FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE THIRD WAVE

manufacture of margarine as a ‘convenience* food for the industrial citizens of Europe and America destroyed the fragile and complex social system of the non-industrial Africans.” Huge plantations were set up in the Belgian Congo, in Nigeria, the Cameroons, and the Gold Coast. The West got its margarine. And Africans became semi-slaves on huge plantations.

Rubber offers another example. After the turn of the century when automobile production in the United States created a sudden heavy demand for rubber for tires and inner tubes, traders, in collusion with local authorities, enslaved Amazonian Indians to produce it. Roger Casement, the British consul in Rio de Janeiro, reported that the production of four thousand tons of Putumayo rubber between 1900 and 1911 resulted in the death of thirty thousand Indians.

It can be argued that these were “excesses” and were not typical of Grand Imperialism. Certainly the colonial powers were not unrelievedly cruel or evil. In places they did build schools and rudimentary health facilities for their subject populations. They improved sanitation and water supplies. They no doubt raised the living standard for some.

Nor would it be fair to romanticize precolonial societies or to blame the poverty of today’s non-industrial populations exclusively on imperialism. Climate, local corruption and tyranny, ignorance, and xenophobia all contributed. There was plenty of misery and oppression to go around long before the Europeans ever arrived.

Nevertheless, once torn out of self-sufficiency and compelled to produce for money and exchange, once encouraged or forced to reorganize their social structure around mining, for example, or plantation fanning, First Wave populations were plunged into economic dependence on a marketplace they could scarcely influence. Often their leaders were bribed, their cultures ridiculed, their languages suppressed. Moreover, the colonial powers hammered a deep sense of psychological inferiority into the conquered people that stands even today as an obstacle to economic and social development.

In the Second Wave world, however, Grand Imperialism paid off handsomely. As the economic historian William Woodruff put it: “It was the exploitation of these territories and the growing trade done with them that obtained for the European family wealth on a scale never seen before.” Built deep into the very structure of the Second Wave economy, feeding its ravenous need for resources, imperialism marched across the planet.