Imminent Crisis and the Embryonic Global Regime, 1945–1994

Abstract

As the development economist Arthur Lewis (1970: 19) once commented, ’sugar cane was the only tropical crop to experience a scientific revolution before World War I’. As the previous chapter illustrated, this productive revolution was intimately tied to the extension of state regulation and corporate finance into sugar production. Moreover, the industrial structure and market conditions that this incipient national regime supported created a highly uneven distributive system, prompting Lewis (1955: 281) to remark on another occasion that ’cane sugar is an industry in which productivity is extremely high by any biological standard.….Yet workers in the cane sugar industry continue to walk barefooted and live in shacks, while workers in the wheat industry enjoy among the highest living standards in the world’. More tellingly, Lewis might have contrasted the fortunes of the sugar cane workers in the former colonies with those of sugar beet workers in Europe and America. As the previous chapter also showed, while the institutions characteristic of the national regime were replicated across an ever-growing number of states, the terms brought to bear on the various countries and classes implicated in this transformation differed markedly.KeywordsWorld MarketSugar IndustryExport SubsidyPreferential TradeFood CrisisThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.