On Global Rift
Stavrianos, Leften Stavros. Global Rift. New York: William Morrow, 1981. pp. 890.
Weirdly “modernist.” It’s good that this book exists as a distillation of Dependency Theory and its application throughout the world from ~1400 to 1980, regardless of whether Dependency Theory is the most useful way of conceptualizing the world today. Nevertheless, Stavrianos comes at his subject from a perspective that appears so progressive—not in the political sense, although surely he is that too, but in the sense of movement. To Stavrianos, it seems that the coming of capitalism caused Western Europe to inexorably consume all other parts of the world, hoisting the capitalist system on other regions and transforming them into workshops for the good of empire (hence, each region falling into the “Third World”). In Stavrianos’s view, the coming of independence movements is a long overdue rejection of the capitalist world-system.
I can’t say I agree. Surely the history of capitalism is important to the history of the world, and that many newly independent states rejected capitalism and opted for socialism, but more often leaders and individuals did not contest the capitalist world system and instead aimed to transform it in a way that benefited themselves. Moreover, the “Third World” doesn’t seem to work in this sense. While some regions of the Third World clearly continue to be “dependent” on the First (in the sense of dependency theory), others are a bit more flexible in their choices. That being said, the world is so tightly interlinked that it seems unthinkable for any country to strive for autarky, let alone actually achieve it. Is that what dependency entails? If so, every country is “dependent.” If not, we might say that many “Third World” countries—China and Russia (but I don’t know why Russia is considered Third World at any point in this book; after all, it had a massive empire of its own), above all—are no longer in the Third World.
It’s worth skimming to see the way that Stavrianos views the past, and perhaps as a blueprint for Dependency Theory as well, but it isn’t worth much as a historical study.