GS C10a midterm
Milton Friedman: Milton Friedman believed that an ideal society should prioritize economic freedom over political freedom by minimizing government intervention and allowing individual self-sufficiency in free markets.
Walter Rodney: Rodney stated that Europe prevents Africa from developing by exploiting its resources, or in other words, underdeveloping it, in his work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
Stuart Hall: Stuart Hall critiques how the West represents itself as civilized, whilst categorizing other areas as exotic or in need of advancement.
Franz Fanon: Franz Fanon expresses stark disapproval for the European model and colonization because colonization results in subjective new personhood of colonized subjects, in which people must decide how to conceptualize their own identities in a new way.
Amartya Sen: Amartya Sen published Development as Freedom, and in it, he wrote that having extended freedoms contributed to making development possible.
Sun Yat Sen: Named the Father of the Xinhai Revolution, Sun Yat Sen proposed a development plan with industrialization, land reform, improved infrastructure, and better state management.
Global Studies: Studying the global connections and issues that take place internationally to better understand the world we live in. Explores forces like globalization, development, and transnational movements.
International Relations: Focuses on the interactions between nations, usually more focused on diplomacy, politics, and foreign policy.
Industrial Revolution: In the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution completely changed technological innovation by replacing most labor with capital and energy.
Capital: Capital is wealth in motion. Examples include money, tools, machines, and resources.
Energy: Energy provided the fuel for industrialization. In Britain, the leading source of energy was coal.
Labor: Labor is human work. In the Industrial Revolution, people exchanged their labor for wages.
Material: Materials are the inputs that are used to make products. Examples include cotton, coffee beans, and tea leaves.
Infrastructure: Infrastructure is the basic structures or facilities that improve the condition of living for society. Examples include aqueducts and railroads.
Innovation: Innovation involved transforming ideas into new inventions that society needed. Some notable inventions that resulted from the Industrial Revolution were the steam engine and foot-powered trip hammers from Britain.
Policy: Actions proposed by the government that shifted Britain from mercantilism to a freer market system.
British Empire: A vast empire with many colonies all over the world. The colonies helped the empire accumulate capital by providing markets, raw materials, and slavery, which were essential to the British Empire’s growth as well as the Industrial Revolution.
Factor proportions: Factor proportions are proportional amounts of resources a nation has, or the relative availability of factors of production. It focuses on the amount of inputs it takes to produce commodities or capital.
Development: Rodney defines development as the advancement of society based on how people cultivate their natural environment. He also states that individual skills, freedom, and responsibility cannot contribute to development without societal interactions between different groups of people. Amartya Sen defines development as increasing the amount of freedoms people can exercise.
Underdevelopment: a state in which valuable resources are extracted and exploited to benefit Imperialist colonial powers to develop their own economy.
Superstructure and Base: The base is the economic system and means of production that stays dominant. Superstructure is the part that is not related to production forces and supports the base. Superstructure includes art and law, while the base includes tools and labor.
Unfavorable Integration: When a country is integrated into the global economy, only for unfavorable resource extraction. For example, Congo holds the majority of the world’s cobalt, but cobalt extraction mainly serves other nations' interests.
Dependency: As resources or labor is exploited from lower-income nations, they often become dependent on more powerful nations like the US, because the generated profit advances development in the countries exploiting developing nations, while keeping development in developing countries stagnant or worse off.
Development paradox: When a country that is rich in high-demand resources does not have proportional economic growth/profit and instead may have instability and exploitation.
Export of surplus: When a nation gains profit through its resources, the profits are exported out of the country instead of benefiting the nation. For example, much of Congo’s cobalt is used to generate profit for foreign companies instead of Congo.
The “west”: The idea of the West was developed mostly in Europe, but can now encompass non-Western regions. The “west” is developed and modern, posing a stark contrast to “the other”.
False homogeneity: Makes people assume incorrect things about non-Western countries, ignores the diversities and complexities of nations, and tends to generalize/categorize.
Definition against “the other”: Without what isn’t the “west”, the west would cease to exist because it can only differentiate itself by establishing its superiority compared to less developed nations.
Haitian Revolution: The Haitian uprising that declared independence from France. The victory of Haiti allowed drastic changes, such as banning slavery in the Haitian constitution, to be made.
Toussaint L'Overture: Was the leader of the Haitian Revolution. He pioneered guerrilla warfare and strategically defeated one of the best armies in the world (the French). He was later captured by the French and died in jail.
Haitian political economy: The Haitian political economy was negatively affected due to debt and international policy because they had to pay off debt with extreme interest to France, and were burdened by their dependence on imported American resources like rice and pigs, which deterred the domestic industry
Debt: Haiti was forced to take on debt to support its suffering economy.
International Aid and Trade policy: The Haitian president received French loans with incredibly high loans to support its economy. Haiti relied on international trade, but France’s twenty-year blockade of Haiti made the Haitian market for goods suffer.
Inequality: There was inequality between France and Haiti due to the debt, and it reinforced a similar hierarchy of the French maintaining power while Haitians (mostly people of color) remained dependent.
State failure in Haiti: The assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse led to weakened government control and rampant gang violence (state failure) because Moïse had formed a peace deal with gangs.
Gangs
Freedom: Friedman believes utmost freedom is exercised with minimal government intervention, and he believes economic freedom makes political freedom possible. Amartya Sen believes freedom is the advancements that make development possible, like education, public facilities/infrastructure, and legal and civil rights.
Debt: When one has to borrow money and has not paid it back. Haiti is an example.
The Chicago Boys: A group of Chilean economists trained under Milton Friedman who played a role in implementing neoliberal economic reforms in the Chilean economy.
Friedman’s playbook: Advocated for freedom of cooperation and exchange between individuals as well as limited government intervention in the economy and political scene.
Pinochet: The U.S. replaced the democratic socialist Allende with Pinochet as the leader in Chile to prevent the spread of communism and implement Friedman’s playbook.
Neoliberalism: Liberalism applied to the economy. Examples include free markets, austerity, privatization, and global trade.
Imperialism: A developed (usually Western) nation colonizes a nation and underdevelops it by colonizing it or taking over the government, military, or resources.
Cobalt supply chain: How Congo’s cobalt is extracted and transported to eventually end up in global markets.
Artisanal miners: They are small-scale miners that sell cobalt ore to negociants.
Battery Manufacturers: Take cobalt exports from refineries and create rechargeable batteries.
Four pests campaign: Mao Zedong, the first chairman of the Chinese communist party, wanted to reduce famine and eliminate four pests (sparrow, rat, housefly, and mosquito) that caused disease. However, eliminating the sparrows increased the locust population and worsened the famine because the locusts ate all the crops.
Development indicators: Measure a nation's development mostly economically.
GDP & GDP per capita
Life expectancy
Literacy
Inequality
Liberalism: The goal is to pursue freedom, individualism, and unregulated economies.
The scramble for Africa: When European powers competed to colonize African nations.
Opium Wars: Britain lacked desirable goods to exchange with the Chinese. Therefore, they expanded the opium supply (something the Chinese actually did want) in China. When Commissioner Lin tried to stop the opium trade, Britain and China went to war. Britain won, and the Chinese were forced to open themselves up for Western trade through unequal treaties.
Silver trade: When trading with the Chinese, Europeans often lacked goods that the Chinese wanted, so they had to pay with silver bullion. This caused a silver shortage in Europe.
Sun Yat-sen: Named the Father of the Xinhai Revolution, Sun Yat Sen proposed a development plan with industrialization, land reform, improved infrastructure, and better state management.
Imperial China: Imperial China was far ahead of most of the world in terms of development. It created the first movable type printing press and paper money. Imperial China’s products were also immensely popular in Europe.
Deng Xiao Ping economic reforms: Seeing the decline of the USSR, Deng Xiaoping sought economic development in ways that contrasted with Mao’s. It served as a catalyst for China’s rise to a global economic power. Examples of the reforms was inspiration from various types of economists and philosophers and the invitation of foreign investment by creating special economic zones.
Agency: The ability to act and make decisions independently.