ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the problems which an agricultural country face in carrying through a process of capital accumulation and industrialisation. It explores that the process of capital accumulation and the process of industrialisation were virtually identical since the application of mechanical technique has been traditionally much more limited in agricultural production than in industry. In the capitalist economies of the past the order of development has generally been the more gradual one; investment first being directed towards agricultural or extractive industries, then to lighter consumer-goods industries, especially textiles, and only at a later and more advanced stage towards heavy industry producing capital goods. Evidently, the reason why ‘younger’ industrial countries in the past have tended to specialise in lighter industries and to be slow in developing more capital-intensive ones has been because investment in heavy industry is discouraged by the possibility of importing the products of heavy industry from older and more capitalistically developed countries.
