4- From Free Trade to Globalization: Colombia Within the Spreading Global Capitalism

Abstract

The world had to go into a slow and painful path before a sort of world capitalist and trading environment transformed it into a single one-world one-market system. Several authors attempted to build a theoretical framework to offer an explanation of the way a world economic system was formed and how its interactive parts made the whole system work. A first example of this process refers to the sixteenth and seventeenth century European experience, where the idea that the economy developed into a system where boundaries surpassed the nation-state contributed to enlarging the scope of the discipline of economic history. The second corresponds to the contribution of agriculture and industrial modernization as mechanisms to accelerate capital formation. The third set of elements corresponds to factor combination and new institutional improvements to accelerate growth, and finally trade improving conditions to make a world-system operate smoothly, helped particularly by a friendly social, political and economic environment to the formation of this system. Under these conditions we explore how Colombia as an emerging country is linking the world economy, following the idea that in this continent we might constitute a kind of social system that makes a many organically interconnected bits around a trade agreement that covers the whole Hemisphere.