Europe and the ‘Third World’: An Introduction and Overview

Abstract

The themes of this book are, in a nutshell, development and underdevelopment in the course of European overseas expansion into what we call — imprecisely — the ‘Third World’. It provides an inevitably selective overview of European economic relations with the other continents (and the military and political means used to secure them) in what I hope is a factually informative way. Though not a work of theory, it reviews some of the conceptual frameworks that have been used to account historically for global inequalities.