ABSTRACT
This classical model of capitalist growth with inequality was built by English economists surrounded by the poverty and pauperism of early nineteenth-century Britain. W. Arthur Lewis (1954) carried the classical labor surplus model into the twentieth centur;, where it has become the dominant paradigm used by Third World observers to analyze exactly the same set of problems. T o the extent that the application of the labor surplus model to Britain was encouraged in part by the forces of demographic transition there - rising rates of population growth driven primarily by rising fertility (Wrigley and Schofield, 1981), but aided by declining child mortality and further augmented by Irish immigration into the industrializing North - then its application to the contemporary Third World has even more to defend it, since the population growth there has been almost double that of earlv nineteenth-century Britain.
