7 The economic impact of colonialism
نویسندگان
چکیده
The immense economic inequality we observe in the world today didn’t happen overnight, or even in the past century. It is the path dependent outcome of a multitude of historical processes, one of the most important of which has been European colonialism. Retracing our steps 500 years, or back to the verge of this colonial project, we see little inequality and small differences between poor and rich countries (perhaps a factor of four). Now the differences are a factor of more than 40, if we compare the richest to the poorest countries in the world. What role did colonialism play in this?
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