Fieldhouse under the two headings; optimists and pessimist gives a brief, but very helpful introduction to the history of economic thoughts, all with an ideological twist that the reader needs to bear in mind. I am gonna try to deconstruct his writings in order to explore his assumptions in ideological level.
He builds his premise by asking "Have the third world countries benefited or suffered from close economic relationship with the more developed countries of the west?"(P.3). In any economic encounter that two willing parities chose to enter there is a risk of winning and losing. But was and is the relationship just an economic one? Was there a choice? Where both sides willing? I just cannot fit in slavery into a close economic ... nor can I fit recent and ongoing "marketing strategy!" in Iraq into his classification!
Classifications can be very insidious, so we have read, but "his useful organizing concepts" (P.9) of optimists and pessimists, somehow puts the onus on the readers as well as the third world countries. Obviously, all developed countries are very optimistic and that's why they sometimes literally force feed this economic optimism to the pessimist third world countries who might not know what is good for them! His classification also is ideologically loaded: all on the "benefiting" side of the argument are happy cheerful optimists - including the academics who articulate these theories - and all critical of status co are bunch of pessimist losers!
I think he should have read Smith more carefully as he quotes him "each society can benefit from what another can offer" and the whole argument is about that offer that free will. once I passed the ideological hurdle all was very informative, almost a complete history of economic thoughts.
Haideh
Fieldhouse – Parts II & III
ReplyDeleteIn the second part of his book, Fieldhouse is concerned with explaining the character of the government of colonial empires and its impacts on Third World Development. Most prominent feature – imperial rule was “external to each colony” (71). Major consequences of colonialism: the colonized lost their freedom of choice (one can argue it was more than ‘choice’); and, the colonized did not have united national consciousness. If the latter is the absolute fact, it means that the colonizers did not know how to deal with tribes, ethnic groups, religious factions, or whoever they encountered once they colonized the lands. There were no western-style governments and the disconnect created was not only the ignorance but the unpreparedness of the colonizers and the sheer scope of what they had to deal with in an unfamiliar territory. What the author sees as the three main shortcomings of the colonial state (1. it never connected to or understood the needs of the colonized; 2. it had split loyalties between the metropolis and the colony; and, 3. it did not have the legitimacy since it did not have the “voluntary support” of the colonized; p. 89-90) would not only contribute to the future resistance and eventual decolonization, but it also shows the lack of vision for the future on the colonizers’ part as they did not foresee these shortfalls as something that would cause the demise of that form of exploitative/territorial imperialism. What is valuable in this part II of Fieldhouse’s work are the author’s explanations of different imperial economic systems (British, French, and others). The British system can be summarized as follows: the economy of the empires was supported by the producers in the colonies through the bulk-buying and marketing-board systems, the latter which became corrupt because of local politicians’ need for greed. The French imperial economic policy had a once-sided protectionist policy: French goods entered most of the colonies duty free but foreign goods paid “the same duties as if entering France” and not all colonial exports entered France duty free (sugar as an example since competing with France’s sugar beet production). Fieldhouse does not interpret the system of surprix in connection to its incorporation into the economic structure of EEC after 1958. He also introduces the Stabex system after 1975 as if his audience members are all economics experts. Another feature of colonialism which further embedded colonies into the imperial economy was the currency, especially the ability of the currency to connect the colonies with the global world system. In this second part of the book, Fieldhouse’s original concept of optimists and pessimists is neglected as he does not show its relation to the elaborate economic discourse he presented.