ABSTRACT
The immense differences in the economic condition of countries are a striking fact about world society—both a cause and a result of important features of the contemporary world polity. Some economic historians argue that even without exploitative colonialism and its legacies in the contemporary Third World, the great economic disparities between the "Western" and "non-Western" countries would have materialized. The historical causes of today's prevailing global economic disparities are, of course, controversial among historians and social scientists. The scholarly controversies parallel and feed into policy disputes over the extent to which countries can and should operate according to "free trade" principles in the contemporary world. Even if valid in theory, however, the dynamics and results of such a global free-trade regime are anathema to many of the nonindustrialized countries, for their competitive niches would have to be, for the most part, in the production of primary agricultural commodities, leaving their economies highly vulnerable to the wide fluctuations in global supply.
