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Writer's pictureEmilė Petravičiūtė

Relating Global and Local: Historical Perspective on Inequality


Jinrickshaw quarters in 1920s Singapore (Source: Cheah Jin Seng's Singapore: 500 Early Postcards)

Introduction

Leading scholars of inequality today, such as Branko Milanovic[1] or Frank Stilwell[2] amongst others, tend to structure their publications in three segments: inequality between nations, inequality within nations, and inequality between global citizens. Similarly, historians writing on inequality often fall either within the debates on global divergences, such as Austin, Acemoglu and Robinson, Pomeranz, or Parthasarathi, or within debates on local inequalities within societies, including Dahrendorf, Tilly, and Flannery. However, not so many authors draw contrasts between the histories of global hierarchies and the experiences of local inequalities.


I thus argue that historians should juxtapose local with global inequalities in a mutually relating, rather than isolating way, to uncover the mechanisms of inequality formation. In particular, I will analyse how the changing global systems of hierarchies result in shifts in experiences of inequality within national societies both directly physically, and indirectly ideologically. Firstly, to illustrate the former, I will use an example of nineteenth-century British colonialism’s impact on racial inequality in Malaysia and Singapore. Secondly, the latter will be explained by an analysis of how local experiences of inequality in the post-communist Eastern European countries were shaped by the global hierarchies of knowledge pushing for neoliberal reforms in the 1990s.


Nineteenth-century colonialism

Wallerstein called two time periods as ‘Age of Transition’, referring to major shifts in global economic and political hierarchies. These are from 1450 to the present, and from 1945 to the present[3]. In this article, I will narrow down these two timeframes to the 1800s and 1990s to demonstrate the historical contrast between international and national inequalities. This part will analyse the former, specifically, how the global shift in the British Empire’s domination determined the local experience of racial hierarchies in Singapore and Malaysia. It will start with a brief discussion of the Great Divergence and British domination, followed by a conceptual understanding of contrasting imperial growth with national colonial inequalities and end with a specific example of racial polarisation in the British Straits Settlements.


The Rise of Europe and the British Empire

The last 500 years saw something that Acemoglu and Robinson call the ‘Reversal of Fortune’, which points out that regions in Asia, and Africa, that were relatively prosperous in the 1500s, became poor[4]. Pomeranz notes that it was in the 1800s when industrialisation got underway that the greatest change in world regions began to show[5]. Western Europe diverged greatly, more than doubling its output per capita in the century, while East Asia stagnated[6]. It was notably the British Empire that climbed to its zenith of global dominance at the time not only economically, but politically too, newly acquiring several countries in Africa, as well as Burma, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The nineteenth century also saw the British crown assigning governmental authority to the East India Company[7], which now had legitimate tools to directly extract wealth from residents[8] of a country 7000 km away to its domestic royal sovereign. Many inequality historians argue that this century holds the roots of global inequality[9], with Branko Milanovic’s famous data explorations confirming the 1800s as a starting point for a change in the composition of global income inequality. While in the early 1800s within-state class disparities were responsible for the bigger part of global inequality, today, 80% of it is comprised of between-countries income variation[10].


How and why exactly this happened is one of the biggest ongoing academic debates, with classical explanations ranging from Weber’s appraisal of Protestant ethics as the driving mechanism for European economic growth[11] to the Malthusian argument of better European population management[12]. These have now been mostly rejected and historians, such as Parthasarathi, or Pomeranz, take a more pragmatic approach, stressing the importance of the lack of wood, competition from the Indian textile industry[13], and exploitation of the New World lands[14] as leading to the European coal-fired industrial revolution. The two authors are critical of institutionalist or Marxist approaches that shine a light on capitalism and surplus value extraction as the drivers of European divergence. This critique is complemented by Austin’s argument that capitalism can also be found in the pre-colonisation indigenous communities[15]. However, in analysing how this restructuring in global hierarchies required a change in local colonial inequalities, focusing on capitalist markets and surplus value extraction will prove quite useful.


Colonial inequalities

The rising economic and political power of Europe inevitably meant the weakening of non-European regions. Historians and Political Science authors including Austin[16], Wallerstein[17], Luxemburg[18], Hobsbawm[19], Buzan and Lawson[20] all tend to somewhat agree that the changing global hierarchies resulted in an intensified spread of the capitalism, both through colonisation, and global trade in general. The Marxist school of thought argue that the surplus value extraction and capital accumulation qualities of the capitalist economy required non-capitalist lands inclusion in the global economic system for three main reasons. Firstly, industrial production required raw materials from new lands[21]; secondly, the British empire needed new markets to sell their products to, as the local English citizens were too deprived by the new industrial capitalist regime to provide enough demand[22]; thirdly, the intrinsic nature of capitalism required the spread ‘beyond its native continent’[23], for the sake of the 'entanglement of all peoples in the <...> world market'[24] to maximise the surplus value extraction. In such a way, the rise of Europe, and Britain especially, above the rest of the countries, resulted in the separation of the world into the rich core, which centralised accumulated industrial capital, and poor colonial peripheral economies, from which capital was extracted. The power core countries had propelled the processes of global exclusion, segregation, and segmentation through imbalanced international trade and direct colonialism, which created what Cambridge sociologist Göran Therborn calls, a circle-like, core-periphery global system of inequality[25].


The British industrial revolution triggered the de-industrialisation of ‘the Rest’, as argued by Austin. This is because the British empire needed the markets to export their manufactured products, which have previously pushed Britain to a trade deficit due to for example aforementioned Indian textiles. In addition, richer Europe has now started requiring more agricultural goods[26]. With the new position at the top of the global hierarchy, Britain coerced the rest of the world into ‘export-intensive vehicles for the metropole’[27] through various colonial laws and policies, de-industrialising previously prosperous economies. Change in economic production inevitably meant a change in systems of inequality.


The local colonial experiences of inequality were restructured in two ways, the first one being the creation of different labour relations to produce and export more primary goods. Wage-labour generally increased in most colonised countries in the nineteenth century, because of the demise of slavery in some[28], and the displacement of peasants from their private farms to plantations in others[29]. While drawing some out of poverty, this wage labour was extremely exploitative, including long hours and reduced food security[30]. However, as Austin notes, the creation of the wage labourers’ class was mostly unintentional, as what really interested the colonial elites was extracting more value from the land market, which required tax collection from the peasants living on these lands[31].


Therefore, the second way local relationships of inequality were changed was through new taxation systems imposed by the colonial powers. Extractive institutions in non-settler colonies were thus created to maximise the profits from land revenues by enhancing existing or creating new systems of inequality. Colonisers thus created bonds with local elites, imposing indirect rule through them[32]. In Bengal, for instance, on top of enforcing their own superiority, the British intervened in the local inequalities by reforming the hierarchical dominance of zamindars[33]. They put the supportive zamindars in the shoes of British-style landowners, which resulted in an even more extractive tax system that maximised colonial land revenue profits[34]. Acemoglu notes that in places like densely populated India, where some tax administration systems already existed, it was profitable for Europeans to control such systems and plunder wealth by levying high taxes[35].


Acemoglu’s institutionalist approach is generally very useful in contrasting the global and local inequalities arising from the colonial period, as he argues that Europeans developed private property institutions where they have settled, for instance, the US, or New Zealand, which sequentially led to the economic growth of these previously poor regions. On the other hand, in the colonies that they have not settled in, colonial powers manufactured extractive institutions characterised by exploitative labour, tax systems, and exclusive hierarchal orders, which have lasting negative effects until today[36]. These extractive institutions, designed to maximise rents to European colonialists, placed the majority of the colonial population at risk of expropriation by the government, which consisted of a small group of ruling elites[37]. Austin disagrees with Acemoglu in some ways, drawing attention that the extractive colonial and post-colonial institutions did not necessarily result from ill-intended colonisers, but from European private property concepts mismatching existing hierarchal practises[38]. Even so, their arguments overlap in agreeing that European colonialism disrupted existing social organisations, deepening extractive institutions, and thus hindering further inclusive development and growth[39]. Therborn’s systematisation of interactions between global and national inequality processes thus rightly notes that the global history of institutional legacy determines local distribution[40].


Racial inequalities in the Straits Settlement

The changing global hierarchies of the nineteenth century allowed the newly rich European, and especially British, powers to expand their imperial dominance over the world. This disturbed pre-existing economic and social structures in the colonies, inevitably transforming local hierarchies. This section will specifically contrast how the local racial dynamics in the Straits Settlement, which consisted of port towns of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, got affected by the British colonial rule, which, as I showed earlier, is the result of the changing global hierarchies the nineteenth century experienced.


Before the British took over the Malay peninsula, it already had a somewhat multi-ethnic population, including Chinese and Indian migrants, due to its central trading position in Southeast Asian commerce. The indigenous rulers of the Johor state encouraged Chinese migration, entrepreneurship and settlement. The migrants integrated quite well and intermarried with the local Malays[41]. Some cultural division and occasional hostility existed between the races; however, as argued by William Lee[42], and Charles Hirschman, these were not systematic, as before the domination of the British, there was no racial ideology pertaining to social interactions[43]. However, the global dominance of the British, which eventually reached the Malay kingdoms in the nineteenth century, impacted the ethnic hierarchies in three pillars: imported ideological racism, exclusionary political treatment, and segregated economy, as discussed in the following paragraphs.


The nineteenth century was a time of classification and hierarchical ordering in the European sciences, including Darwinian and Linnaean understandings of all species, non-human, and human. This resulted in defining and differentiating races, and in a sense, the birth of structural racism[44]. Hirschman argues that the British colonisers imposed the same type of thinking about races in colonised Strait Settlements too[45], which justified differences in entitlements to the white, Malay, Chinese, or Indian residents of the ports[46], and helped the British to ‘divide and rule’[47]. The British created stereotypes of Malaysians as ‘lazy’, and of the Chinese as ‘hardworking’[48]. These narratives have built a racial ideology in a country which did not have one before, producing consciousness of segregation, which is strongly felt by a lot of people in Singapore and Malaysia even today due to the adaption of racially exclusive institutions by the post-colonial regimes that followed after the independence[49].


Politically wise, however, the local pre-colonial rulers, who were Malay, received preferential treatment, as the British had to collaborate with local elites to negotiate for the establishment of their own rule. The new British authorities thus gave a promise to foster Malay culture as a superior one,[50] only letting full political or administrative participation of exclusively Malay officials, regarding resident Chinese as non-citizens[51], and allowing Malay aristocrat families to enter a cultural European snobbery alongside the new British rulers, however, virtually stripping them of any real power[52].


Economically, the races were strictly segregated into different segments by the British to maximise value extraction: cheap Indian and Chinese migrants’ labour was utilised for rubber plantations and tin mines, and local Malay peasantry was bound to feudalist-like agriculture[53]. The Chinese migration bringing cheap labour was heavily fostered by the colonisers to extract more value from tin and rubber exports, however, many Chinese migrants have also seized the opportunity to become entrepreneurs and established small businesses, or loan services, of which some grew into big enterprises. While not recognised as real citizens of Malaysian lands, they were relied on by the colonisers not only as workers, and economy fosterers, but also sellers of opium[54], which acted as a tool for the British to control the working class[55]. With the laws constraining the Chinese to urban areas only[56], racial segregation was established in every aspect of life.


The new nineteenth-century global power that was Britain, imposed inequality-enhancing institutions on the colonised Malaysian and Singaporean territories to both rule over the country more efficiently, and extract more profits. Thus, the Straits Settlements example reveals a specific case of contrasting the historic events of global and local inequalities.


The neoliberalism of the 1990s

The physical territorial and material economic global hierarchies, exercised through colonisation were not the only way local inequalities changed. As mentioned before, a second timeframe Wallerstein calls an ‘Age of Transition’ is post World War II[57]. However, this is rather a time of de-colonisation and national independence movements, seemingly the opposite of the nineteenth-century transformations. However, in the following parts I argue, that historians should contrast the local and international inequalities of the last 70 years, by looking at the global hierarchy of knowledge, and ideology instead. Particularly useful is the case study of the economic transition of the post-communist Eastern European region after the fall of communism in the 1990s.


Global Ideological Hierarchies

Many historians argue for the central role of knowledge in shaping different forms of inequality. Examples include the aforementioned classification of races, biological differences argument for a system of gender binary[58], liberal theory shaping exclusionary hierarchies of reason[59], or the birth of statistics and the ‘bell curve’ to justify eugenics[60]. All of these ideas coming from the political hegemony of the West dictate how inequalities are perceived in the spheres of their influence around the globe. This is especially true for the post-war period, which saw the rise of a new kind of global hierarchy – the binary competition between the US and USSR for ideological and political domination.


The US seized the opportunity to spread its capitalist understanding of economic development to the rest of the world through the Marshall plan, and Point Four programme, to ‘prove that capitalism was better equipped than socialism to ameliorate the lives of the poor and underprivileged’[61], as argued by Sara Lorenzi. In fact, due to its global academic hegemony, American and British thought became the roots of development as a discipline. Stephen Macekura further argues, that economic growth, as a linear process of development aiming at the goal of reaching the Western levels of ‘Mass Consumption’ as argued by Rostow[62], was invented by the Cold War economists dominating social sciences at the time[63]. Rostow’s ideas, for example, were directly used as a justification for the US military action in South Vietnam[64]. By producing knowledge on what kind of economy developing countries should strive for, Western economists inevitably manufactured ideas on how national inequalities should change as well. One such example is Simon Kuznet’s famous theory that income inequality should increase, and then decrease along the linear process of development. While it has been proven wrong by many contemporary prominent economists, Milanovic notes that it acted as a justification to push for certain economic development policies[65]. With both Kuznets and Rostow being fierce anti-communist campaigners, it is clear that this knowledge production was intertwined with maintaining and strengthening the US ideological hegemony in an intense battle of global hierarchy with the USSR in the Cold War.


The rise of neoliberalism

Because of the bipolar Soviet-American opposition, argues Piketty, heterodox thinking about economy and property was blocked[66]. Perhaps, this is why a radical idea of complete privatisation, market liberalisation and individualism, better known as neoliberalism[67], changed Keynesian economic policies of state intervention in the 1970s. In addition, David Harvey argues that the global neoliberalism project was led by the top classes in the developed world when their share of assets fell by 16% from 1965 to 1975 after real interest rates went negative due to a global period of stagflation and the oil crisis[68]. However, neoliberal policies, promoting tax cuts, erosion of social protection, free trade, and minimal state intervention could create conditions for the lost capital restoration[69].


Neoliberalism was first adopted by Reagan’s US, and Thatcher’s Britain, but soon spread across the developing world in three ways: through physical US-backed military regimes, such as in Chile, or Argentina[70], through implementations of the loan conditions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Mexico[71], or Jamaica[72], and through voluntary national governments’ policies changes, such as in Deng Xiaoping’s China, or 1980s India[73]. In this way, and with the global hierarchy of knowledge, specifically in Economics academia (60% of all Economics Nobel Laureates are American[74]), the global Gramscian ‘common sense’, that free-market policies lead to economic growth, was manufactured[75].


Neoliberalism as a dominating doctrine, arising from the hegemony of the US, drastically changed all levels of inequality. Global inequality between individuals rose[76], with the top 1% of the ‘global plutocrats’ receiving one-fifth of the whole global output gains since the 1980s[77]. Neoliberal economic policies reached even communist China, and the USSR, both of which showcased high growth in income inequality too[78]. The developing countries’ local inequalities were also extremely reshaped by the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of neoliberal austerity policies. This is true not only for income inequality but various other aspects of hierarchies too. For example, one of the austerity measures being social expenditure cuts meant that number of women were coerced to perform unpaid care work, reinforcing patriarchal structures[79].


Taking the risk of oversimplifying the complex global phenomenon that is neoliberalism, the summary of it as a mechanism that linked global and local inequalities is as follows. Changing global hierarchies, positioning USSR and America as two dominant ideological powers, resulted in America pushing for a radically anti-state intervention economic knowledge agenda that is neoliberalism. This push was additionally promoted by a shift on another level of global hierarchies – the weakening assets of the top elites. Neoliberalism quickly dominated the policies of the Western world, global development institutions, and the consciousness of national policymakers, in this way in itself further changing hierarchies by making the global rich richer. The neoliberal policies, which were designed to support global hierarchies, infused segments of local inequalities, creating class division and accumulating capital for the elites.


Shock Doctrine in post-communist Europe

The transition economies of post-USSR and Eastern European countries can act as the purest illustration for historians analysing the contrasts between global and local inequalities concerning neoliberalism of the last century.

The fall of the USSR and communist regimes in Europe signalled the end of the Cold Way and the victory of the US ideological hegemony. This massively shifted the global hierarchies of knowledge and consciousness, as with the opposition to Western neoliberalism failing, one seemed to have no choice anymore but to agree with Thatcher, that there actually is ‘no alternative’[80]. The victory of the US was greatly celebrated by Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay on ‘the end of history’, promoting ‘Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’[81]. Fukuyama employed Hegel’s notion of historical materiality[82], which bases itself on the metaphysical concept of consciousness transcending to material reality, resulting in the historical progression towards the absolute spirit.


However, there are clear examples that the global consciousness of Western ideology of political economy did not naturally transcend to the local material lives of the new democracies of the independent post-communist states. Small weak countries, wanting to cut ties with the past regime and turn away from the massive security threat of Russia, had no choice but to accept every condition from the West to gain their support. The countries were economically deprived and in desperate need of funding sources[83], so undergoing a neoliberalism shock economic transition was crucial in two ways.


Firstly, by adopting neoliberal reforms they asserted their ‘capitalist credentials’, gaining an advantage against the rest of the developing world such as Latin America, or Asia, in the competition for foreign investments[84]. Secondly, turning to IMF, and its’ austerity conditions, was the only choice as it provided much-needed loans. Dr Kropas, A Lithuanian economist working for the IMF and one of the figures behind Lithuania’s Independence Act, noted that alternative, less shock-inducing economic transition paths were never even mentioned in the parliamentary discussions[85]. However, as Prof Rutland notes, radical free-market reforms were not all coerced by international and capital pressures. In Latvia, neoliberal ideas were promoted by a group of local economists who had studied in the US, and one of first Estonia’s prime ministers Maart Laart claimed to be a fan of Friedman’s ideas[86]. Nevertheless, this does not mean that neoliberal policies were the actual best option for the Baltic countries, but were rather perceived by local policymakers as the only option through the aforementioned Gramscian ‘common sense’.


The economic reforms of the ‘shock therapy’ – sudden privatisation through the use of vouchers, price liberalisation, social spending cuts, no regulations of new businesses or proper taxation regimes, and opening up to international trade, had detrimental effects on economic growth, as well as income, and social inequalities. The Gini coefficient, which measures the intensity of income inequality, jumped by 15 points on average in post-USSR countries[87]. As state-owned enterprises got privatised, unemployment rates soared[88], however, the ones at the top, or the ones who were quick and witty enough to engage in new forms of unregulated markets and entrepreneurship, gained capital quickly, exponentially creating a new economic and social stratification[89]. In fact, what emerged was what Titma and Murakas call ‘robber capitalism’[90]. Unregulated, and what it seemed, a perfect laissez-fairez world of business got intertwined with criminal activities, paving way for a sudden emergence of criminal organised crime groups. These groups gained power in coercing businessmen into cooperation and had deep connections within the government[91]. Throughout the early 90s, the number of homicides grew[92], as well as human trafficking, and communicable diseases, while male life expectancy dropped[93]. A slash in public social protection also meant that many women who were fully engaged in labour in the Soviet Union were pushed back to provide unpaid labour in their households, reinforcing patriarchy, and exacerbating gender inequality[94].


The post-communist world was in a perfectly weak position to easily accept neoliberal reforms offered by the global hierarchy that was the US[95]. Using the opportunity to expand its hegemony and global capitalism into newly available peripheral regions, the US influenced the local experiences of inequality by introducing austerity programmes directly through debt conditions, and indirectly by ‘common sense’, and hegemony of knowledge.


Concluding thoughts

The examples of British colonialism creating racial polarisation in Singapore and Malaysia and neoliberal shock doctrine revamping income and social inequalities in Eastern Europe after the ideological victory of the US hegemony reveals the close interrelation between global and local hierarchies. Therefore, historians should expand beyond thinking of global and local inequalities as isolated of it from each other, as often done in scholars’ work segregated to within and between-country analysis. Instead, one can examine the contrast between international hierarchies and local experiences of inequalities by understanding imperial and capitalist global development as an overall polarising project.





 

Emilė Petravičiūtė is currently undertaking an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge (Darwin College)



Notes: [1] Branko Milanovic, The haves and have-nots (New York: Basic Books, 2011). [2] Frank Stilwell, The Political Economy of Inequality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019). [3] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Globalization or the Age of Transition?’, International Sociology 15(2) (2000), p. 251-267, p.251. [4] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, ‘Reversal of fortune: Geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income distribution’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 177(4) (2002), p. 1231-1294, p. 1231. [5] Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence – China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 9. [6] Our World in Data, GDP per capita, 1820-2018 (2020) [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020, accessed 21 Jan 2023]. [7] Britannica, British Empire 5 Jan 2022 [https://www.britannica.com/place/British-Empire/Dominance-and-dominions, accessed 21 Jan 2023]. [8] Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Law and the Colonial State in India’, in History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology, ed. June Starr and Jane F. Collier (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 131-152, p. 132-134. [9] Patrick J. McGowan and Bohdan Kordan, ‘Imperialism in the World-System Perspective: Britain 1870-1914’, International Studies Quarterly 25(1) (1981), p. 43-68, p. 43. [10] Branko Milanovic, ‘A short history of global inequality: The past two centuries’, Explorations in Economic History 48 (2011), p. 494-506, p. 499. [11] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). [12] Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). [13] Ibid, p. 2. [14] Pomeranz, The Great Divergence – China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World, p. 264. [15] Gareth Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, in The Cambridge History of Capitalism, Volume 2: The Spread of Capitalism: From 1848 to the Present, ed. Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 320. [16] Ibid., p. 307. [17] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Rise and Future Demise of the Capitalist World System’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 16(4) (1974), p. 387-415, p. 408. [18] George Lee, ‘Rosa Luxemburg and the Impact of Imperialism, The Economic Journal 81(324) (1971), p. 847-862, p. 847. [19] Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. The making of modern English society, 1750 to the present day (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), p. 110-112. [20] Barry Buzan and George Lawson, ‘The global transformation: the nineteenth century and the making of modern international relations’, International studies quarterly 57 (2013), p. 620-635, p. 621. [21] Wallerstein, ‘The Rise and Future Demise of the Capitalist World System’, p. 408. [22] Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. The making of modern English society, 1750 to the present day, p. 110-112. [23] Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, p. 304. [24] Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1995), p. 379. [25] Göran Therborn, Inequalities of the world. New theoretical frameworks, multiple empirical approaches (London: Verso, 2006), p. 18-19. [26] Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, p.302 [27] Buzan and Lawson, ‘The global transformation: the nineteenth century and the making of modern international relations’, p. 18. [28] Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, p. 332 [29] James R. Rush, Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 69. [30] Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, p. 311 [31] Ibid., p. 339 [32] Ibid., p. 307-8. [33] Irfan Habib, ‘Colonisation of the Indian Economy, 1757-1900’, Social Scientist (1975) 3(8) (1975), p. 23-53, p. 26. [34] Austin, ‘Capitalism and the Colonies’, p. 342. [35] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, ‘Reversal of fortune: Geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income distribution’, p. 1265. [36] Ibid., p. 1264. [37] Ibid., p. 1261-1263. [38]Gareth Austin, ‘The ‘reversal of fortune’ thesis and the compression of history: perspectives from African and comparative economic history’, Journal of international development 20(8) (2008), p. 996-1027, p. 1010. [39] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, ‘Reversal of fortune: Geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income distribution’, p. 1264. [40] Therborn, Inequalities of the world. New theoretical frameworks, multiple empirical approaches, p.43. [41] Charles Hirschman, ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology’, Sociological Forum, 1(2) (1986), p. 330-361, p. 338-9. [42] William Lee, ‘Racial Inequality in Singapore’, Journal of International & Comparative Social Welfare, 11(1), (1995) p. 56-73, p. 69. [43] Ibid, p. 337. [44] John Carson, The Measure of Merit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p.75-109. [45] Charles Hirschman, ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology’, p. 340-341. [46] Charles Hirschman, ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology’, p. 355 [47] Ibid, p. 332. [48] Ibid, p. 344-346 [49] The Economist, Racial Prejudice rears its head in Singapore, 24 January 2021 [https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/07/29/racial-prejudice-rears-its-head-in-singapore, accessed Jan 24, 2023]. [50] James R. Rush, Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction, p. 60-61. [51] Charles Hirschman ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology’, p. 353. [52] Ibid., p. 355. [53] Geetha Reddy and Ilka H. Gleibs, ‘The Endurance and Contestations of Colonial Constructions of Race Among Malaysians and Singaporeans’, Front Psychol 10 (2009), p. 4. [54] James R. Rush, Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction, p. 70-72. [55] Ned Colin and Sonia Sarkar, ‘Singapore Celebrates Colonialism To Justify Modern Shortcomings’, Ozy, 25 Apr 2019 [https://www.ozy.com/news-and-politics/singapore-celebrates-colonialism-to-justify-modern-shortcomings/93340/, accessed 24 Jan, 2023]. [56] James R. Rush, Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction, p. 72. [57] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Globalization or the Age of Transition?’, p. 251. [58] Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 33-37. [59] Uday S. Mehta ‘Liberalism and the Politics of Exclusion’ in Tension of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. by Frederic Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 59- 86, p. 66. 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