ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters have traced patterns of accumulation from trading and from primitive and semi-feudal exploitation of agrarian dependents, through to exploitation of wage-labour in manufacturing and services. While commerce and capitalist relations incorporated ever more territory, resources and labour power as commodities, areas of difficult access or hostile residents and low prospects for profit were neglected.The inhabitants thus escaped high levels of exploitation but at the cost of poor access to services and opportunities. In other words, national growth meant increasing economic and social disparities, but governments paid no serious attention to this problem until the 1970s. As commerce expanded, more people were able to accumulate capital, but they were mostly owners of significant resources, whether land, merchant capital or information. Many more people lost control of resources and became wholly or partly proletarian, so that social differentiation increased.
