to terms with a world in which European influence was dominant, and to adapt their own domestic political structures and economies to meet the European prerequisites of statehood.
