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It is tempting to see this as just a list of crimes, but it is much more than that. These snippets of history hint at the contours of a world economic system that was designed over hundreds of years to enrich a small portion of humanity at the expense of the vast majority. By the early part of the …

The Indian famines of the late 19th century were not a natural disaster, as the British insisted at the time. They were the predictable consequence of imposing a foreign market logic that saw fit to eliminate basic human food security and sacrifice tens of millions of people in the service of profi…

[...] What made this famine so appalling was that it was completely avoidable; it would never have happened if peasants had retained full rights to their ancestral land, where they would have had plenty of space to produce a diversity of crops. In other words, the scarcity that led to the famine wa…

[...] The sugar and cotton plantations of the New World supplied Europe with another ecological windfall, much as silver did. For example, sugar came to account for up to 22 per cent of the calories Britain consumed, which reduced the need for domestic agricultural production and freed up labour po…

[...] achieving this level of growth would mean driving global per capita income up to $1.3 million. In other words, the average income would have to be $1.3 million per year simply so that the poorest two-thirds of humanity could earn $5 per day. This gives us a sense of just how deeply inequali…