Ricardo: Our positions are close enough that we have to be careful in defining the propositions under discussion. To start from the last but perhaps most fundamental point > Colin concludes: "But I would ask you to consider whether the very > question of locating e.g. "the main factor in the > industrialization of England" inside or outside > Europe is sensible. Surely the force of AGF's > argument is that we have had a truly international > economy for a very long time." > Again, the numbers are against Frank's claim there was a world > economy dominated by Asia, since the Asian economy was much smaller > (with very few links to the European one) as compared to the > intra-European world-economy... Let me clarify that I am not taking a position on whether the world economy was Asia-centered at some point (or 8000 years old or any of that). I do feel confident in arguing that there's been a Europe- centered world economy for the last 400 years or so, in the context of which the european industrial revolution occurred. If that is granted and if it can be shown that significant scale economies existed in industries like textiles, and/or that leading sectors drew surpluses from colonial activities (of which slave trading was just part), then I think the case for colonialism's decisive role in the Industrial Revolution is fairly good, and the broader point that we cannot treat European development as a separate thing should be established. Relatedly, to say that the slave trade (or even the totality of the colonial trade) "accelerated an industrialization process which would have happened only more slowly," as you quote Landes as saying, is a bit vacuous. Apart from being a counterfactual that we can't prove, it also begs the question of how fast is "more slowly." At this point I'm repeating myself. The scale- economies argument, the leading-sector argument, and the argument Barkley articulated that even modest amounts of extra capital investment are significant if maintained over time, all need to be addressed directly if we're going to get any farther. Most generally it has been put to you that analysis of aggregates cannot take us very far in understanding qualitative change. Perhaps there is a basic methodological difference. On the Asian sink question, I clearly misunderstood your original post: > But even if Europe extracted a lot of capital > from the colonies, did not Frank tell us that a high proportion of it > ended up in Asia or China as the ultimate "sink"?! Whatever happened > to Asia's "massive balance of trade surplus with > Europe"? Really, this is a major unrecognized problem in > Frank's very thesis. Can you tell me which AGF proposition the sink disproves, and why? Or are you arguing that there is an internal AGF contradiction and if so, what is it? Best, Colin
