Historical Statistics as Text

Abstract

Europe's colonization of other peoples was a program that aided and deepened the then on-going process of drawing and incorporating non-European regions of the world into the European-dominated capitalist world-economy. Since inception, the world capitalist economic system has enabled European nations to transfer enormous wealth from non-European areas to their respective economies. The beneficiaries of wealth transferred from the periphery regions of the world include European states, their rulers, and their peoples. But the extent to which ordinary members of a specific European population may have benefited from wealth that was generated in specific world regions over a period of time is largely unaccounted for in existing studies. The analysis of British historical statistics for the period 1800-1960 reveals pointers on certain aspects of the extent to which non-state components of the British society may have reaped from the wealth that was extracted from the Indian and West African sub-continents. Indigenous economies in both regions were incorporated and peripherialized into the world-economy and imperial Britain subsequently acquired colonies in them.