Mercantilism According to Wild, 2000, the trade theory that states that nations should accumulate financial wealth,

usually in the form of gold, by encouraging exports and discouraging imports is called mercantilism. According to this theory other measures of countries' well being, such as living standards or human development, are irrelevant. Mainly Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain used mercantilism during the 1500s to the late 1700s. Mercantilistic countries practised the so-called zero-sum game, which meant that world wealth was limited and that countries only could increase their share at expense of their neighbours. The economic development was prevented when the mercantilistic countries paid the colonies little for export and charged them high price for import. The main problem with mercantilism is that all countries engaged in export but was restricted from import, another prevention from development of international trade. Mercantilism proposed that a country should try to export more than it imports, in order to receive gold. The main criticism of mercantilism is that countries are restricted from import, a prevention of international trade. Adam Smith developed the theory of absolute advantage that stressed that a country should produce goods or services if it uses a lesser amount of resources than other

countries. David Ricardo stated in his theory of comparative advantage that a country should specialise in producing and exporting products in which it has a comparative advantage and it should import goods in which it has a comparative disadvantage. Hecksher-Ohlin's theory of factor endowments stressed that a country should produce and export goods that require resources (factors) that are abundant in the home country. Leontief tested the HecksherOhlin theory in the U.S. and found that it was not applicable in the U.S. Raymond Vernon's product life cycle theory stresses that a company will begin to export its product and later take on foreign direct investment as the product moves through its life cycle. Eventually a country's export becomes its import.

Feudalism The economic structure prevailing then became known as Feudalism, a term which has come to mean, an economic system based on Lordship (ownership) of vast Land (also known as the manor or estate), owned by a senior lord, who gave the right of cultivation (fief) to a lower rank of people called the vassals, who in return paid a stipulated amount from the harvests or from services rendered or later on through money, to

the Lord of the manor. The vassals also received security from the lord of the manor. The origin of feudalism is sometimes traced back to the expansion of the Roman Empire. In Italy for instance, there were present large portions of land owned by Roman soldiers who had received the allocation of land in return for military services rendered to the Caesar. There also existed ownership of large track of land in Gaul before the Roman

Roman ownership of land prevailed through the invasion of the German tribes until the beginning of the medieval period. The Romans had intended that the Farm or Estate would be auto sufficient. This concept prevailed especially in the 8th and 9th Centuries resulting in the farms being nearly auto sufficient. In return, the social economic system became rigid and so did the resulting social cultural structures. The effect of this rigidity was what became known in Europe as Feudalism. In feudalism, every man owed allegiance to another higher than him and at the highest level was the King. The lord of the farm or manor, also known as the Vassal or in Spanish Caballero owned allegiance to another man senior, like the Conde or Baron, who in turn owed his allegiance to the King or Emperor who in turn was the head of the

feudal system. The vassals could distribute the right of cultivation of land given them in trust to other men. Thus the structure went on down to the peasantry. Those of higher rank like the King, the Barons and the Knights hungered for power in order to maintain powerful control of the others below them, to live well and to impose law and order. The medieval king was, above everything else, a warrior. From the 9th to the 14th centuriesthe heyday of feudalismthe most important element in making war was the armoured and mounted knight. To maintain a retinue of knights was, however, very expensive. In return for providing the king with warriors, tenantsinchief were granted large holdings of land. Besides, the king and those of higher rank also needed servants for other public services. They invoked the law of land ownership from time to time to reclaim title of property over the others in order to make concessions for the recruitment of soldiers or other certain specific services for the King or Lord. Some lords organized local governments for the sake of law and order. In every case, the vassal had juridical allegiance only to his immediate superior. This allegiance was basically a form of slavery since the vassal knew he could not liberate himself from

his Lord. As a result the entire society remained attached to an intricate system of allegiances and services. The men below of lower rank were not slaves as such but in effect were workers without any rights (given to servitude). They had no economic recourse other than the land and could not leave it. If they did, the life away from the land was vandalism and adventure such as that of Robin Hood which was rather much worse. In effect Feudalism was a political system which decentralized and localized power. The system came to its Zenith at the beginning of the 12th Century. At this time most of the farming land belonged to most senior people, dioceses and monasteries. It turned out that administration of these estates became very difficult owing to the fact that most land owners had come into possession through various, hereditary paths. They owed loyalty to various warring vassals and thus administration of estates became very difficult. Description of life in the Estate The feudal method of holding land was by fief; the grantor of the fief was the overlord, and the recipient was the vassal. The fief was formally acquired following the ceremony of homage, in which the vassal swore an oath of fealty, while, the lord invested the

vassal with the fief. Honours or rights, as well as land, could be granted as fiefs. Gradually, with the advent of hereditary succession and primogeniture, renewal of the fief by the heir of the deceased became customary, and little by little the fief became hereditary. The nobility was essentially a military class, with the knight as the typical warrior. Since equipping mounted fighters was expensive, the lord could not create his armed force without the obligation of the vassal to supply a stipulated number of armed men. The gradations of nobility were, therefore, based on both military service and landholding. At the bottom of the social scale was the squire, originally the servant of the knight. Above the knight were classes that varied in different countriescounts, dukes, earls, barons, and other nobles. The vassal owed, in addition to military service, other dues and services that varied with local custom and tended to become fixed. The obligation of the overlord in the feudal contract was always the protection of the vassal. The land for cultivation belonging solely to the lord of the estate was the centre of technological development in land use. The system of planting which developed in the 8th and 9th century became known as the trialterno or triannual rotation of plantations. The system gave rise to a high productivity which in turn augmented the

growth of the population. Later better methods of using animals to till the land were improved. However, methods of maintaining soil fertility simply eluded them. Productivity was very low in comparison to current farming technology. Colonialism Colonialism and imperalism Governor-General Flix bou welcomes Charles de Gaulle to Chad. A colony is part of an empire and so colonialism is closely related to imperialism. Assumptions are that colonialism and imperialism are interchangeable, however Robert Young suggests that imperialism is the concept while colonialism is the practice. Colonialism is based on an imperial outlook, thereby creating a consequential relationship. Through an empire, colonialism is established and capitalism is expanded, on the other hand a capitalist economy naturally enforces an empire. In the next section Marxists make a case for this mutually reinforcing relationship. Marxist view of colonialism Marxism views colonialism as a form of capitalism, enforcing exploitation and social change. Marx thought that working within the global capitalist system, colonialism is closely

associated with uneven development. It is an instrument of wholesale destruction, dependency and systematic exploitation producing distorted economies, sociopsychological disorientation, massive poverty and neocolonial dependency.[16] According to some Marxist historians, in all of the colonial countries ruled by Western European countries the natives were robbed of more than half their natural span of life by undernourishment.[17] Colonies are constructed into modes of production. The search for raw materials and the current search for new investment opportunities is a result of intercapitalist rivalry for capital accumulation. Lenin regarded colonialism as the root cause of imperialism, as imperialism was distinguished by monopoly capitalism via colonialism and as Lyal S. Sunga explains: "Vladimir Lenin advocated forcefully the principle of self-determination of peoples in his "Theses on the Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination" as an integral plank in the programme of socialist internationalism" and he quotes Lenin who contended that "The right of nations to selfdetermination implies exclusively the right to independence in the political sense, the right to free political separation from the oppressor nation. Specifically, this demand for political democracy implies complete freedom to agitate for secession and for a referendum on secession by the seceding nation."[18] Empire

Etymology and Uses The term empire derives from the Latin imperium, which originally meant the sovereignty held by a magistrate, but later evolved to refer to the authority that the ancient Romans established over much of Europe and the Near East. Its etymology indicates the main source and standard for its usage. The Roman Empire became the archetype of what an empire should look like and how it should behave, a positive model for the Europeans who sought to emulate its achievements. In the east, the Byzantine Empire kept its heritage alive for nearly a millennium. In the west, the Carolingian 11 empire, the Napoleonic empire, the British empire, Hitlers Third Reich, and various other expansionist European states consciously evoked the Roman empire in their iconography and ideological claims to legitimacy. The Roman model made its mark on European historiography as well, acquiring a prominent place in literature that sought to discern the patterns of history and distill its lessons. Edward Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (17761788) is arguably the most influential work of history ever written. Empire also carries negative connotations, evoking charges of political and cultural oppression. This use of the term

has its origins in the classical Mediterranean world as well, though its principle source is probably the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, which threatened the independence of the Greeks. The same connotations are attached in Western historiography to its successors, the Sasinid and Safavid empires, as well as to neighboring states that came in collision with Europe, notably the Ottoman and Mugal empires. The term is used less consistently in other geographical and historical contexts. While the closest counterpart to the Roman Empire was in many respects the contemporaneous Han polity of China, it is more often called a dynasty than an empire. The same is true for its successor statesthe Tang, the Song, the Ming, the Qing, and others. Some historians have shown similar reservations about using the term empire in reference to the Abbasids and Umayyads, who consolidated political authority across much of the Near East and North Africa under the banner of Islam. In sub-Saharan Africa, indigenous polities rarely receive the appellation empire, the main exceptions being the West African states of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, whose indirect association with medieval Europe gave them mythic reputations. Similarly, the only polities in the Americas commonly characterized as empires are those that fell to Spanish conquerors,

the Aztecs and the Incas, even though archeologists have determined the earlier existence of other large states in the same locations and in other parts in the western hemisphere. The ambivalence and inconsistency that have characterized the use of empire serve as a reminder that words and their meanings are no less embedded in the particularities of history than other aspects of human experience.

Western Europe as the Principal Actor Wallerstein posited that the world system began in the 1400s as the result of the peculiar historical circumstances of Europes late medieval period. In addition to commercial dynamism, some of the small states that emerged from feudalism during this period, including Spain, Portugal, France, and England, became highly centralized and thus were able to expand and compete for colonies on a worldwide scale. Through mercantilism (which for Wallerstein is a type of capitalism), they protected their own 22 workers in a free-wage system and created a colonial system in which the colonies provided raw materials in return for manufactured goods. England and France evolved into core states that dominated commercially,

whereas the Iberian countries declined into a semiperipheral status, with little manufacturing and sharecropping becoming dominant. In turn, the colonial regions became peripheral; trade patterns favored the western European core regions. To pay for the manufactured goods (always more expensive than raw materials because of the value added through manufacturing), the peripheral regions had to coerce labor to keep costs down. The colonial elites aided in this endeavor by helping to repress workers through systems such as, in the Spanish Andes, the mita, which supplied indigenous labor to silver mines. Under the mita, colonial officials obligated the chiefs of Andean Indian villagers in a swath from Cuzco to Potos to send a seventh of all adult males to the mines and spend a year working in the mine shafts. The western European core was able to take advantage of other regions without dominating them militarily. Eastern Europe, for example, became peripheral after the recession of the fourteenth and fifteen centuries resulted in a manorial reaction and a second serfdom for the peasantry there. In the sixteenth century the eastern European aristocracy cultivated grains to export westward and so gain access to western European goods; to do so, they forced free peasants into serfdom to work on their estates. Up until the nineteenth century, a number of regions, including most of Africa, Russia, and China,

remained largely unaffected by western European penetration. These regions developed their own, noncapitalist systems that at times also relied on coercive labor practices. During the period of imperialism in the nineteenth century, however, even these regions were pulled into the world economic system, though Russia and later China became external after their Communist revolutions. WST has been used to explain a number of other phenomena, such as the dynamics of frontier regions in the Americas, the environment, or gender relations in developing countries. WST has also proven fruitful in disciplines beyond historical sociology and history, such as geography (looking at product flows in regional perspective) and archaeology (in which the types of trade goods found from different 23 regions provide a kind of economic hierarchy and make possible suppositions about social systems beyond the region being excavated).