Culture, Trade and Globalization

Eighth in the series of articles

Mervyn Claxton

I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I know well
that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world:
America has been depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them; Africa has been
depopulated so as to have the people to cultivate them. The ravages which European ("free")
trade and globalization have wreaked on non-European lands since the beginning of its expansion in
the 16th century could not be more graphically illustrated than by the above observation of
Bernadin de St. Pierre, a French eighteenthcentury aristocrat. International trade, and the
globalization of economic activity associated with it, have together shaped the modern world in
almost every respect. The depopulation (a euphemism for the trans-Atlantic slave trade) caused by
the demand in Europe for sugar and coffee that Bernadin de St. Pierre noted is but one of many
consequences of international trade. That 17th-19thcentury depopulation is currently manifested in
the tidal wave of illegal migrants from the South, which countries in the North fear will inundate
their societies if draconian measures are not adopted to stem it. The vast majority of those illegal
migrants are forced to leave their countries because of the economic ravages of globalization and
the unequal trade relations that have destroyed entire sectors of their economies.

From as far back as biblical times, right up to the 19th century, spices were considered a
precious trading commodity. In the Bible, Joseph is sold by his brothers to a spice caravan plying
the route between Gilead and Egypt, and the Queen of Sheba brings with her camels bearing spices
as a gift to King Solomon. The ancient spice trade was a complex network, with the spices (mainly
nutmeg, mace, cloves, ginger, and pepper) reaching Europe from the spice-producing islands of the
Moluccas via a supply chain of Chinese and Javanese sailors, Indian wholesalers, and Arab camel
caravaners. In Roman times, there was great demand in Europe for the products of the East spices,
incense, and precious stones. In the post-medieval period, tea, porcelain, silk, and rhubarb were
added to spices as products Europe sought from the East. However, since Europe had nothing the
East wished to buy, which could have offset the cost of its imports, the continent was drained of
silver and gold to pay for them. As early as the 1st century AD, the Roman historian and naturalist,

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Pliny the Elder, expressed serious concern about his country's trade imbalance with the East and the
Middle East: "At the very least, India, China and the Arab peninsular extract each year from
our Empire 100 million sesterces such is the price that our luxuries and our women cost us."
From the Fall of the Roman Empire up to the 17th century, the civilizations of the East and the
Middle East were much more advanced that that of Europe, as the crusaders immediately
recognized on reaching the Levant, where they were dazzled by its luxurous lifestyle.

When the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453, almost all the traditional trade routes to the
East were closed to European merchants, which sparked off a desperate search for an alternative
route to the East, either around Africa or around the globe. There were two great sea-faring nations
at the time Portugal, which (with Vasco da Gama) sought a route around Africa; and Spain, which
(with Columbus) sought a route to the East by circumventing the globe via the Atlantic. The urgent
search for trade routes, and the subsequent need to exercise control over the territories that supplied
the products Europe needed, eventually led to the colonization of most non-European lands.
According to prevailing mercantilist theories, every European country was convinced that political
control of the territories which provided them with essential products was necessary in order to
prevent them from falling under the control of rival European powers. Where colonization was
difficult or inadvisable, as in the case of China, extra-territorial rights were extracted from the
government concerned by Western trading countries, either by threat or by force.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Nankin (1843), the "Unequal" treaty which Britain compelled the
Chinese to sign at the end of the Opium War, Hong Kong was ceded to Britain in perpetuity. In
addition, the Chinese ports of Canton, Foochow, Amoy, Ningpo, and Shanghai were opened to
British trade. The following year China was forced, by France and the United States, to also grant
them extraterritorial rights in the form of "concessions" enclaves that were set aside for their
nationals. In Shanghai, there were British, French, and American concessions until the latter two
were merged to form the "international settlement". In the enclaves, Western foreigners raised
taxes, ran police forces, formed municipal councils, managed local services etc. Like the current
situation in Iraq, where the "multinational" occupying force enjoys extra-territorial rights in the
form of the Green Zone (yet another example of history repeating itself), no foreigner or foreign
firm was subject to Chinese law. They enjoyed the right instead to be tried under the laws of their
own country. Western European colonization profoundly changed the political map of the entire
non-European world, altered the historical trajectory of the countries subjected to it, and
transformed the destinies of the peoples who inhabited them, that is to say, the overwhelming

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majority of the world's population.

George Santayana, the Spanish-American philosopher, once observed: "He who ignores the past
is condemned to repeat it." History is replete with examples of the North imposing unequal trade
relations, unequal treaties, and unequal agreements on the South. On the other hand, history does
not present a single example of a trade agreement, proposed by the North, which was of the
slightest benefit at all to the South. It is not outside the bounds of possibility that Europe has
abandoned its past hegemonial trade practices and has accepted that the globalization game should
henceforth be played on a level playing field, and that the EPA it currently proposes to Caricom
countries will indeed bring great benefit to the region. However, the EU's continued practice in
providing export subsidies for its agricultural products which are then dumped upon developingcountry markets at below-cost prices, destroying the livelihoods of the rural majority in those
countries in the process, is compelling evidence to the contrary.

Devinder Sharma, Chairman of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security (India) and a food
and trade policy economist with an international reputation, described in a recent article the lengths
to which the EU will go to impose lopsided trade terms on countries of the South: "When all
political coercion and economic arguments fail to defend the huge domestic support [of the
EU], the big players are ready to even use moral and ethical concerns to justify the
illegality of maintaining these subsidies. At the ongoing dispute settlement case against sugar
export subsidies, brought up by Australia, Brazil and Thailand, the EU has invoked a good
faith defence by arguing that in negotiating its export subsidy reduction schedule under the
Uruguay Round, it did not include cuts in export subsidies for certain kinds (based on quality)
of sugar. Earlier, when developing countries had wanted sugar subsidies to be discussed, the
EU stand was that sugar was off the negotiating table. The same answer came whenever
developing countries wanted dairy subsidies to be examined. (WTO and Agriculture: Green
Box Subsidies Must Go, April 2008).

Those in the Caribbean who unreservedly support the EPA should think of Santayana's dictum
when they read the serious reservations the UK Parliament's Select Committee on International
Development expressed about the proposed EPAs. "The ACP is negotiating under considerable
duress and the EU approach emphasizes the unequal nature of the negotiation process." In a
remarkable way, those words echo similar doubts about that country's trade relations with India doubts which were voiced in the UK parliament two centuries ago.

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A Select Committee of the House of Commons (1808-1813) was established to examine the East
India Company's request for the renewal of its Royal Charter. In the Committee hearings, the East
India Company's representatives claimed that India had enjoyed prosperity under their rule. That
claim was effectively rebutted by the evidence of a number of experts who were called to testify
before the Committee. The experts attributed much of the existing misery in India to the adverse
effect of the Company's trade monopoly on India's industries, especially its textile industry. In his
seven-volume History of British India, John Stuart Mill, who fully substantiated the experts'
testimony, observed that, in view of the great damage the East India Company had done to India,
"it was too much to talk of the philantrophy of it, or to rank the supporters of it as in a
peculiar degree the friends of India."
Mill continues: "The History of the trade of cotton cloths with India affords a singular
exelification of the inapplicability to all times and circumstances of that principle of free trade
which advocates the unrestricted admission of a cheap article, in place of protecting by heavy
duties a dearer one of home manufacture. It is also a melancholy instance of the wrong done
to India by the country on which she had become dependent. It was stated in evidence [to the
Select Committee] that the cotton and silk goods of India up to this period could be sold for a
profit in the British market at a price from 50% to 60% lower than those fabricated in
England. It consequently became necessary to protect the latter by duties of 70%-80%, on
their value, or by positive prohibition. Had this not been the case, had not such prohibitory
duties and decrees existed, the mills of Paisley and of Manchester would have been stopped in
(sic) their outset, and could scarcely have been again set in motion, even by the powers of
steam. They were created by the sacrifice of the Indian manufacture. Had India been
independent, she would have retaliated; would have imposed preventive duties upon British
goods, and would thus have preserved her own productive industry from annihilation. This
act of self-defense was not permitted her; she was at the mercy of the stronger. British goods
were forced upon her without paying duty; and the foreign manufacturer employed the arm
of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competition with whom he could
not have contended on equal terms." (J. S. Mill, History of British India, Continuation and Notes
by Wilson, pp.538-539, Vol.1, Chapter 8, 1845, 4th edition).

Here we have the very same elements recurring two centuries afterwards, in the case of the
CARIFORUM-EU EPA. The proposers of trade agreement and charter alike presenting them in
altruistic guise, as being beneficial to the country/region concerned; a deliberate deception on the

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part of the entity proposing the agreement/charter re the unfavourable impact it would have on the
country/region; the testimony of experts to the reality of that impact (in Caricom, and before both
Select Committees); and finally, the similarity of conclusion by the Select Committee in both
cases, of the harmful consequences of the agreement/charter. If Santayana were alive today and
witnessed how the near-perfect symmetry between the EPA and the East India Company Charter
provided proof of his dictum, he might well have quipped: "quod erat demonstrandum."

The East India Company presents a text-book case study of the North's entrenched practice of
establishing unequal trade agreements and commercial relationships with the South. It was the
world's first multinational company and also the first to "globalize" its economic activities. It was
tea from three of the East India Company's ships which American colonists used for their Boston
Tea Party, an action motivated by the same resentment against the predatory practices of
multinationals that drives local inhabitants to sabotage Shell company pipelines in the Nigerian
Delta. Like today's multinationals, the East India Company traded in many products, the most
infamous of which was opium. Like today's multinationals also, it was ruthless in its single-minded
pursuit of profits for its shareholders. It might not be without significance that the name it was
fondly called by the people who ran, and worked for, it "the Company" is the very same name
CIA operatives use for their own "Company". The latter "Company" was accused, in the testimony
of several former CIA operatives given to the Congressional Subcommittee on Narcotics,
Terrorism, and International operations in 1988, of involvement in the opium trade in South-East
Asia's "Golden Triangle, profits from which were used to fund what the CIA called its "black"
(illegal) covert activities against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

In that last respect also, the East India Company operated very much like the American "Company",
in "running drugs" between India and China. For Martin Booth, "The first great drugs warlord
was the East India Company which made vast fortunes out of taxing Indian growers and then
shipping the drug [opium] to China." (Opium: A History, 1996). The East India Company was
not only the only corporate drug "baron" in history but it was also the only one whose stocks were
quoted on any Stock Exchange in the world. Among the lucky owners of such valuable stocks were
representatives of the flower of English aristocracy. Where the American "Company" enjoyed only
unoffical institutional and political suport for its drug-running activities, the East India Company's
trade in opium received open political and official support. Her Majesty's navy was assigned to
escort the company's drug-running ships, in convoy, whenever that was necessary.

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The East India Company was the prototype of the modern vertically-integrated multinational
company. Unlike the American "Company" which had to obtain its opium supplies from local drug
barons, the English "Company" possessed its own opium fields in India. The East India Company
was granted a legal monopoly over the production of opium in India. Its monopolistic control over
opium production not only ensured the East India Company cheap, regular supplies of the drug,
with no competition, but also permitted it to control the price of opium throughout the chain - from
plantation to sales outlet - much like today's petroleum "Majors" do when they possess their own
supplies of petroleum. The East India Company's Governor-General, Warren Hastings, described
opium as a "pernicious' commodity, "which the wisdom of the [British] Government should
carefully restrain from internal consumption.'' Apparently, Hastings had no moral problem with
China's internal consumption of that "pernicious" commodity, despite the Chinese government's
vociferous opposition to the British-imposed opium trade.

Opium was produced cheaply, and on quite a large scale, by the East India Company's plantations
in India. It is estimated that between 1767 and 1850 Chinese consumption of opium increased
seventy-fold, with such serious social consequences for the country that the Chinese government
declared opium smoking illegal, in a desperate effort to neutralize the effects of the compulsory
trade. The British were well aware of the destructive nature of opium, but argued that opium sales
were necessary because it was the only item they could sell to the Chinese. Their purchases of tea
and other Chinese products had created a drain of silver from England to China, as had occurred
with Rome 1,700 years before.

By 1804, British revenues from opium sales to China were sufficient to cover the cost of tea
imports. The opium trade increased from 4,244 chests in the 1820-21 period to 18,956 by 1830-31.
By 1831, the value of British opium exports to China was two-and-a-half times greater than the tea
trade, which probably made it the largest and most valuable trade in a single commodity anywhere
in the world. The most important British opium traders, in terms of tonnage traded, were William
Jardine and James Matheson, who formed a partnership (Jardine Matheson) in 1828. Matheson
made good use of his opium fortune to become the second largest landholder in Britain. He was
subsequently ennobled by Queen Victoria who made him a Baron, presumably in royal recognition
of his "patriotic" work in helping erase Britain's trade deficit with China. Jardine was nicknamed
"Iron-Headed Old Rat'" by the Chinese, which is reminiscent of that favourite Chinese 20th-century
appelation for Westerners: "Running dog of caplialism". The modern business firm, Jardine
Matheson, was ranked number 457 in Fortune's 2007 listing of the world's 500 top companies, with

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profits in 2006 amounting to $16.3 billion and assets of $200.4 billion. Money leaves no smell, and
the odour of Jardine Matheson's origins has long been dissipated by the firm's outstanding success.
It is now a pillar of modern Western capitalism a worthy example, for the South, of the reward
globalization holds out for those countries who are willing to embrace it with open arms and to
practise it without any scruples.

From the very beginning, China had vigorously protested to Britain against the East India
company's drug trafficking. Lin Tse-Hs, whom the Chinese Emperor appointed High
Commissioner with a special mandate to end the illegal opium trade, made a poignant appeal to
Queen Victoria to stop the opium traffic, in a letter dated December 31, 1839 he addressed to her.
Lin complained to the Queen that: "this poisonous article is manufactured by certain devilish
persons in places subject to your rule....". Queen Victoria ignored the letter. The subsequent
Chinese destruction, by fire in 1839, of 20,000 chests of opium which were stored in the
warehouses of British merchants in Canton, was a casus belli similar to the Boston Tea Party of
1773. In that year, American patriots protesting against a recent tax on tea imposed by Britain and,
also, against the Company's legal monopoly of the tea trade, dumped into Boston harbour 342
chests of tea belonging to the British East India Company. The Boston Tea Party was one of the
events that paved the way for the American War of Independence. The Chinese destruction of the
British merchants' stocks of opium in Canton sparked off the First Opium War. However, the
similarity between those two defining moments in British imperial history ends there. The
American colonies won their independence. The Chinese, in a manner of speaking, lost theirs.

The First Opium War (1839-1842) ended with the Treaty of Nanking, under which China was
compelled to cede Hong Kong to Britain, in perpetuity. At the time, Hong Kong was a small,
infertile, mountainous island off the Chinese coast whose only asset was a good deep-water harbour
that facilitated its use as an entrept for smuggling and trans-shipping opium to China. The opium
trade with China was not, however, confined to the British. The French and Americans were also
involved. The leading American opium firm was Russell and Company, which was headed by
Warren Delano 11, a former sea captain, former American vice-consul in Canton, and grandfather
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States.

The second opium war (1856-1860) was provoked by China's refusal of Britain's demand for a
revision of the Treaty of Nanking. Those demands, supported by France, and the U.S., included
opening all of China to Western and Russian merchants, China's legalization of the opium trade,

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and its exemption of foreign imports from Chinese internal transit duties. Lord Palmerston, who
was Britain's Prime Minister at the time, gave Sir Henry Pottinger, the British Superintendent of
Trade in Canton, precise written instructions concerning those demands. Pottinger was "strongly to
impress upon the Chinese plenipotentiaries...how much it would be to the interest of that
Government to legalize the [opium] trade.''

China refused to even discuss the legalization of opium, to which demand the Chinese Emperor
Tao-kuang responded: "Gain-seeking and corrupt men will for profit and sensuality defeat my
wishes, but nothing will induce me to derive a revenue from the vice and misery of my
people.'' It was to no avail. The first part of the ensuing war ended in June 1858, with the Treaties
of Tianjin to which France, Russia, and the United States were parties. Those treaties opened eleven
more ports to Western trade, China was to pay an indemnity to Britain and France of 2 million taels
of silver each (the Chinese tael was a 40 oz weight measure), and compensation to British
merchants for destruction of their property in the amount of 2 million taels of silver. China initially
refused to ratify the treaties but further military and naval action by the Western powers finally
"persuaded" it to change its mind. China signed the Convention of Peking (October 1860) which, in
addition to the measures in the Tianjin Treaties, included further impositions: permission for British
ships to carry indentured Chinese to the Americas, and an increase in the indemnity China had to
pay Britain and France to 8 million taels of silver each.

At the time of the First Opium War, the British Secretary for War, Lord Macaulay, declared that, in
trying to suppress the evils of opium, the Chinese had committed an even greater evil an
interference with private property and free trade. One cannot help but wonder what would be
the response of Britain, the United States, and France if the Drug Barons of Colombia and
Afghanistan were to make the very same claim when protesting against those countries' interference
with their private property and freedom of trade in cocaine and opium, respectively. Western
opinion on the Opium Wars has changed since then, although it is rarely expressed publicly.
Discussing the Opium Wars in the late 1980s, a British writer had this to say: "It was an
extraordinary and shaming episode, which is still not adequately dealt with in British History
teaching..."(B. Whitaker, The Global Connection: The Crisis of Drug Addiction, p.17, 1987).

Britain had no other alternative to restoring the island of Hong Kong to China when its
subsequently-acquired lease of the New Territories on the Mainland expired in 1997, since the
Island could no longer survive without them. The occasion of Britain's reluctant transfer of the

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Island's sovereignty to China presented an opportunity for some (a very few) media comments on
the country's disreptuable conduct in the Hong Kong affair. In a 1997 article published in American
Almanac, Robert Trout commented on the origin of Britain's possession of the colony: "At
midnight on July 1, 1997, Hongkong, the British Crown Colony, will be restored to China.
This is not only an event which will be celebrated by patriotic Chinese; any patriotic
American should celebrate it as well. The British seizure of Hongkong was an aspect of one of
the most ugly crimes of the British Empire: the takeover and destruction of India, and the use
of India to flood China with opium. The British twice sent the Royal Cavy to enforce opium
addiction on China, in order to open up China for looting." (THE CHINESE OPIUM WARS:
The Queen of England Pushes Dope. July, 1997).

During the last two decades of the 19th century, and throughout the 20th century, there was a virtual
information blackout on the origins of British sovereignty over Hong Kong. As with the Algerian
War of Independence in France, history books and school text books in Britain skirted delicately
around the subject, in some cases omitting all reference to the Opium Wars. In the issue
immediately preceding Britain's return of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997, an article in the
Sunday Times (London) noted: "In colonial Hong Kong, history text books tackle it [China's
long-running conflict with Britain over the opium trade] with great economy: 40 years of conflict
are described as a 'trade war' and given a single paragraph."
Jan Morris, the author of dozens of travel books and essays on some of the world's most interesting
cities, always made it a point to place the city about which she was writing in its historical context,
perceptively describing and discussing the defining moments of the city's history. Indeed, that was
the most distinctive feature of her writing, as the following book review noted. "Morris shows
particular skill in evoking, and bringing life to, the history of places, and in sketching national
and regional character.Morriss travel writing is usually fixed in the present, but it is a
present always haunted by the presence of the past. Places are stages brought to life by
characters from history who emerge blinking into the light of the present day." However, in
her book, Hong Kong (1988), the reader has to be content with a single cryptic sentence concerning
Hong Kong's British origins. Morris informs us the reader that China ceded Hong Kong to Britain
in perpetuity, in the mid-19th century, without explaining why a very proud sovereign country like
China with perhaps the most outstanding, and certainly the longest surviving, civilization known to
history would want to cede a part of its territory to a distant foreign country. She left the
uninformed reader both unenlightened and perplexed.

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Henry Carey, a contemporary of John Stuart Mill has described and denounced the predatory nature
of British imperial trade policies in general and those of the East India Company, in particular, in
much the same terms as J. S. Mill did with the East India Company. Carey described, in graphic
detail, how the British Empire's system of "globalization'' (a term he understandably did not use for
it had not yet been coined) had devastating effects on India. Prior to the East India Company, whose
Royal Charter granted a monopolistic power over India's economy, the latter was esssentailly based
on indigenous manufacture of cloth and other goods, which made possible a division of labor and a
higher level of productivity for the economy as a whole. The British demanded one-half of the gross
product of the land, as tribute from the areas they controlled, and imposed a tax collection system
which severely disrupted India's economy. Carey further described how, in 1813, Britain removed
tariffs on cloth imported into India, in the name of "free trade'':`"but with the restriction on the
export of machinery and artisans maintained in full force.'' (The Slave Trade, Domestic &
Foreign, Why it Exists & and How it May be Extinguished, 1853).

The Indian textile industry was completely destroyed within twenty years. The result was not only
mass unemployment and starvation for textile workers, but also the impoverishment of cotton
cultivators, since cotton now had to be shipped all the way to England, and the British now had a
monopoly control of cotton consumption. Carey demonstrated that British policy had effectively
reduced India's ability to support its population. Indeed, although Carey did not mention it, it was
that British policy which laid the foundation for the frequent, devastating famines which India's
transformed India into an international basket case, a situation that endured until well after
independence. "The Hindoo, like the negro, is shut out from the workshop. If he attempts to
convert his cotton into yarn, his spindle is taxed in nearly all of the profit it can yield him. If
he attempts to make cloth, his loom is subjected to a heavy tax, from which that of his wealthy
English competitor is exempt. His iron ore and his coal must remain in the ground, and if he
dares to apply his labour even to the collection of the salt which crystallizes before his door,
he is punished by fine and imprisonment.''
Although Carey did not mention it, British authorities in India banned the local production of salt.
The East India Company planted a 12-foot thick thorn hedge to discourage salt smuggling, which
eventually stretched for 2,500 miles along India's coast. Despite having plentiful local salt supplies,
Indians were obliged to buy salt from Cheshire's rock-salt mines, which transported all the way
from England. In 1930, when Gandhi walked 240 miles to the sea and picked up a chunk of salt
crust from the sea shore, the British considered it an act of defiance and rebellion that merited his

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arrest and punishment.

"Free trade" in theory and practice

Until the mid-19th century, international trade was conducted in such a way as to ensure maximum
protection for the domestic market. The struggle in England for free trade, which pitted the
manufacturers and merchants against the farmers who had long enjoyed a market protected by the
tariff on grain, had been joined much earlier in the century. The Free Trade philosophy, which was
called the creed of Manchester because of the symbolic importance of that city in English
industrial and commercial development, triumphed with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.

As soon as Britain acquired a more advanced industrial technology than that of other countries,
British manufacturers and merchants no longer required government protection against the products
of other countries. It was in the British, therefore, to trumpet the merits of free trade, which it did,
becoming the first country in the North to actually adopt a liberal policy of free trade. Clothing
national interest in a philosophy that it proclaimed of universal value, Britain turned "Free Trade"
into a political dogma, preached to, and wherever possible, imposed on, all other countries. Like all
dogma, "Free Trade" was preached fervently and with proselytizing conviction, remaining a
sacrosanct principle until well into the 20th century. Not surprisingly, other countries in the North
initially opposed that British dogma until their own industries achieved a level of efficiency which
permitted them to embrace the "Free Trade" principle with genuine conviction. From the very
beginning, however, the free trade policies of the North were tainted with double standards when it
came to applying them reciprocally to the South.

From the 19th century onwards, either because it was colonized or, though independent, was too
weak to resist imposed commercial relations, no country in the South had the freedom to apply
customs duties to foreign imports in order to control their volume. That was particularly so in
respect of textiles. As Paul Bairoch observed, The commercial policy applied by all the
colonising countries was to open as much as possible the markets of their colonies to
metropolitan products....even in the case of independent countries commercial treaties were
concluded by agreement or by force. (Paul, Le Tiers Monde dans LImpasse, p.54, 1992).

The treaties European countries concluded with the majority of politically independent countries in
the South stipulated that, in no case, were their customs tariffs to exceed five per cent. Those

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treaties, and the commercial arrangements imposed on colonized countries, were unequal in that
their free trade clauses did not apply reciprocally to European countries. In 1913, India could not
impose customs tariffs exceeding three per cent on imported manufactures while, for the same
products and the same period, the customs tariffs countries in the North imposed on their imports
were 13% in the case of Germany, 18% (Austria and Italy), 20% (France and Sweden), 26%
(Canada), and 44% (the United States). For machines and heavy industrial goods like railway
wagons, locomotives, and printing machinery, which were at the time manufactured only by the
industrialized countries, the latter adopted a customs tariff law in April 1901 imposing a general
tariff of 30% on purchases of such machinery by countries of the South. That discriminatory policy
had its intended effect: The fall in the costs of transport, together with customs disarmament
imposed under either a colonial or a neocolonial regime led to the decline in local artisanal
industry [in the developing countries], and completely destroyed the chances of spontaneous
industrialisation. (Bairoch, p.58).

No country in the North was able to launch its economic development without erecting high tariff
barriers to protect its nascent industries. Periods of free trade were very brief interludes in world
economic history, except for Britain which, because of it was more advanced industrially, was able
to afford a grand total of some seven decades of free trade in the entire period between 1700 and
1950. For the other countries in the North that are now considered "developed", such periods of free
trade varied between one and three decades over the same period.

J. F. A. Ajayi, a distinguished Nigerian historian, has described how Europe, historically,

manipulated the principle of "free trade" in practice; "In the 1870s, free trade was the slogan by
which Europeans fought against the right of African rulers to regulate trade. In the name of
free trade, they sought more and more privileges for European traders. They encouraged
African rulers to borrow heavily from European banks and dubious European adventurers.
They manipulated the servicing of the loans, to acquire rights to the produce and to the
customs duties years in advance. They signed one-sided agreements for the collection of debts
and enforced these and other privileges of European traders to weaken the economies of the
states and even more the control of the rulers over the economy. In Egypt and Tunisia, they
forced on the rulers international debt commissions which greatly undermined the autonomy
of the rulers, provoked riots, hindered reform and directly led to the loss of independence,
with little or no fighting involved. But free trade was only a slogan to give the European
traders control of the economy so that they could exclude not only African traders but also

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other European nationals.", (Africa on the Eve of the European Conquest, Unesco General
History of Africa, Vol.V1, pp.773-791, 1989).

The advantages of free trade, in those brief periods of world history when it did actually exist,
accrued mainly to countries in the North, as Alvin Toffler rightly observed: ....despite much
imperialistic rhetoric about the virtues of free trade and enterprise, [countries in the North]
profited greatly from what was euphemistically called imperfect competition . (The Third
Wave, pp.88-89, 1981). To this very day, those very countries continue to interpret the principles of
economic liberalism and free trade in ways that are calculated to promote their own national
interests. Old habits die hard, and it is therefore not surprising that economic liberalism and free
trade, the principles of which are loudly proclaimed by the countries of the North, confident that
their economic and technological superiority would give them a dominant role in any free trade
system, are accompanied by discriminatory trade practices that are designed to load the dice even
more in their favour.

The protectionist practices of countries in the North with respect to their domestic agricultural
markets, though somewhat attenuated in recent years, remain an important obstacle to the expansion
of agricultural exports from, and economic development in, the South. Not content with such
blatant distortion of their vaunted free trade principles, countries in the North continue to dump
their highly subsidized agricultural products in the domestic markets of the South, thus destroying
their local agriculture and husbandry. UNDP noted in 1992 that: "The market for agricultural
produce is also distorted - by import barriers and by $300 billion a year in agricultural
subsidies and price supports in industrial countries, reducing the export opportunities for
developing countries." (Human Development Report, p.48). ILO also calculated, at that same
period, that the lack of market opportunities for the exports of developing countries in the
industrialized countries cost the former $500 billion a year - ten times the amount they received in
foreign assistance. The situation has hardly changed since then. More than four decades after the
demand was made at the first UNCTAD Conference in 1965, the South's famous battle cry of the
time "Trade not Aid" is as justified as it was then.

In the same 1992 report, UNDP noted that those discriminatory (anti-free trade) practices were also
directed to the manufactured exports of developing countries; that non-tariff barriers were imposed
mostly on products in which the latter countries are more competitive (e.g. labour-intensive exports
such as textiles, clothing and footwear); and that tariff levels for a wide range of goods increase

14
with the level of processing. Citing a World Bank study, UNDP further noted that trade restrictions
reduced the GNP of developing countries by three per cent, representing an annual loss of $75
billion for the South. The years following that report have seen no change in the North's systematic
violation of their avowed free trade principles, especially with respect to the South. The rich
countries, for example, cut their tariffs by less in the Uruguay Round than the poor countries did.
According to a 1999 study by Thomas Hertel (Purdue University) and Will Martin (World Bank),
the average tariffs imposed by rich countries on manufactured imports from poor ones are four
times higher than those imposed on imports from other rich countries. (Economist, 25 September
1999). Furthermore, UNCTAD estimated that developing countries could export $700 billion more
annually if the North gave greater access to their markets for the products of the South.

As a general policy, the international economic organizations and the major countries of the North
have tried to cajole and even force countries in the South to privatize all economic, and a certain
number of social, activities; and also to remove all barriers on trade and financial flows, on the
grounds that such measures would stimulate their economic growth. The proposed EPA, to some
extent, is an illustration of that type of pressure. Challenging the theoretical basis of that economic
argument, Dani Rodrick maintains that there is little convincing evidence that open frontiers alone,
i.e. low barriers to trade and capital flows, actually improve economic growth. He considers that
openness ought not to be a policy goal in itself, for though it can bring indirect economic benefits,
such as access to foreign finance or the transfer of technology from abroad, those potential benefits
would only be realized if the right domestic institutions exist and if appropriate policies are
adopted. He further argues that, for developing countries, the lesson of post-war history is that the
key element in fostering economic growth is greater domestic investment, which openness alone
would not guarantee. Indeed, Rodrick argues that openness makes a country vulnerable to
externally-generated, economic shock waves and to the sudden withdrawal of capital. (The New
Global Economy and Developing Countries, 1999).

Richard Falk has challenged the very premises of the North's neo-liberal agenda for the South:
"The winners of the Cold War are promoting a version of democracy that allegedly
embodies purist market approaches to development: privatisation, deregulation, free trade,
unlimited wealth, unconditional property rights, low taxes and limited protection of the
poor....Without appropriate democratization any transition to geogovernance is certain to
remain subject to the manipulation of geopolitics and market forces of the sort characterized

15
by the triple indictment, that is, hegemonic in structure, exploitative in human effect, and
wasteful of resources". (On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global Politics, p.12, 1995).

India was not called the Jewel in the Imperial Crown for nothing, so much has Britain profited from
its rule there. At the beginning of the 19th century, India and China were the worlds two leading
manufacturers and exporters of textiles. Indian textiles were better and cheaper than those of
England. After two centuries of British rule, the situation had completely reversed, as that nation's
leading economic journal has noted: When the British left India in 1947, the country was
relatively poor and backward. (Economist, 16 August 1997). Since the 17th century, textiles had
accounted for more than 50% of non-agricultural activity in India whose tissues, very much
appreciated in Europe, represented almost two-thirds of Indias exports. England decided to change
that situation. From 1813 onwards, England not only obliged India to purchase its own cotton
textiles but also methodically proceeded to destroy India's textile industry and, thus, its capacity to
compete with English textiles.

The destruction of Indias textile industry depended on destroying the skills and autonomy of
Indias weavers, which was often done with great violence. When Indian hand woven textiles
continued to sell better than the products of British mills, the thumbs of the best Bengal weavers
were cut off in order to neutralise that redoubtable Indian advantage over British manufactured
textiles. (Vandana Shiva & J. Bandyopadhyay, Political Economy of Technological Polarisations,
Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.xvii, No.45, 1982, pp.1827-1832). Britain continued to
systematically strangle India's textile industry by imposing heavy taxes on Indian weavers, or on
anyone who owned a spinning wheel, so as to give its own textiles a competitive advantage. Britain
also imposed high tariffs on Indian textile imports while ensuring duty-free entry for its own
exports to India, which soon came to supply all of the latters textile needs, thus effectively ruining
India's textile industry.

Such measures enabled England to increase its textile exports to India from one million yards of
cloth in 1814 to 13 million in 1820, 51 million in 1830, and 2,050 million in 1890. The result was
severe social and economic disruption in India, accompanied by a dramatic increase in
unemployment. Deprived of their means of existence, Indian craftsmen flooded the cities, where
they joined the growing mass of the unemployed because there were few new industries to give
them work. (Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in
the Nineteenth Century, 1981). Describing the consequences of the collapse of the Indian textile

16
industry, Marx wrote of The bones of weavers whitening the plains of India. The massive
migration of ruined Indian textile workers to the cities has its parallel today in Africa where
farmers, whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the U.S. (cotton and grain) and Europe (grain
and meat) dumping highly-subsidized agricultural surpluses in African markets, migrate to the cities
in large numbers in their futile search for work. History truly repeats itself. The North's predatory
policies towards the South live on.

Around 1913, Indias entire manufacturing sector, including artisanal activity, had a production
capacity 50% greater than it had had in 1880, but that represented only one-third of the country's
capacity in 1750. As Paul Kennedy points out, India and Britain had similar per capita levels of
industrialisation at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution but, by 1900, the Indian level was
only one-hundredth that of Britain. (Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, 1993). In that respect,
Yves Lacoste observed: "Very few countries had succeeded in building up as important a
complex of manufacturing and artisanal establishments, exporting to Europe, as that
possessed by India before its colonisation, and very few colonised countries were subjected to
such a deliberate strategy of liquidation." (Gographie du Sous-Development, p.111, 1981).

The textile industry was crucial to Englands economy. By 1840, it accounted for 75% of Englands
industrial employment, and cotton which represented 50% of this sector, was responsible for 40%
of total English exports. Hence the need for England to ensure access to overseas markets for its
textiles, which it did, in the case of its colonies, by deliberately discriminatory policies designed to
eliminate all local competition. But cotton also played an important technical role in Britains
economic development and, indeed, in the success of the Industrial Revolution itself. The
mechanisation of textile manufacture was the leading technological transformation of the first
industrial revolution, and it is because of the particular qualities of cotton fibre which, unlike that of
linen or wool, lent itself to easy processing by machines, that the mechanisation of the textile
industry was made possible.

That mechanisation, which played such an influential and catalytic role in the birth of the Industrial
Revolution, might not have been possible had it not been for cotton with its machine-friendly
qualities: "It is indeed very unlikely that without the prior success of the mechanisation of
cotton spinning, such an enormous amount of effort would have been made to develop
machines capable of successfully processing traditional textile fibres. Textile development
would then have been blocked and this probably would have made problematic, or at least

17
seriously affected, the whole process of economic development." (Bairoch, p.11). The economic
importance of the prior mechanisation of cotton spinning is further illustrated by the subsequent
change in the relative position of the cotton and wool industries. Between 1769 and 1929, the value
of British wool exports increased from 3,897,000 to 5,362,000 while that of cotton grew from
212,000 to 37,269,000.

Africa fared no better under European rule, although the predatory, destructive, and often
murderous nature of that self-serving colonial enterprise has always been clothed in philanthropic
garb. That is as true of French colonial rule in Africa as it was of British rule. Nonetheless, a report
on East Africa by a British Commissioner in the early 1900s makes the following self-righteous
claim: "Modern East Africa is the greatest philanthropic achievement of the later nineteenth
century....Perhaps political philanthropy is never quite disinterested; but when a Government
can point to the triumphant accomplishment of the great work of humanity there is no reason
why it should not receive due recognition....It is only a few years ago since East Africa was
nothing but a human hunting-ground.....The native tribes warred with one another in order to
get slaves to sell to the Arabs, and this picture of slavery and bloodshed was chiefly diversified
by interludes of terrible famine......How great is the difference now! There can be no doubt of
the immense progress made in rendering the civilisation of the African at least possible, and it
is a progress which need occasion no regrets, for we are not destroying any old or interesting
system, but simply introducing order into blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism." (Sir
Charles Eliot, Report by His Majesty's Commissioner on the East Africa Protectorate, 18th April
1903).

The French were no less convinced, both of the undeniable superiority of their culture and of the
benevolent, altruistic nature of Frances colonising mission. Cardinal Verdier, Archbishop of Paris
in the 1930s, felt able to describe his countrys colonising mission in Africa in lofty and
condescending terms: "Cothing is more moving than this gesture of the Frenchman, taking his
black brother by the hand and helping him to rise. This hierarchic but nonetheless real
collaboration, this fraternal love stooping toward the blacks to measure their possibilities of
thinking and feeling......this art, in a word, of helping them progress through wise
development of their personality toward an improved physical, social, and moral well-being;
this is how Frances colonizing mission on the black continent appears to us". (cited in Wole
Soyinka, A Balafon Against Disdain, 1997). History is unforgiving, for the historical evidence does
not support that incredible attempt to clothe French colonial rule in Africa in philanthropic guise.

18
The first Madagascan resistance to French colonial rule began in November 1895 with an
insurrection led by the nationalist movement, Menalamba. It was broken by brute force. However,
France's "pacification" of the island was only completed in 1904, after 100,000 of a total population
of approximately 3 million were killed by the French army. Some forty years later, at least 100,000
Madagascans (according to a statement made in January 1949 by Pierre de Chevign, the French
High Commissionner of Madagascar) were killed by the French armys brutal repression of the
national revolt that began in March-April 1947. After visiting Algeria in 1841 and seeing how
France was pacifying the country with the technique known as "razzia", which involved the
systematic sacking and burning of villages with women and children in them, Alexis de Tocqueville
described the nature of French rule there as quite simply "barbaric". As Frances Ghils has noted,
the founding of Amnesty International in the 1950s was prompted by the brutality of France's
colonial rule in Algeria and by the atrocities committed by French forces in the Algerian War of
independence. (Another Savage War, Times Literary Supplement, 6 February 1998).
Notwithstanding France's murderous colonial rule, the French National Assembly adopted a Bill in
April, 2004, one clause of which declared that French colonial rule in North Africa was beneficial
to North African peoples and that that "fact" should be taught history courses in French schools.

Caricom and the EPA

The current debate in the Caribbean on the EPA, which has brought to light a disturbing democratic
deficit, as well as a serious deficiency in public consultative processes between Caricom
governments and their citizens, underlines the crucial importance of citizens and citizens groups
having ready access to relevant information that would enable them to monitor, in an effective
manner, the political power of the corporate economy. The public need for such information was
illustrated, par excellence, in France, by the still-born, neo-liberal Multilateral Agreement on
Investment. With tacit support from the French government, and without full public disclosure of
the terms of the Agreement or any opportunity provided for a public debate of it, the European
Union was apparently proposing surreptitious adoption of the Agreement, which would then be
virtually impossible to repeal. The proposed agreement, which became publicly known in 1997,
would have provided multilateral firms with an unrestricted right to invest in any sector of the
economy of any of its signatories, on the same terms as national firms. It had been discussed in
quasi-secret conditions, in negotiations conducted under the auspices of the OECD, in whose
twenty-nine member states ninety per cent of the worlds multinationals have their headquarters.

19
Under the draft agreement, any national legislation that was contrary to its terms would have had to
be repealed, without any possibility of such legislation being re-enacted by the government
concerned. Any loss to, or prevention of profits by, multinationals as a result of changed
government policy, as for example national legislation introduced for environmental protection,
would have given the firms concerned the right to be indemnified by the responsible government,
for loss of profits. Multinational firms could therefore take sovereign states to court to prevent the
latter from enacting legislation in the national interest, but which would adversely affect the firms
profits. In April 1998, the President of the External Economic Commission of the European
Parliament denounced the draft agreement as the privatization of legislative power with
commercial law taking precedence over public law. More than two years after the semi-secret
discussions on the agreement had begun, the President of the French National Assemblys
Commission on Foreign Affairs admitted that he had been totally unaware that they were being
conducted.

A small group of French parliamentary representatives from the Greens, the Socialist, and
Communist parties took up the issue, posing questions to the Government and disseminating
information on the draft agreement to the public. The disseminated information served to mobilize
dozens of French NGOs, civic associations, and trade unions to contest the agreement, with similar
civic action taking place in the United States and several other European countries. Internet was
used, to great effect, to disseminate information on the agreement worldwide and to mobilize
opposition to it. That widespread protest action led to the suspension of negotiations on the
agreement, in April 1998, when the French Government finally signalled its opposition to it.

That neo-liberal Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and the apparent ease with which secret
negotiations were conducted, on behalf of highly developed sovereign member states of an intergovernmental organization, for more than two years with senior national parliamentary figures kept
in total ignorance, should be a salutary warning for Caricom citizens and citizens groups. It
illustrates the power of the international corporate economy and is a portent of what could happen
in the less developed Caribbean societies (less developed in terms of the influence civil society
could exercise on the government) if they do not ensure that national legislation is adopted which
would render full disclosure, and open public consultation, of such important agreements as the
EPA, compulsory for Caricom governments. Moreover, the EU's attempt to introduce the
Multilateral Agreement by stealth, and the French government's apparent complicity in that attempt,
is not only very revealing about the EU's methods of operation but it also shows how easy it is for

20
such powerful organizations as the EU to persuade governments that their proposals would benefit
their countries. Caricom countries should take careful note.

The EPA's are being "sold", by the European Union to Caricom and other ACP countries, in the
hallowed name of "free trade" and for the presumed economic benefits such agreements would
bring them, not least of all, their acceptance as fully accredited players in the globalization game.
However, in contemplating whether they should agree to the EU's "hard sell", Caricom countries
should bear in mind the Northern adage, "caveat emptor". The benefits the EU itself stands to
derive from those same EPAs are seldom, if ever, mentioned. Moreover, the fact that the dice are
loaded against ACP players in that globalization game is considered a minor inconvenience which,
it is implied, should in no way devalue the "altruistic" gesture of the EU in facilitating their
participation in the globalization game on the allegedly "concessionary" terms offered by the EPA.

Dissatisfied with Dag Hammarskjold's refusal to order the United Nations troops, which had been
despatched to the Congo to assist Lumumba with the country's post-independence problems, to
restore Katanga to central government authority by force, Nikita Khrushchev proposed, at the UN
General Assembly in 1960, that the post of UN Secretary-General be replaced by a Troika.
Implying that it was Hammarskjold's alleged bias towards the West which prevented him from
adopting a neutral position on the Congo, Khrushchev declared that there may be neutral countries
but there are no neutral individuals. To paraphrase Khrushchev, there may be philanthropic,
altruistic individuals but there are no philanthropic, altruistic countries. In their external relations,
the primary objective of every country is to protect and further its own interests, not those of other
countries. Caricom countries should bear that well in mind when they are told, by the intergovernmental entity with which they are negotiating a trade agreement that is as important to their
economic future as the EPA is, that the entity's proposals will bring them great benefit.

The vaunted "philanthropy" of the colonial and imperial enterprise has become the "development
assistance", "aid" programmes", and "concessional" trade agreements of today. John Stuart Mill
denounced the fraudulent character of the East India Company's claim that its operations in India
were philanthropic (i.e. beneficial to the Indians). The British parliament's Select Committee has
denounced the EU's attitude in EPA negotiations as anything but beneficial to Caricom and other
APC regions despite claims to the contrary by the EU and the EPA supporters in the Caribbean. It is
in that light that Caricom should assess whether the "development assistance" in the EPA package
would really compensate the region for the probable negative effect of further trade liberalization,

21
as the EU and some of its Caribbean supporters proclaim. In that respect, the Caribbean should bear
in mind the advice Laocon, the Trojan seer, gave to his fellow Trojans: "timeo Danaos et dona
ferentes" ("I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts").

In terms of its perceived distinctiveness as a cultural entity, as a coherent system of values, and as a
politico/geographical expression, Ancient Greece was the very embodiment of the modern idea of
the West, particularly in contraposition to the East. Writing in the 5th century B.C., Herodotus
reported that Persian historians identified the Trojan War over Helen as the event that had initiated
the division between East and West. The Persian historians were taking stock of the situation
between the two blocks, as they saw it, after the crushing defeat of Darius, the Persian king, at the
Battle of Marathon in 490 BC - the very year Herodotus was born. In the opinion of modern
Western historians also, that battle sealed the split between East and West. In that very respect,
J.F.C. Fuller observed: "Their victory endowed the Greeks with a faith in their destiny which
was to endure for three centuries, during which Western culture was born." (A Military
History of the Western World, 1987). For his part, John Stuart Mill considered the Battle of
Marathon a more important event for British history than the Battle of Hastings. In his opinion, if
the Persians had won that battle, what we call "the West" would never have come into being.

Consequently, "Ancient Greece" and "the Greeks" could be assimilated, respectively, to "the West"
and "Westerners" of modern times. For the purposes of this article, therefore, the prescient advice
the Trojan seer gave his fellow citizens when he saw them discussing what to do about the wooden
horse the Greeks had left outside the gates of Troy after abandoning their 10-year siege of Troy,
could apply to Europe and the West as a whole. Recounting the siege of Troy by the Greeks in his
epic poem, the Aeneid, the Roman poet, Virgil, recalls Laocon's advice to the besieged Trojans.
"At the head of a large crowd, in plain view of everyone, Laocon, in a blazing temper, came
rushing down from the acropolis, and from far off started shouting: 'What colossal madness
is this, you pitiful people? Do you really believe the enemy have sailed away? Do you think the
Greeks make any gifts which are not tricks? Is this the Ulysses you know? Either Greeks are
hidden secreted within this wood, or this is a device to attack our walls: it will spy on our
homes and roll down upon the city, or it is some other kind of booby trap. Trojans, do not
trust the horse. Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts.' (bk 2, v.49).

One is tempted to follow the example of the very prescient Laocon and ask of Caribbeans
contemplating whether to accept the EPA or not, "Is this the Europe you know? In view of their

22
past history of ruthless colonial domination and unequal trade relations with the South, do
you think the Europeans make any gifts which are not tricks? Caribbeans, do not trust the
Europeans. Whatever the EPA really is, I fear the Europeans - even when they bring gifts."