of the centrifugal tendency andbalkanizationthat have characterized African
politics since the 1950s because they often clustered groups that historically were
adversaries within the confines of a single state, or conversely, diluted the influence
of many groups by dividing them among several countries.
Although the overt political control of imperial powers has faded over the past
half century, some scholars argue that this has been replaced by more subtle forms
of imperialism, including cultural and economic imperialism. Some consider glob-
alization to be simply a more indirect means for the developed world, representing
former colonial powers, to control the global economy and secure markets for
their products by controlling the flow and supply of capital and technology.World
systems theoryand dependency theory both are anchored in the position that the
exploitive economic relationship betweenthe industrialized, imperialistic coun-
tries and their colonial holdings was not ameliorated by political independence
of the colonies, but rather was simply replaced by a more insidious system of con-
trol and manipulation that perpetuates the dominance of the imperial states. For
these commentators, the Age of Imperialism has not come to an end, despite what
they consider to be a superficial independence for most of the colonial territories.
Another school of thinkers holds that cultural imperialism, the ubiquitous applica-
tion and promotion of external cultural values that erodes the foundation of tradi-
tional culture, is the actual legacy of political imperialism. The proponents of this
view assert that Western, and especially American, culture and value systems have
usurped the traditional cultures of much of the world, and that this process results
in both a corruption of traditional value systems, and the elimination of non-
Western cultural systems, or at the very least a hybridization of culture. The
process is reflected in everything from the loss of indigenous languages to the
adoption of Western modes of dress, and is typically viewed as leading to a loss
of diversity in the human family and resulting in a homogenizedcultural identity.
The agents of cultural imperialism are primarily the media, and in recent decades
the Internet, which now (according to the supporters of this theory) has the ability
to project Western culture to every corner of the planet.Infant Mortality Rate
The Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) is defined as the number of infants who perish
during the first year of life per one thousand live births. The IMR is typically com-
puted for a given country or state and reported on an annual basis. Because it is a
rate and not a percentage, it is reported as an integer. For a child to be included in
the IMR calculation, the infant must exit the birth canal or womb (in the case of a188 Infant Mortality Rate