EMPIRE AND AFTER^433new guises. The old colonial areas were only nominally free, they said,
still bound to exploiters by invisible ties of unequal trade and depen
dency; also by subventions and bribes in return for political allegiance
and loyalty. Hence failure.
Some critics of this new colonialism (neocolonialism) even argued
that all exchanges between the advanced industrial nations and the
backward "Third World" are intrinsically unfair. Logically, the poor
should cut all commerce with the rich.^15 No better recipe for poverty
maintenance could have been found, and fortunately most Third World
governments knew better than to shut themselves off from trade in
goods and knowledge; also from loans, gifts, and subsidies. One ex
ception was Burma (Myanmar), where a self-imposed embargo made
it necessary to cannibalize vehicles to keep them running, and to use
gasoline so crude that black gouts of poison spout into the streets.
Only the light traffic saves the lungs of passersby.
Since independence, the heterogeneous nations that we know collec
tively as the South, or as the Third World (and sometimes the Third
and Fourth worlds, to distinguish between poor and very poor), have
achieved widely diverse results. These have ranged from the spectacu
lar successes of East Asia to mixed results in Latin America to outright
regression in such places as Burma and much of Africa.
This diversity of outcomes shows that colonization in itself, even
enslavement, does not dictate failure.* In the long sweep of history,
this is the heart of the matter: down is not out. Some countries have
made something of the colonial legacy; of the heritage of social over
head capital, education, ideas; even of their own anger, resistance, and
prided Others have run down what the colonial power left behind and
have not learned to replace it. Still others were left little, usually be-
- Two examples from pre-modern history: the ancient Israelites after the exodus
from Egypt; and the Aztecs who fled slavery into the marshes and emerged to conquer
all the peoples around.
t The significance of resistance and pride is the principal theme of much of the new
work on the history of imperialism—what Michael Adas conveys as "The End of the
White Hero in the Tropics"—" 'High' Imperialism and the 'New' History," p. 318.
Whereas older studies focused on European conquistadors, governors, and entrepre
neurs, on European modernity vs. native backwardness, on improvement vs. stagna
tion, the recent stress has been on the forms and consequences of resistance, not only
the rebellions, riots, and "mutinies," but also the quotidian sabotage and withholding
of cooperation. On this last, cf. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. The point is to restore
"agency," that is, to show passive victims as purposeful actors and indigenous cultures
as sources of energy and inspiration.