How did the world get like this? Eight books to help explain the way we live now
Inequality and poverty arose by design, not chance and stories of human rights abuses and failures in development have deep roots.
WW Rostow: The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960)
Rostow argued that all countries can become rich through openness to world markets and investment, state investments in infrastructure and new technologies, and ploughing profits back into industry. He warned of the complications of modernization and the potential for communists to hijack the process.
However, Rostow's ideas were more pro-American ideology than a comprehensive explanation of modern development complexities.
Vandana Shiva: The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (1991)
Shiva warns about the dangers of technologically-based development from the top down, using India's green revolution as a case study. She highlights how the strategy of the green revolution led to conflicts, rural unemployment, and marginalization of small farmers.
Her book serves as a cautionary tale against placing blind faith in new technologies that centralize power and exploit natural resources.
Karl Marx: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867)
Marx's work examines the emergence of capitalism through land theft, population displacement, and the subordination of certain populations. He explains how capitalism generates extreme inequalities and the exploitation of labor.
Marx's critique challenges the notion that capitalism is a natural outgrowth of human nature and highlights the role of historical injustices in establishing a grossly unequal world.
Sylvia Federici: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)
Federici explores the gendered impacts of primitive accumulation, particularly through the lens of medieval witch-hunts in Europe. She reveals how the destruction of solidarity among peasant households and the rise of the modern economic order contributed to gender hierarchies and divisions of labor.
Her book underscores the need to recognize the historical and gendered roots of present-day economic inequalities and the importance of empowering women in economic growth.
