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European Expansion and Asian Economic Development Since 1850: India, Indonesia and Japan*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Om Prakash
Affiliation:
Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi

Extract

The nature of the relationship between the metropolitan world and the colonies and of its impact on the economic development of each of the two sides has been the subject of intense debate and controversy over a very long period of time. As far as the role of the colonial relationship in the development of the West is concerned, an important viewpoint has been that it would be wrong to assign a significant role to this factor in explaining European industrialization. In some recent economic literature on ‘Modern Imperialism’ it has been argued that neither in the field of capital formation in the metropolitan countries, nor in that of finding a market for the foods manufactured there, can an important role be assigned to the colonial factor. Only in highly specific cases such as textile manufacturing in Britain during the nineteenth century could the export market in the colonial world have been of some significance.

Type
The Great Debate
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1988

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References

Notes

1 H.L. Wesseling, ‘European Expansion and its Impact upon the “Third World”’, Lecture delivered at the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, 18 May 1988, forthcoming in print from the Institute.

2 Ibidem.

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