Just a moment...

The application of this logic to land and farming marked a fundamental transformation in human history. It meant that, for the first time, people’s lives were governed by the imperatives of intensifying productivity and maximising output.23 No longer was production about satisfying needs, no longer about local sufficiency; instead, it was organised

The second intervention – in many respects, a second ‘stage’ – is to direct investment and entrepreneurs towards manufacturing. This is because manufacturing industry makes the most effective use of the limited productive skills of the workforce of a developing economy, as workers begin to migrate out of agriculture. Relatively unskilled labourers

While colonialists desire a form of capitalist development that can benefit the entire empire, nationalists aspire to develop a national economy of their own.

But what would catalyze the process of revolutionary mobilization? With hindsight, the push came from the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s festering economic problems, until then officially denied, convinced the top Soviet leadership to call for perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (public openness).