Historical Statistics as Text: Unusual Indicators of How Ordinary British Folk Reaped from the World-Economy, 1800-1960.

Europe’s colonization of other peoples is basically a program that aided and even deepened the then on-going process of drawing and incorporating non-European regions of the world into the European-dominated capitalist world-economy. Under the capitalist world-economy system, considerable wealth from other world regions is known to have been transferred to the economies of participating European nations. That transfer took place during both the course of time when the economies of those non-European regions were being incorporated into the world-economy as well as after, when they had been peripherialized. While it is a no-brainer to assert that European states, their rulers and peoples did benefit from such transferred wealth, the extent to which Europe’s metropolitan population benefited from such wealth is un-quantified. In this paper analysis of British historical statistics from 1800 and the period between 1960 tend to furnish pointers on aspects of the extent to which non-state components of the British society may have reaped from the wealth that was extracted from the Indian and West African sub-continents, two regions where imperial Britain acquired colonies and whose economies were incorporated and peripherialized into the world-economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]