ABSTRACT
If local isolation was rarely complete and development was rarely totally inde-pendent, the coming of the modern world economy led to greater and greaterinteraction between different parts of the world. In this chapter, we focus on the cumulative consequences of this increased interdependence for those regions incorporated into the world economy on terms initially and decisively disadvantageous to them. This is not to say that the terms of interdependence have always remained absolutely disadvantageous, although this is true, for example, in the case of Central America and large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Particularly since the late 1960s, the major oil-producing countries (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria and Indonesia) and the newly industrializing countries (NICs) (such as Taiwan and South Korea and, most recently, China) have challenged the static picture of a ‘fixed’ industrial core and a ‘fixed’ non-industrial periphery. The world economy now has a vibrant semi-periphery of NICs and resource-based economies. This chapter begins with a discussion of how existing economies were transformed into colonial ones. A second section identifies the major ways in which these colonial economies were enmeshed and maintained within the world economy. A third section identifies the importance of frameworks of administration introduced by Europeans. A fourth section discusses the cultural mechanisms that facilitated integration into the world economy. The final two sections explore the contexts of change in the nature of interdependence since the 1960s, respectively the global context (the new international division of labour, decolonization and the Cold War) and several national political-economic strategies or ‘models’ of development that challenge or, more typically, have adapted to the dominant ‘liberal’ one.
