New Afterword for The Divide

Written for the Korean translation of The Divide and updated.

The Divide was first published in 2017. In the years since, many people have written to me, or approached me during public events, to share the impact it had on them. I am always grateful for this. And yet as a researcher, I look back on the text now and wish that it could include all that I have learned over the past seven years. Knowledge moves quickly, and I want to make it available to readers. My goal with The Divide was to serve as an accessible introduction. I hope it continues to do that for readers. But - until Penguin is ready to produce a new edition - here are some resources that I encourage people to explore for more information and new knowledge.

1. On the rise of capitalism in Europe

The Divide briefly describes the violent processes of enclosure and dispossession that accompanied the rise of capitalism in Europe during the long 16th century. This description is improved with new information and references in the opening chapters of Less is More. It describes how worker revolutions brought down feudalism and improved human welfare, before elites responded with enclosure and other interventions to push wages back down and restore working-class subordination.

2. On the human toll of colonialism and capitalist integration

The Divide describes the devastating suffering that was inflicted on people in Asia, Africa and the Americas as they were colonized and forcibly integrated into the capitalist world-economy. In a recent article for World Development, we assessed this history more systematically by looking at empirical data on real wages, human height and mortality rates from the 16th century onward. We found that the rise of capitalism and its imposition around the world was associated with a striking decline in social indicators, with wages often crashing to below subsistence and mass mortality crises occurring in several regions. In the global South, recovery only began during the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of progressive and radical anti-colonial movements that reclaimed control over national resources and production.[1]

This history offers an important counterpoint to dominant narratives claiming that capitalism rescued people from widespread extreme poverty. Quite the opposite is true: capitalism caused widespread extreme poverty, and progress in human development was brought by progressive social movements and governments in the post-colonial era. This history is also captured in Amya Kumar Bagchi’s book Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital.

3. On neo-colonial backlash

The Divide describes how the USA, Britain, France and other imperialist powers intervened violently to stop the rise of progressive and radical governments in the global South in the mid-20th century, deposing and sometimes assassinating progressive leaders in coups, and imposing structural adjustment programmes to reverse their progressive economic reforms. This history has since been described yet further in several excellent new books: The Jakarta Method (by Vincent Bevin), which tells the story of the bloody anti-communist crusades perpetrated across the global South by the US and its allies, and Capital and Imperialism (by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik), which describes the economic mechanisms of the imperialist world economy past and present. I also recommend Imperialism in the 21st Century (by John Smith), and Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (by Intan Suwandi).

4. On drain from the global South

The Divide describes how the wealthy economies of the global North appropriate much more from the global South than they give in aid. In recent years, researchers have quantified this drain more comprehensively, building on methods first described by early theorists of “unequal exchange”. My colleagues and I have contributed to this work in several recent articles. In one, we describe how growth in the global North relies on a large net appropriation of labour, land, energy and materials from the global South, embodied in traded goods. This appropriation is worth more than $10 trillion per year, represented in Northern prices, which would be enough to end extreme poverty in the global South 70 times over.[2] This drains the South of resources necessary for development, it perpetuates mass deprivation, and it means that the social and ecological costs of Northern growth are overwhelmingly suffered in the South.

5. On the colonial dimensions of ecological breakdown

Since writing The Divide, my research has focused increasingly on the crisis of climate change and ecological breakdown. In recent papers, my colleagues and I have reported on data showing that the rich countries of the global North are overwhelmingly responsible for causing this crisis, while the consequences (in terms of social and ecological damages) fall hardest on the South. We can see this clearly in terms of emissions: the global North is responsible for 92% of all emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary – in other words, the emissions that are causing climate damages.[3] And high-income countries are responsible for 74% of cumulative excess material use since 1970, which is driving biodiversity loss and other forms of ecological breakdown.[4] This represents processes of colonization – of atmosphere and ecosystems – and the consequences are playing out along colonial lines. In a recent paper we also find that high-income countries have overshot their fair-shares of the Paris Agreement carbon budget, and are set to owe $192 trillion in compensation to countries in the global South.[5]

6. On strategies for decolonization

In the penultimate chapter of The Divide, I describe some of the major structural changes that we must fight for in order to make the world economy fairer and ensure that global South countries have pathways to real sovereign development. I still stand by many of these principles, and I believe that progressive political movements in the global North should adopt them as core demands. But I also believe it is naïve to assume that the imperialist powers will agree to these changes any time soon. Global South countries should not just wait around to be decolonized. They can take active steps toward unilateral decolonization, to achieve economic sovereignty. We have developed this approach together with my colleague Ndongo Samba Sylla,[6] whose writings I recommend. As for development strategy, it will require using industrial policy and planning to overcome the obstacles presented by capitalism in the periphery.[7] The task of progressive social movements in the global North is to align with and support Southern struggles for emancipation and self-determination.

7. On “degrowth” and global justice

In the final chapter of The Divide, I explore an idea that I only really engaged during the final weeks of writing the book – an idea called “degrowth”. Degrowth describes how the wealthy economies of the global North need to reduce their use of the planet’s resources in order to stop ecological breakdown and also end imperialist appropriation from the global South, and how this can be done while at the same time improving people’s lives and achieving better social outcomes. The idea was new to me and still somewhat underdeveloped at the time. In the years since, it has advanced through a large scientific literature, international reports, and several new books. For readers who are new to the concept of degrowth, or who find it confusing or challenging, I wrote a full accessible account in my recent book Less is More. I have also written several articles which elaborate the empirical basis.[8],[9],[10],[11],[12] Ultimately, for me, degrowth is not just about ecology. It is about economic justice. It is about decolonization.[13] It is about the urgent need for post-capitalist transition.[14]

The changes we need are not reformist but revolutionary. Revolutions require liberating first our imagination – to think beyond the constraints of our existing economy and its ideologies, and to envision a post-capitalist world. But they also require the hard work of organizing and struggle.

Written for the Korean translation of The Divide and updated.

[1] Sullivan, D., & Hickel, J. (2023). Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century. World development. See also: Hickel, J. and Sullivan, D. (2023). Capitalism, poverty, and the case for democratic socialism. Monthly Review.

[2] Hickel, J., Dorninger, C., Wieland, H., & Suwandi, I. (2022). Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015. Global Environmental Change. See also: Hickel, J., Sullivan, D., & Zoomkawala, H. (2021). Plunder in the post-colonial era: quantifying drain from the global south through unequal exchange, 1960–2018. New Political Economy, 26(6).

[3] Hickel, J. (2020). Quantifying national responsibility for climate breakdown: an equality-based attribution approach for carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary. The Lancet Planetary Health, 4(9), e399-e404.

[4] Hickel, J., O’Neill, D. W., Fanning, A. L., & Zoomkawala, H. (2022). National responsibility for ecological breakdown: A fair-shares assessment of resource use, 1970–2017. The Lancet Planetary Health, 6(4), e342-e349.

[5] Fanning, A. L., & Hickel, J. (2023). Compensation for atmospheric appropriation. Nature Sustainability, 6(9), 1077-1086.

[6] Sylla, N., and Hickel, J. (2024). Proposals for unilateral decolonization and economic sovereignty. Progressive International. See also Hickel, J. (2022). How to achieve full decolonization. New Internationalist.

[7] Hıckel, J., & Sullıvan, D. (2023). Capitalism, global poverty, and the case for democratic socialism. Monthly Review, 75(3), 99-113.

[8] Vogel, J., & Hickel, J. (2023). Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries. The Lancet Planetary Health, 7(9), e759-e769.

[9] Hickel, J., & Kallis, G. (2020). Is green growth possible?. New political economy, 25(4), 469-486.

[10] Hickel, J., Brockway, P., Kallis, G., Keyßer, L., Lenzen, M., Slameršak, A., ... & Ürge-Vorsatz, D. (2021). Urgent need for post-growth climate mitigation scenarios. Nature Energy, 6(8), 766-768.

[11] Hickel, J. (2021). What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification. Globalizations, 18(7), 1105-1111

[12] Hickel, J., Kallis, G., Jackson, T., O’Neill, D. W., Schor, J. B., Steinberger, J. K., ... & Ürge-Vorsatz, D. (2022). Degrowth can work—here’s how science can help. Nature, 612(7940), 400-403.

[13] Hickel, J. (2021). The anti-colonial politics of degrowth. Political Geography, 88.

[14] Hickel, J. (2023). The double objective of democratic ecosocialism. Monthly Review.