For those of you like me who didn’t know much about this: What is today called the Long Depression, caused by the panic of 1873 (stock market crashes/demonitization of silver) and lasting until 1879, was called the Great Depression, until the events a few decades later stole the name.
I have to write a paper contrasting colonization in Africa between this time of the Berlin treaty, wars by proxy in the cold war and present day with large investments from China and India. Apparently, a large motivation for the Berlin Treaty was the economic conditions of industrializing European nations. Before this time, it is said that there was not much interest in fully colonizing the continent.
Wikipedia quotes Rothbard, saying that this “depression” was only a price depression, versus a decline in GDPs, but there is no source. How would this really encourage African colonization, besides factors like quinine being more used and irrational (?) fears over trade balances/ countries being outproduced or left out? I don’t quite get it =/
Any other insights from more experienced fans of the Austrian school on Cold war investment/exploitation in Africa or present day “non-intervention” policies would be appreciated too. Finally, there was discussion recently on another forum on the “morals” of the anarcho-capitalist in the hypothetical Libertariana doing business within foreign states. The only answer attempted was that I said this was basically okay to the courts at home along the guidelines set forth by Block in his paper on Radical Anarchism/dealing with an illegitimate state. That is the continuum of guilt and innocence, by if a function of the state would be “purely evil” (genocide) or would exist in a free market stateless society (mail carrying) and a person’s role in administering or simply “carrying out orders”. My answer was that it was okay to trade, but not make aggressive bribes to politicians for favors and such. Do you think this applies at all to this situation? I haven’t found any good articles on any of this from this site yet. The mainstream idea seems to be that China and India are doing good, except that they take no responsibility for propping up dictators.
Thanks. It seems like the sort of hands off approach to Africa pre-1880’s is similar to China’s today. It seems like some trade treaties that had restricted China up until a few years ago sort of serve the same function that better opportunities elsewhere in 1880, sort of do the same thing.
I don’t know if this is off-point or not. I do know that the disputed trading with China and the U.S. for decades has been argued by politicians that trading with China will open up China to more democratic ways. That was the mainstream argument for decades by politicians with the occasional opposing dispute about how China doesn’t have a good human rights record (namely Tibet, but others too and within their own borders due to their Communist monopoly against dissidents). Western States like to make their trading seem legit cause “it will encourage free market ideas” they would say.
But a State isn’t the free market and Africa is basically being looted it seems, for the most part, by States, the IMF, other global agencies, and heck the Pope from Rome made a recent visit to Africa.
Kenya is supposed to be the new India from what I’m hearing. This is due to corporations not only moving there, but also fiber optic wires are being layed in the ocean to connect Kenya with the rest of the global fiber optic grid:
“The first of three undersea fibre optic cables linking East Africa to the world is expected to be landed by June 2009…”
Also it seems a lot of universities (maybe other grade levels of school too) are focusing on Africa it seems. I don’t know how wide-spread this focus in education is, but I’m seeing schools are having their students focus on African scenarios. Education focus for a new generation due to a much bigger U.S. political shift and focus in African affairs? I know the U.S. military recently established Africacom in Africa (the North American version of Northcom). Libya is back in the world oil business. Etc…, etc… I don’t know if anybody else sees this or not, maybe I’m wrong but it seems like it.