Adam Smith [...] called this 'previous accumulation' [...] Karl Marx called it 'primitive accumulation', perhaps to highlight its barbaric nature, for the process of accumulation was violent
a trenchant indictment of our global economic system
there is a yawning gap between the 'real value' of the labour and goods that poor countries sell and the prices they are actually paid for them. This is what economists call 'unequal exchange'.
Today, power imbalances like these, enshrined in the Uruguay Round of the WTO, are estimated to cost poor countries around $700 billion each year in lost export revenues.
on US/EU being allowed to subsidise agriculture while poorer countries can't (because market size determines leverage in negotiations)
Leveraging debt, they imposed 'structural adjustment programs' that reversed all the economic reforms that global South countries had painstakingly enacted.
