ABSTRACT
When experts turned their attention to Third World countries, they applied to them the already established frames of reference and adopted an ethnocentric, or 'western-centric', perspective. The idea was that, as industrialism continued inexorably to expand, it would extend its hold over the less developed regions on the capitalist periphery and that these too would converge towards the modes of the advanced industrial societies (see Kerr et al. 1960: 29). Their development was expected to be along the same trajectory as that of the West (but also of eastern Europe - Clarkson 1979), where large-scale industrialisation had triumphed. Certainly Marx (1973b: 319-33), most of his disciples, and even his opponents believed that since 'scale increases productivity and lowers costs' (K. Arrow in Kindleberger and Herrick 1977: 149; also Clark 1979: 35), 'the replacement of artisans by factory production [in the Third World] seems inevitable' (Bottomley 1965). In other words, industrial gigantism was the model developing countries should emulate if they wished to follow the transformations pioneered by the West to achieve a comparable modernity, and affluence.
