1. THE HISTORICAL FORMATION OF THE CONTEMPORARY PERIPHERY

The tendency of the capitalist mode of production to become exclusive when based on expansion and deepening of the home market is accompanied by a tendency for the social structure at the center to come close to the pure model of Capital., characterized by polarization of social classes into two basic classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

of their labor power — but political or ideological. Moreover, the concentration of enterprises by the formation of monopolies modifies the forms in which the bourgeoisie manifests itself. But the alleged dichotomy established between dispersed ownership and control (said to have passed into the hands of the “technostructure,” to use the word coined by J. K. Galbraith) is only an illusion. For the “’technocrats” who take decisions take them in accordance with the logic and in the interest of capital, which exercises a more and more concentrated control. Nevertheless, the fact that the social structure is thus directly molded by the movement of the economy itself leads to the ideo!ogization of economics, that is, to economism.

If, however, the capitalist mode of production, introduced from outside — that is, based on the external market — does not tend to become exclusive, but only dominant, it follows that the forma­tions of the periphery will not tend toward this essential polarization. Contrasting with the growing homogeneity of the social formations of the center will be the persisting heterogeneity of those of the periphery, a heterogeneity that does not mean mere juxtaposition. For, just as the precapitalist modes of production are here integrated into a system subjected to the distinctive purposes of dominant capital (the peasant goes on producing within the setting of his former mode of production, but henceforth produces commodities that are exported to the center), so the new social structures form a structured, hierarchical totality, dominated by the ’“great absentee” of colonial society: the dominant metropolitan bourgeoisie. The eco­nomic system of the periphery cannot be understood in itself, for its relations with the center are crucial; similarly, the social structure of the periphery is a truncated structure that can only be under­stood when it is situated as an element in a world social structure.

The form assumed by peripheral formations will ultimately depend on the nature of the precapitalist formations subjected to attack, on the one hand, and, on the other, on the forms taken by this external attack.

The precapitalist formations that were attacked fall into two main types: on the one hand, we have the Oriental and African formations, and, on the other, the American formations. The former were combinations structured, on the one hand, by the various modes of production, the dominant mode being the tribute­paying mode — either in its early form (based, that is, on a surviving village community) or in its developed form (and in this case being gradually transformed into a feudal mode of production), with the simple commodity mode and the slaveowning mode being, so to speak, in the service of this dominant mode — and, on the other hand, by relations of long-distance trade with other formations.

As there are already systematic studies concerning America, it will not be necessary to dwell much on this continent. More space will be devoted to the Arab world and to Black Africa.

The American Peripheral Formations

The Americas played an essential role in the mercantile period of the formation of the contemporary world system. At the outset the pre-Columbian formations were either destroyed or subjected to the merchant capital of the rising European center. Merchant capital, ancestor of fully developed capital, established annexes in America, in the form of enterprises for the exploitation of precious metals (mainly silver) and producing some exotic commodities

(sugar, later cotton, etc.). European merchant capitalists, who held the monopoly of this exploitation, thus accumulated the money­capital needed.for the subsequent complete development of capital. Exploitation took various forms: “pseudo-feudal” (the encomienda of Latin America) or “pseudo-slaveowning” (mines) or slaveowning (plantations in Brazil, the West Indies, and in the British colonies in the southern part of North America).

It was during this mercantilist period that Latin America acquired the main structures that characterize it to this day. These were based on agrarian capitalism of the Iatifundia type, the labor force of which was supplied by peasants of degraded status (peons and former slaves). To this was added a local merchant bourgeoisie of the comprador type, when the monopoly of the mother country became overstretched. Along with this, a petty urban community of artisans, small traders, officials, domestic servants, etc., in the image of that existing in the Europe of the time, came into being.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, independence meant transfer of power to the landowners and the Creole comprador bourgeoisie. The structures described were to persist and become reinforced throughout the century, as trade was intensified with Great Britain, the new metropolis, which established al! over the continent a network of import-export firms and banks, and drew additional profits from financing the public debt of the new states.

The installation of oil and mining capital in the twentieth century (mostly from the United States), and then the establishment of import-substitution industries, engendered a limited proletariat, the higher categories of which were to appear all the more privileged, comparatively speaking, as the agrarian crisis brought about a steady impoverishment of the poor peasantry and an increase in rural and urban unemployment.

Historians of Latin America — among others, Andre Gunder Frank, Celso Furtado, Fernando Cardoso, Enzo Falleto₁ Darcy Ribeiro — have shown how the Iatifundia-Owning and Creole com­prador bourgeoisie served as a transmission belt for rising dominant European capitalism. While in Europe liberal thought was the banner of the industrial bourgeoisie, in Latin America it was the banner Oflandowners and traders. The nineteenth century witnessed, from 1810 to 1860-1880, a long series of civil wars between the “Euro­pean party,” in favor of free trade, and the “American party,” representing the interests of national development and advocating protectionism. The final victory of the former at the end of the century, when capitalism at the center entered its imperialist phase, was to blight every hope of industrial development and assert the dependence of Latin America. Porfirio Diaz in Mexico was a symbol of this national surrender. The taking over by foreign capital of industrial and mining enterprises until then belonging to Latin Americans that followed, especially in Chile after 1880, paved the way for imperialist capital.

Nevertheless, a new industrial bourgeoisie was constituted in the wake of the dominant foreign capital, particularly during the First World War, during ∙tfιe 1930s, and especially during the Second World War. Limited in its development by the submission of Latin America to the requirements of free trade, this new industrial, bourgeoisie attempted to challenge, partially at least, the power of the landowners and traders. To achieve this, it tried to win the support of the masses, and this gave Vargas’ regime in Brazil, that of Peron in Argentina, and that of Cardenas in Mexico their populist character.

The Arab and Asian Peripheral Formations

The start came much later in Asia and in the Arab world. It was only in the second.half of the nineteenth century that the former feudal classes turned into big capitalist landowners producing for the world market. Developments of this type were, moreover, very uneven, affecting only a fringe, sometimes a very narrow one, of the vast continent. The extreme case is that of Egypt, entirely transformed into a cotton farm for the mills of Lancashire by its few thousand big landowners. For a long time, the power of survival of the village community was to resist, in a number of regions, the development of agrarian capitalism — less so in India, where the British rulers gave the zamindars ownership of the land, forcibly breaking up the village communities; more so in China and in many areas of the Persian and Ottoman empires, which escaped direct colonial subjection. It was only recently, often not until the period since the Second World War, that small-scale agrarian capitalism (with rich peasants of the kulak type) made its appearance, particularly where agrarian reforms liquidated or limited the large

estates. The belated and limited character of the development of agrarian capitalism, and the phenomena characteristic of the struc­tures of the urban community and of the ideology and culture of the new dominant classes that emerged from the transformation of the old ones, or the phenomena characteristic of the forms of colonial subjection, restricted to a greater or lesser degree the expansion of the comprador trade sector,, either to the advantage of European firms or to that of a partly Europeanized bourgeoisie of cosmopolitan background (Levantines, for instance). Later on, as in Latin America, sporadic industries founded by foreign capital made it possible for local oligarchies to associate themselves with the new activities. The structure of these new formations then tended to be similar to that of Latin America, with the lag being made up for all the faster because the penetration of modern forms of foreign capital was more powerful.

The case of British India has been studied by R. C. Dutt, Palme Dutt, and Frederick Clairmonte. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British systematically destroyed the Indian textile industry by economic means (prohibition of imports into England) and also extraeconomic means (destruction of the indus­trial towns of Surat, Dacca, Murshidabad, and others). They imposed agricultural specialization, by creating from scratch a pattern of large landed property, reinforced by the exemption of cotton fields from, the land tax. Independent India and Pakistan inherited this structure. Since independence, partial agrarian reforms have opened the way to a more thorough development of kulak-type agrarian capitalism. Along with this, there is a tendency for the center of gravity of urban capitalism to move from comprador commercial capital to state capital as progress is made in indus­trialization by import-substitution,

Dutch colonialism :n Indonesia created directly for its own benefit industrial plantations producing for export. The relative weakness of local large landownership that resulted from this policy explains the greater specific weight possessed by the petty- bourgeoisie and accounts for the particular nature of Sukarno’s subsequent regime. The same thing happened, to some extent, in Malaya, in Indochina, and in the Philippines. Special circum­stances, notably conflict between different imperialist interests, enabled Thailand to escape colonial subjection.

For these reasons, the history of the contemporary Thai social formation is particularly interesting. The manifestations of chaos and alienation that dependence entailed elsewhere are less noticeable here. Because it escaped direct shaping by colonialism, Thailand, for a long time a backward but not underdeveloped country, was able to recover and, by means of “enlightened despotism,” to achieve a national unity and a state modernization more coherent and more solid than elsewhere. It was only after the Second World War that the country’s process of underdevelopment accelerated, with its integration into the world system. The same applied to Afghanistan. Iran resisted for a shorter time, the AngIo-Russian agreement of 1907 and the exploitation of the oil of Abadan having entailed its integration into the world system as a semicolony.

The history of the formations of the contemporary Arab world covers a period that can be clearly divided into three parts. The first was marked by awareness of the European danger, and some­times by an attempt to imitate Europe in order to offer a better resistance to it. The failure of this attempt was followed by the stage of colonial subjection during which the Arab formations acquired their final dependent peripheral character. The third stage, during which this dependence was challenged, began during the 1950s.

The Arab formations had been based on long-distance trade. The shifting of the center of gravity of world trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, with the rise of European mercantilist capitalism, entailed the decline of the Arab world. Consequently, at the dawn of imperialist aggression, in the nineteenth century, the Arab world had lost real unity, and henceforth was only a heterogeneous conglomerate, subject moreover to a foreign power: the Ottoman Empire. Imperialism was t>o-H*> to accentuate the division of this world and to revive its unity.

The limits of Arab civilization coincided with those of the mercantile formations allied with the nomads. When they penetrated peasant countries, the Arabs failed to set their mark on the peoples 'concerned, except in Egypt. This explains their failure in Spain,, where the Arab merchant class remained urban, amid a Christian countryside. When they were driven out of'Spain, the Arabs left only monuments behind them. Similarly, the Turks failed in the Bal­kans. The failure of Arabization in Iran, Anatolia, and beyond, and that of Islamization in Abyssinia, reflect the same limitation.

The Arab world felt very early on the reality of the danger from European imperialism. Already in the sixteenth century, in the age of mercantilism, European merchants obtained from the Ottoman state the trading privileges conferred on them by the “Capitulations.” The Arab merchant class was thus already defeated; Europe had won the battle. The next three centuries were a prolonged slumber during which the East was unaware of what was happening in the West» For the commercial development of mercantilist Europe had its c⅛rollary in the decline of the mercantile world of the Arabs. The Arab cities wilted, and the country districts became dominant, with all their heterogeneity; and the very centers where the causes of the decay of the Eastern world might have been reflected upon ceased to exist. The awakening, a rough one, came at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign.

The long effort of resistance made by the Arab world was to culminate in defeat, and dates can be given for this defeat: 1882 in the case of Egypt, the period 1830-1911 in the Maghreb, 1919 in the Arab East. Then came the period of Arab revival, the period of the anti-imperialist struggle. All through this century of history, two characteristic features appeared and developed everywhere in the Arab world, with a greater or lesser degree of clarity or of delay in appearance in different parts of it. First, the revival was marked by the rise of a new class, the modern ρetty-bourgeoisie of the towns, brought into being by the very process of integration of the Arab world into the imperialist sphere. This petty-bourgeoisie took over from the old ruling classes, which were rapidly collapsing, and even from the new bourgeois classes engendered by integration into the world capitalist system. Secondly, this revival expressed itself in a growing sense of Arab unity. Since the Arab world had never, except in Egypt, been a peasant world, the revival could not base itself on genuine national peasant cultures; it therefore fell to the bourgeoisie of the towns to revive the former unity of the Arabs in language and culture. Where, as in Egypt, the revival could base itself on national peasant unity, there was a delay in the appearance of the sense of Arab unity, with, instead, a revival of (Egyptian) national feeling.

Egypt was the first province of the Arab world to react against the threat from without. But it was the danger from Israel that made Egypt realize that its fate was bound up with that of the Arab world as a whole. The Arab East did not really wake up until imperialism installed itself in the heart of the region by creating the state of Israel. From the start, therefore, the anti-imperialist struggle here was identified with the struggle against Zionism. The Maghreb, geographically remote, and colonized moreover by another power, France, was not to wake up to the problems of Arab unity until 1967. Gradually, the Palestine problem became the pivot of the “Arab question,” the test of capacity for the various social classes that aspired to lead the anti-imperialist national movement. It was on this test that there came to grief both the comprador, Iatifundia-Owning bourgeois generation and then the ρetty- bourgeoisie.

The Arab “renaissance” of the nineteenth century (the Nahda) was centered mainly in Egypt and Syria. In Egypt there had already been in the eighteenth century, with Ali Bey, a first attempt at modernizing the Egyptian state, something that required its emancipation from the Ottoman yoke. The circumstances following the adventure of Bonaparte’s armies led to a second attempt being made, by Mehemet Ali Pasha. The Egyptian ruling class — of foreign origin (Turkish, Albanian, Circassian) — was the Pasha’s military bureaucracy, which levied tribute from the peasantry, made up of families of small holders. Their surplus was used by the Egyptian state to finance modernization in the form of irrigation works and the establishment of a national army and of industry. The Anglo-Turkish alliance in 1840 dealt a blow to this attempt at modernization. Europe, hastening to the rescue of the Ottoman Sultan, whose armies had been beaten by the Egyptian Pasha’s forces, compelled Mehemet Ali to submit to the Capitulations, thus putting an end to the effort to develop industry. The Pasha’s successors, from 1848 to 1882, gave up this independent policy, in the hope (in the case of the Khedive Ismail) of Europeanizing and modernizing Egypt with the aid of European capital, integrating the country into the world market (by developing the growing of cotton), and appealing to the financial houses of Europe to find the capital for this outward-oriented development. This was the setting in which the ruling class of Egypt was to undergo a change of structure, taking possession of the land, with the help of the state,] and transforming themselves from a mandarin-type bureaucracy, into a class of Iatifundia-Owners. This did not mean “feudalists,” as has often been said, but agrarian capitalists, whose prosperity depended on the world market. Egypt having thus been made into a cotton plantation for Lancashire, when the British threat to Egypt’s independence materialized, the Egyptian ruling class quickly agreed to submit, on being guaranteed the maintenance of its privileges. It was well repaid by the British and became the biggest beneficiary of the opening up of the Nile valley.

The urban Third Estate, made up of clerks and craftsmen, vestiges of the mercantile world of former times, with their rural equivalent, the village notables, reacted in a different way. As the heirs of the traditional culture they felt the danger of colonialism as the destroyer of the values of Arab and Egyptian civilization. They also experienced very soon the harmful effects of competition by imported goods. Rejecting European domination for these reasons, disappointed in the Khedive and the Turco-Circassian aristocracy, they were brought to rethink seriously the problem of national survival. It was this Third Estate that began the “renaissance” in Egypt from 1860 onward. This attempt nevertheless ended in defeat, despite some successes: revival of the language, remarkable adaptation of the language to the needs of cultural and technical renewal, awakening of the critical spirit. Hassan Riad remarks: “In face of the (imperialist) danger... the aristocrats had thrown over all the country’s traditions, through selfish interest and also owingto their Turkish origin, without, however, really assimilating European culture. The Third Estate clung desperately to tradition in order to safeguard their personality. At one and the same time the power of the foreigners threatened them, fascinated them, and led them to examine their country’s traditions with a critical eye. In the brief interval that history allowed them between the moment when the danger from without was felt (1840) and the moment when it materialized in the occupation of Egypt (1882), the thinkers of the Third Estate failed to overcome this contradiction between

their will to defend their personality and their will to catch up on their backwardness.... Eventually they found themselves in a dead end, the empty assertion of their personality which was gradually to lead to that neurotic loyalty to tradition which paralyzes movement.”

Syria provided the second pole of this nineteenth-century Arab revival. Syria’s traditional orientation toward the Mediterranean explains the country's early awareness of the imperialist danger. Held fast in the Ottoman grip, however, the economy of the countries of the Mashraq was stagnant in those days: away from the trade routes of former times and also from the new colonial development to which Egypt was exposed, the Syrian towns were without their brilliant elites of an earlier age. As in Egypt, there­fore, the “renaissance" was fostered by the semipopular elements of the Third Estate (craftsmen, clerks, religious leaders).

The Egypto-Syrian Nahda thus failed to formulate a coherent and effective program for the social changes that were needed in order to resist imperialist aggression. It was nonetheless a decisive, moment in the shaping of modern Arab feeling, for it renewed the circulation of ideas between the “provinces” of the Arab world, and it remodeled the language on a uniform basis, while adapting it to the common requirements of modernization — thus, in short, giving new life to the principal instrument of Arab unity.

Mehemet Ali’s attempt in Egypt was, with that of Japan, the only attempt at modernization made in the nineteenth century outside the European world. The Pasha’s failure was due to two sets of causes: the proximity of Europe, which did not leave him time to reform the state and industrialize the country, and the fact that the local social conditions were insufficiently mature. The social formations of the Arab world were not preparing the birth of capitalism from within. Hence the Pasha’s attempt to institute a state mercantilism to remedy the nonexistence of an indigenous bourgeoisie rested on a fragile social basis. Japan, on the other ■hand, which did not suffer from Egypt’s strategic geographical position, was not the object of early.European covetousness. More­over, Japan’s feudal social formation predisposed it to the birth of an indigenous capitalism.

After the defeat of the Nahda came a dark period marked by

self-absorption on the part of each separate province that lasted, broadly speaking, until the Second World War. This was the belle epoque of triumphant imperialism. It was also that of the failure of the bourgeois nationalist movement that had withdrawn into the separate provinces of the Arab world. Finally, this was the period when the Zionists installed themselves in Palestine. The political history of Egypt in this period was analyzed for the first time in $ Hassan Riad’s book, L’Egypte nass6rienne. I am here following the essential thread of his account.

The military defeat suffered by Arabi in 1882 marked the end of the hopes that had been placed in the Nahda. The Third Estate was swept away, first politically and then economically. “The generation of petty officials, narrow-minded and submissive, who were their successors quickly accepted foreign rule and took refuge in rejection of the values of the modern world, in an opposition that was reactionary and that involved no risks.” At the same time, in the setting of colonial development, an Egyptian bourgeoisie was formed, at first merely agrarian but later partly agrarian and partly mercantile, and even industrial. The highly concentrated aristocracy of large-scale capitalist landowners ventured after 1919 into commercial and industrial undertakings, with the formation of the Misr group in association with foreign capital, that of the Levantine bourgeoisie of Egypt (Greeks, Europeanized Jews, Europeanized Eastern Christians), and also British, French, and Belgian big capital. This class became the ruling class of Egypt, the transmission belt for imperialist domination right down to 1952. As Riad writes: “After the miscarriage of nineteenth-century renaissance, Egyptian society stopped thinking. The aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie that emerged from it, were thenceforth satisfied with a European veneer, and the petty-bour- geoisie with cafe chatter. There was practically no proletariat, and the deprived masses of the people, increasingly numerous, were dehumanized, reduced to the daily striving for the piastre that would enable them to go on living.... All the conditions were thus present in colonial Egypt for the forming, by reaction to them, so to speak, of an intelligentsia, that is, of a group of men in search of the truth beyond the limits of a crude society into which they could not integrate themselves, even materially, because of its inadequate development.... This is the setting in which we must see the first

Egyptian nationalist party, that of Mustafa Kamil and Mohammed Farid, the history of which extends from 1900 to the First World War. Established by men who belonged to the first generation of the intelligentsia... this first nationalist party cannot be regarded as the party of the Egyptian bourgeoisie: The Egyptian big bour­geoisie of that time was a bourgeoisified aristocracy reconciled to the foreign yoke. Nor was it the party of the rural bourgeoisie... which had its own organization, the Umma party, jealously con­servative on ideological and social questions and a faithful supporter of the efficient British administration — which shows that already at that time the middle classes of the countryside felt solidarity with the aristocracy in face of the danger represented by the growing masses of landless peasants.... It was nevertheless a bourgeois party in the quite precise sense that its modern ideology was derived from the European bourgeois tradition.... Despite the wretched state of Egyptian society, the apathy of the impoverished masses, the instability of the petty-bourgeoisie, the reactionary attitude of the rural middle classes, and the open treason of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie that had emerged from it, the nationalist party’s call found many echoes. In critical moments the party became the nation, whose potentialities it symbolized.... But the history of the nationalist party was to be a brief one.... At ^t∙ the very moment when the entire nation rose up, in 1919, it vanished from the scene, yielding place to a party that represented more accurately the Egyptian society of that time: the Wafd.”

This Wafd, whose history is the history of Eev∏t between 1919 and 1952, was not the party of the Egyptian bourgeoisie either. That bourgeoisie continued to be basically pro-king and pro-British. The inconsistency of the Wafd was to be on the scale of that of the petty-bourgeoisie: “This is why the Wafd showed itself in the end to be as conservative, where the main problems were concerned, as the parties of the monarchy, and why it never gave any thought, for example, to land reform. This is also why the British were never deceived by its nationalist demagogy.... The Wafd never contem­plated for a moment Egypt's ceasing to be a client-state of Great Britain.... Doubtless, the British side in the negotiations showed cleverness in exploiting the existence of a monarchy ready to accept frankly the foreign presence in Egypt so as not to have to make more than the minimum of concessions to the Wafd₁ even purely formal ones. When, however, a serious danger threatened the entire edifice of British power, Britain quickly found a basis for compromise. This happened in 1936 and 1942, in face of the Fascist menace (the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936 was to govern for twenty years the interests reserved by Britain in Egypt. The negotiating of it, which had dragged on since 1924, was suddenly speeded up by the threat to Egypt from Italy, which had installed itself the year before in Ethiopia).... The successive concessions made by Britain, along with the rapid development of light industry between 1920 and 1945... facilitated compromise.... Thanks to this cohesion the system continued to function in spite of crises: for twenty-five years the alternation between Wafdist parliaments and royal dictatorships was adequate to ensure the survival of both the foreign interests and those of the aristocracy.... The breath­less pace of economic development — that is, ultimately, the gal­loping increase in the numbers of the deprived masses, which even­tually made up 40 percent of the urban and 80 percent of the rural population — with the impoverish⅛ent of the middle strata, on the one hand, and the appearance of communism on the political scene and the crisis of the colonial system in Asia, on the other, were responsible for the clashes of the second postwar period.”

Throughout this long period of Egypt’s provincial turning inward upon itself, during which imperialist domination was not fundamentally challenged but only criticized for the forms it took, and arrangements were being sought whereby it could be made “bearable,” national feeling was strictly Egyptian. There was no attempt to set Egypt’s anti-imperialist struggle in the wider context of the Arab world. True, the Palestinian revolt in 1936 called forth some echoes in Egypt, especially among the masses of the people, where there was a feeling that the region as a whole was oppressed by the same imperialism, with Zionism seen as the agent of this imperialism. However, this feeling remained diffused among the masses, who had no party or organization of their own through which to express themselves. The movements that found expression were those of the collaborating bourgeoisie and of the erratic and unstable petty-bourgeoisie. These, moreover, were no longer rooted in the history of Egypt, for they were products of colonialism. This rootlessness was clearly voiced by Taha Husayn when he declared that Egypt owes nothing to the East, being the child of Greece and of Europe. Hassan Riad spoke of “a superficial Westernism under which lies henceforth a real cultural vacuum. An easy position in which to give oneself satisfaction very cheaply: since we have never been ‘Orientals’ we have always been the equals of the ‘West­erners,’ from whom we have nothing to learn.”

The same provincialism was characteristic of the political life of the Mashraq during this period. Here, however, because the impe­rialists divided the region artificially between the British and French Mandates, and because the installation of the Zionists offered a direct threat to the life of the region, the national reaction was more unitary and Arab in character.

Ottoman rule over the Fertile Crescent preserved the unity of this region until 1919. True, this rule did not form an effective safeguard against imperialist penetration, for the entire Ottoman Empire had been in a condition of underdevelopment and indirect colonial subjection ever since the Capitulations had given unequal privileges to European capital and European goods. The destruc­tion of maritime Syria, which occurred as far back as the Crusades, had given the Europeans (especially the Italian cities) pre-eminence in the seaborne trade of the Mediterranean area. The opening up of the routes across the Atlantic and around the Cape had deprived the Fertile Crescent of most of its commercial role. From the nine-_z teenth century onward the development of E pean ''-Ipitalism hastened the process of degradation of the Arab East. The ruin of the crafts in Syria dates from the first half of the nineteenth centu­ry and resulted from the influx of British cotton goods. Later, the penetration of European finance capital was to take place by way of the Ottoman state debt. This debt absorbed, in 1874, four-fifths of the Ottoman government revenues. In order to meet these exac­tions, Istanbul intensified its exaction of tribute from the subject territories: at the end of the nineteenth century over 80 percent of the revenue collected in the vilayets of Syria and Mesopotamia was paid to the central government as tribute, less than 20 percent being thus devoted to the expenses of the local administration. To this was added direct penetration by European capital. Before 1919, however, this did not amount to much: a few industrial enterprises in Syria, the management of the railways and the ports, and the establishment of some public services (electricity, water supply). The big schemes were still in the planning stage (the Berlin-Baghdad railway, the exploitation of oil in the Mosul region) when the First World War broke out.

The integration of the Fertile Crescent into the world capitalist system thus did not begin on a large scale until the period of the Mandates. In Syria this integration remained very slight until the second postwar period, for the possibilities of developing commer­cial agriculture are limited by the poor agricultural resources of this region. Nevertheless, in the 19SOs the Jezirah (the semiarid steppe situated between the Tigris and the Euphrates, which until then had been occupied only by nomad herdsmen) began to be opened up. This piece of colonial development was carried out by the Syrian town bourgeoisie, using modern capitalist methods: trac­tors, a small wage-earning labor force, large tracts of land leased from the state or from the nomad chieftains. It was to make possi­ble a big growth in agricultural exports: cotton, wheat, and barley. In the traditionally rural West, progress was hindered by the social organization of the -peasantry. For Syria, having lost its former trading role, had undergone a real process of social regression. The country’s population had fallen from about 5 million in the best periods of the past (Antiquity and the Abbasid caliphate) to less than 1.5 million on the eve of the First World War. This popula­tion was still highly urban in character: in 1913 the towns held a third of the country s inhabitants, the nomads accounted for a quarter, and the agricultural districts had hardly 40 percent. The trading role of the Syrian towns was thenceforth trivial, since they served only the Mesopotamian and Arabian hinterland. The ruin­ing of the crafts through competition by European imports aggra­vated the crisis. It was then that, in order to survive, the urban ruling classes of Syria “feudalized” themselves, that is, endeavored to obtain from the peasants of western Syria the surplus that they could no longer obtain from trade. The formation of the Iatifundia goes back to the nineteenth century, when the mercantile bourgeoi­sie, which had lost its function, began to turn toward the country­side. Between the two world wars, within the framework of the Mandate, this feudalization process speeded up, thanks to the “French peace,” which made it possible to subject the peasants who until then had been able to resist oppression. Since the path of industrialization was practically closed by the domination of French capital, the urban bourgeoisie had no other outlet. After Syria became independent, it got its second wind by establishing light industries (textiles, food processing) and by the agricultural conquest of the Jezirah: “The growth of agriculture was a victory for the townsmen,” as Rizkall a Hilan says. Only after 1955 did this process draw to a close, losing momentum and compelling Syria to take a new road, that of state capitalism.

We see very well, in the case of Syria, how, between 1920 and 1955, integration into the world capitalist system enabled the local bourgeoisie to develop, and how this integration shaped a national bourgeoisie of the client-dependent type. It is thus easier to under­stand why, with its bourgeoisie satisfied in this way, Syria, which had been the lively center of Arabism in 1919, could doze for thirty-five years in a condition of dull provincialism.

The same thing happened in Iraq. The British established themselves there in 1920, in a semidesert region even lacking any towns worthy of the name: there was nothing comparable to Syria, even in that country’s decadent state. However, the natural potentiali­ties of the country were great. The British set about reviving an agricul­tural life that had disappeared centuries before: the irrigation works undertaken in the period of the Mandate were LO play a decisive part in forming a new agrarian bourgeoisie, owners of latifundia. The British distributed 90 percent of the land to a thou­sand sheikhs, the chieftains of Seminomadic tribes. The oilfields developed by the Iraq Petroleum Company were to do the rest. This process of development created, out of an Iraq that had been nationalist, Pan-Arabist, and turbulent in 1920, an Iraq that remained until 1958 a loyal client-state of Great Britain.

The urban world of the Fertile Crescent, however wretched it had been at the end of the Ottoman period, had been resolutely nationalist and in favor of Arab unity. In face of the imperialist threat it had long been pro-Ottoman, its “nationalism” wavering between “Moslem nationalism” in an “Ottoman” or an “Arab” form. Disappointed by the inadequacy of.the Ottoman reforms (especially the Tanzimat of 1839), and still further disappointed when the Young Turk reform movement firmly took the road, after 1908, of Turkish nationalism, with even an antireligious aspect, the Arab townspeople of the region turned toward Arab nationalism, and looked around for the external alliance that would enable them to free themselves from the Ottoman yoke. British diplomacy was able to make use of Arab nationalism and to cheat it. At the end of the First World War, the urban bourgeoisie had thought it astute to give themselves “kings,” chosen among the “desert grandees,” thus reviving the traditional alliance between the trading towns and the nomads. In fact, the “desert grandees,” the Hashemite family, accepted the partition of the region between the British and the French and were rewarded by being made kinglets of the British Mandates: Faisal I was given Iraq, and his brother Abdullah got Transjordan.:

The drift into provincialism in Iraq was facilitated by the poten­tial wealth of the country and its development, as well as by the intelligent policy followed by the British. It is true that the political history of Iraq from 1920 to 1958 was highly unstable, but this was only at the level of changing alliances between government cliques, for down to 1958 the dual status quo — social (the domination of the new Iatifundia-Owning class) and external (Iraq’s position as a client-state) — was not questioned by any regime. During the 1920s the old Arab nationalism, of the Ottoman period disappeared, as the new collaborating Iatifundia-Owning bourgeoisie took shape. The new opposition tnat began to arise during the 1930s did not go beyond the intellectual grouping of the Ahali club. This club was not “the party of the bourgeoisie,” any more than the Wafd was in Egypt, for in Iraq as in Egypt the bourgeoisie was collaborationist. The club was thus merely a rather isolated group of the “intelligent­sia” type. But from this group there emerged the principal politi­cal forces of the future, which were to take over in 1958: from petty-bourgeois populism, ancestor of the Baath, to the more radical elements of Iraqi communism.

French imperialism had a much harder task in Syria than faced the British in Iraq. In Syria there was neither oil nor potentialities for agricultural development, making it possible to rally the bour­geoisie around the mandatory regime. The Syrian bourgeoisie was, moreover, much more lively at the end of the Ottoman period than that of Iraq, to such an extent that it set the tone of the region, giving Syria its “Levantine" character, open to influences from the Mediterranean and so from the West. Under these conditions French imperialism had nothing more to offer the bourgeoisie of its Syrian cities than the indifferent “outlet” provided by intensified exploitation of the peasants of the western parts of the country. And it tried to make use of religious differences among the people. But Syria felt even more keenly than Iraq about the establishment of the Zionists in Palestine, for Syria and Palestine had always formed a single region of the Arab East. The bourgeoisie of Jerusalem, Damascus, Haifa, and Beirut belonged to the same families. The region was partitioned artificially in 1919 between France and Britain, and its southern section, Palestine, turned over to the Zionists in accordance with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Syrian people felt this alienation of Arab territory almost as bitterly as the people of Palestine itself. The fall of France in 1940 created the conditions for eliminating French imperialism from this region. First Great Britain, from 1941 to 1949, and then the United States, with the series of three coups d^,6tat in 1949, took over control, without changing the basic social alliance between the new bourgeoisie and imperialism.

From 1920 until 1948, then, imperialism was master of the entire region. In Egypt, as in Iraq and Syria, the nadn_ηa] bourgeoisie, essentially agrarian and latifundia-owning, enriched and strengthened by following in the wake of the imperialists, accepted a narrow provincial existence in the service of its foreign lords. Imperialist domination through this class did not seem to be seriously threatened, since the “opposition” remained very weak, lacking any real class backing — an intelligentsia-type opposition torn between its dis­satisfaction, especially on national grounds, and the attraction it felt for the proimperialist national bourgeoisie.

The betrayal by the Arab latifundia-owning bourgeoisie had as corollary the abandonment of the Palestinian people to the mercy of Zionist colonization. Thus the year 1948 marked, with the creation of the State of Israel, the end of an era and the beginning of a challenge to the imperialist system throughout the region.

The twenty years from 1947 to 1967 were marked by three fundamental features. First, the bankruptcy of the Arab national bourgeoisie and the rise of the nationalist petty-bourgeoisie. Second, the elimination of Britain from the region in favor of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and the working out of a modus vivendi dividing the region between these two. Third, the affirmation in deeds of the expansionist nature of Zionist colonialism.

The social equilibrium that had been the basis for the dreary provincialism of the 1920-1947 period had been conditioned by the class alliance between the predominant imperialism of the region, that of Britain — with France playing an accessory role — and the Iatifundia-Owning bourgeoisie of the various “states.” This system was capable of functioning so long as colonial development could guarantee some “crumbs" for the petty-bourgeoisie. However, the internal contradictions of the regime of imperialist domination set limits to this system. Hassan Riad has analyzed, so far as Egypt is concerned, the increasing economic and social contradictions that were expressed in the tremendous growth in the masses of pro­letarians and semiproletarians after the Second World War, the increasing misery of these masses, the rise in unemployment, the growth of the dissatisfied petty-bourgeoisie, and, in the political sphere, the emergence of new forces, mainly the communist movement and the Moslem Brotherħ∞d. In Syria and Iraq, the same phenomena expressed the same fundamental contradictions, although the still recent character of co,onial development put off the moment of collapse longer than in Egypt.

It was Egypt, therefore, that opened the new period, with the military coup d’etat of 1952. Hassan Riad and Mahmoud Hussein have analyzed the stages of the shift from the former social relations, based on the alliance between British imperialism and the Iatifundia-Owning and comprador bourgeoisie, to the new alliance between the Soviet Union and Egyptian state capitalism. This shift began with the land reform.of 1952, which, abolishing the power of the Iatifundia-Owners, gave the leading position in the countryside to the kulaks, and continued with the nationalizations of 1957 and then of 1961, which transferred to the state the ownership of undertakings belonging to Western capital and its partner, the Egyptian bourgeoisie. It had as corollary the gradual affirmation of a new ideology, that OfNasserism. The new Egyptian ruling class being formed, timid at first, continued the old bour­geoisie’s policy of withdrawal into provincialism. It was the imperialist- Zionist aggression of 1956 which forced it to react and declare for a Pan-Arab policy. In the same timid way, the new regime for a long time sought an internal compromise with the national bourgeoisie, just as it attempted to preserve the traditional foreign alliances. The refusal of the IBRD to finance the Aswan High Dam, Egypt’s retort by nationalizing the Suez Canal in July 1956, the tripartite Anglo-Franco-Israeli aggression in October, and the halting of the aggressors by the Americans and the Russians ensured the regime’s drift toward state capitalism in 1957.

The Egyptian example was to exert a very great force of attraction elsewhere in the Arab East. In Syria, the fall of the Shishakli dictatorship in 1954 brought to power a heterogeneous coalition composed of the new petty-bourgeois social forces of the Baath Party and the forces of the traditional bourgeoisie of the National Bloc. The coup d’etat of 1963 put the Syrian Baath in power, alone this time, and the movement toward a new state capitalism was resumed. Between the first plan of 1960-1965, still based on illusions about active participation by Syrian and Western private capital, and the plan of 1965-1970, in which nationalization measures and Soviet aid were given pride of n^,j>^,'e, we note the same evolution as in Egypt, between the period before 1957 and that of the 1960-1965 plan.

In Iraq the outcome of events was the same. The front formed in 1957 put an end to the power of the Hashemite dynasty and the Jatifundia-Owning bourgeoisie by the coup d^,⅛tat of July 1958. Between 1958 and 1963 the new regime wavered between a Nasser- type line and a “left-wing” line. This was because matters had not proceeded in Iraq as in Egypt or Syria.' The Anglo-Hashemite domination had been complete and had gone on for a long time: also the masses intervened with great violence; the forces of popular resistance (the militia) settled accounts with their enemies, liquidating the Iatifundia-Owning bourgeoisie. The continual hesitations of the Kassem government led to its fall in 1963, giving place to a right­wing Baathist regime.

Thus, both in 1948 and 1956 it was Israeli expansionism which unmasked the nature of the Iatifundia-Owning comprador bour-

Social Formations of the Periphery geoisie of the Arab states, exposing its submission to imperi. and the demagogic nature of its intermittent and purely vt “ Pan-Arabism. ” It also forced each Arab state to emerge from,l≡ isolation. For Israel by its very nature threatens the existence of these states, additional regions of which it must necessarily annex in order to attain its objective of creating a state to include the majority of Jews of the world. Twice therefore, in 1948 and 1956, the Israeli aggression had as its consequence the revolt of the Arab masses against their governments and the transfer of local power from the hands of the latifundia-owning comprador bourgeoisie to the petty-bourgeoisie. The third Palestinian war, initiated by Israel in 1967, culminated in a new and profound crisis of the Arab world, demonstrating the failure of the nationalist petty-bourgeoisie, which did not manage to do any better than the latifundia-owning comprador bourgeoisie that it replaced.

For a long time the Maghreb was kept untouched by the currents affecting the Arab East, because of French colonial rule, its specific forms of oppression, and the local problems to which it gave rise, as also through its geographical remoteness and its specific features — particularly its Berber character. French coloniza­tion in Algeria, probably because it began long before the age of imperialism, and because of the late development of French capitalism, took the form, in part, of a settlement of “poor whites.” This aim of agricultural colonization applied, too, in relation to Tunisia and Morocco. Only later on were more advanced forms of colonization developed in the Maghreb, and particularly in Morocco, character­ized by investment in mining and even in industrial enterprises by French financial capital. Analyzing the differences in social struc­ture brought about by colonialism in each of these three countries, I wrote, in The Maghreb in the Modem World (p. 104): “The Algerian landed aristocracy had long disappeared — indeed Abdel Kader (1830-1848) himself did more to destroy it than did coloni­zation — while in Morocco this class was actually reinforced by colonization. The situation in Tunisia lay somewhere between these two extremes. Even though these structures are today gradually losing their importance in the face of the rapidly rising tide of the petty-bourgeoisie — a phenomenon common to all three countries — they did for a long time condition the nature of the national

movement.” The war of extermination undertaken during the conquest of Algeria, down to 1848, gave a popular peasant character to.Algerian resistance, while it led to the destruction or large-scale emigration of the urban elites. The new urban strata created by colonialism had no ties either with the countryside or with the former urban ruling classes. That is why their “nationalism” was for so long of a superficial sort and their demands "assimilationist” in character, as Ferhat Abbas defined them even after the Second World War. Oppositionfrom the “pieds noirs,” the French settlers, made this prospect impossible, however. The resistance movement gradually shifted its basis to the popular elements in the towns and the Algerian workers in France. From this movement came the armed insurrection of 1954. And it was during the Algerian war (1954-1962) that Algerian nationalism was truly reborn. This long gap, from 1850 to 1945, between the early period of Algerian nationalism and its rebirth in our own time, is without parallel in Tunisia and Morocco, which were colonized later. That is why the modern national movement there did not have popular antecedents such as it had in Algeria. In Tunisia the national movement, which began in the thirties among bourgeois and ρett^-∙ ¹'∩urgeois circles, never cherished the “assimilationist” illusion. But it was always “bourgeois” and “moderate,” as symbolized by the man with whose name it has been linked from the beginning: Bourguiba. When this movement was overwhelmed by the revolt of the peasant masses in 1954, the situation was brought under control thanks to the policy of concessions followed by France which culminated in Tunisian independence in 1956. In Morocco, brought under colonial rule still more recently, continuity is still more marked. That is why the modern urban nationalist movement had to line up behind the country’s traditional elites, who remained in unchallenged control until independence was achieved.

On emerging from the long night of French colonialism, the Maghreb had difficulty in rediscovering its personality, isolated asjt was from the Arab East. Its nationalism was then purely local, although the feeling of belonging to the Arab world was not absent. I wrote of the period after independence (ρ. 188): “The political development of the Maghreb states over the last decade (1960-1970) has to some extent demonstrated that fundamental social realities must eventually break through the veneer of apparent political reality, itself produced by the arbitrary consequences of colonialism. The national movement in Algeria, after reaching its peak of radicalism during the-first years of the war, was finally captured by petty-bourgeois social elements, representatives of the classwhich... Wastobetheprincipalbeneficiaryofindependence. InTunisia... under the growing influence of the petty-bourgeoisie, whose rise paralleled that of its counterpart in Algeria, the N6o- Destour₁ gradually slid away from the free-enterprise capitalism toward ‘nationalist socialism.’... Algeria evolved from left to right, and Tunisia in the opposite direction. In Morocco, the regime has not yet found a comfortable resting place; petty-bour­geois pressure almost succeeded for a time in 1960, but ultimately failed, its failure marking the return to power of the conservative traditional ruling class. Algeria and Tunisia have practically completed their current evolutionary cycle: from ‘moderate’ nationalism in Tunisia, and from'revolutionary peasant radicalism in Algeria, to petty-bourgeois nationalist ‘socialism.’ Morocco has not yet completed this chapter of her history, but the political and social elements behind petty-bourgeois socialism are already massing their forces.”

The petty-bourgeoL nationalism on which imperialist domination rests in our time, through the perpetuation of underdevelopment, is the same everywhere, whatever its foreign-policy orientations may be. At the same time, because the Palestinian theater is far from the Maghreb and the threat from Israel is not felt there, awareness of the necessary unity of the anti-imperialist struggle is more confined than in the Arab East to circles lacking mass influence.

The African Peripheral Formations

Leaving aside the question of “race” — in Africa the people are neither more homogeneous nor less mixed, since prehistoric times, than are the other “races" — a common, or kindred, cultural background and a social organization that still presents many similarities from one area to another make Black Africa a single entity. This living entity, vast and rich, did not wait for colonial conquest either to borrow from or to give of itself to the other great regions of the Old World. But these exchanges did not break up the unity of Africa’s personality; on the contrary, they helped to assert and enrich it. And the colonial conquest strengthened this still further.

Looked at from within, however, Black Africa seems extremely variegated. It is true that hardly a single one of the present states, which are the result of an artificial carve-up, constitutes the sole or even the main basis of this diversity. One would be wrong, though, to think that this pattern, recent as it is, has not already left its mark on Africa and is not likely to consolidate itself, at least as far as the near future is concerned. Of even greater significance are some 100 or 200 regions, varying in extent, which often overlap the Irontiers of the present states. They do not derive their definition from their geographical position alone, but also and above aft from the homogeneous nature of their social, cultural, economic, and even political conditions.

Over and above this unity and this diversity the continent is divisible into three macroregions, based upon ’ effects of the most recent period of Africa’s history, the period of colonialism.

Traditional West Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Togo, former French West Africa), Cameroon, Chad, and the Sudan together constitute “the Africa of the old colonial economy, the economie de traite. ’■ This whole is divisible into three subregions: (1) the coastal zone, which is easily accessible from the outside world and which constitutes the rich area; (2) the hinterland, which mostly serves as a pool of labor for the coast and as a market for the industries established there; and (3) the Sudan. The traditional Congo River basin (Zaire, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, and the Central African Republic) form a second macro­region: "the Africa of the concession-owning companies.” The eastern and southern parts of the continent (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozam­bique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and South Affictt) constitute the third macroregion, “the Africa of the labor reserves.”

Ethiopia, Somalia, Madasgascar, Reunion, and Mauritius, like the Cape Verde islands on the opposite side of the continent, do not form part of any of these three macroregions, even though here and there in them are to be found some aspects of each — combined, however, with features of other systems that have played an impor­tant part in their development: the slaveowning mercantilist system of the Cape Verde islands, Reunion, and Mauritius, and the pseudo-feudal systems of Ethiopia and Madagascar.

The mercantilist period extended from the seventeenth century to the early 1800s, and was characterized by the slave trade. It was not only the coastal zone that was affected by this trade: through its effects a decline in productive forces occurred throughout the continent. There were two distinct slave-trading areas: the area dependent on the Atlantic trade (by far the most harmful, owing to the great numbers involved), which extended along the coast of the continent from St. Louis in Senegal to Quelimane in Mozambique; and the area dependent on the Eastern trade, operating from Egypt, the Red Sea, and Zanzibar toward the Sudan and East Africa. This type of mercantilist activity was carried on after 1800 in the Eastern area, because the Industrial Revolution that shook the foundations of society in Europe and North America did not reach the Turco-Arabian East.

The period between 1800 and 1880-1890 was characterized by an attempt — at least in certain regions within the influence of Atlantic mercantilism — to establish a new form of dependence between these regions and that part of the world where capitalism had assumed its fully developed industrial form. The zone of influence of Oriental mercantilism was not affected by this process.

The next period, that of colonization, completed the work of the previous period in West Africa, took over from Oriental mercan­tilism in East Africa, and developed with tenfold vigor the present forms of dependence.

The premercantilist African formations, the only ones that really deserve to be called traditional, were independent formations but were not isolated from the rest of the world; on the contrary, they maintained with the Arab formations of North Africa relation­ships of long-distance trade that fulfilled essential functions for both groups of formations.

The mercantilist period saw the emergence of the two poles of the capitalist mode of production: the creation of a proletariat and the accumulation of wealth in the form.of money. During the Industrial Revolution, the two were brought together: money-wealth turned into capital, and the capitalist mode of production reached its completed stage. During this period of incubation covering three centuries, the American periphery of the Western European mercantilist center, played a decisive role in the accumulation of money-wealth by the merchant bourgeoisie of the Atlantic countries. Black Africa played a no less important role as the “periphery of the periphery.” Reduced to the function of supplying slave labor for the plantations of America, Africa lost its independence. It began to be shaped according to external requirements, namely, those of mer­cantilism.

The devastating effects that the mercantilist slave trade had in Africa are now better known, thanks to such works as those of Boubacar Barry on the Waalo (Wolof), from which the following main points emerge.

While the premercantilist trans-Sahara trade, in which the Waalo participated, had strengthened state centralization and stimulated progress in that independent Senegalese kingdom, the Atlantic trade that replaced it (after the Frenc^, 'ttled '^rι 1659 at St. Louis) did not give rise to any productive forces but on the contrary caused these to regress and brought about disintegration of the society and state of the Waalo-waalo. This was why force had to be used by the French to cut off the former trans-Sahara links, to subjugate that region of Africa, and to alter the direction of its external relations so as to suit the requirements of the French trading post of St. Louis. African society had tried to react against this, and Islam had provided the framework for this resistance. The traders of St. Louis paid with weapons for the slaves they bought. This upset the former balance of power between (1) the king, who maintained a permanent army of captives under crown control; (2) the assembly of grandees that nominated him and possessed a system of appanages juxtaposed with and superimposed upon the collective elan-ownership (Iamanat) of lands by the village communities; and (3) the village communities themselves, based on the Iamanat. The customs dues paid to the king by the traders of St. Louis encouraged a permanent civil war that involved the leading notables, who engaged in raiding the communities in order to obtain slaves. The Moslem priests (marabouts) tried to organize a resistance movement of the communities; their aim was to stop the slave trade, i.e., the export of the labor force (but not to end internal slavery). Henceforth, Islam changed its character: from being a religion of a minority caste of traders it became a popular movement of resistance. The first war led by the marabouts, in 1673-1677, failed in its attempt to convert the people of the river region and to stop the slave trade. A century later, in 1776, the Toorodo revolution in the Toucouieur country overthrew the military aristocracy and ended the slave trade. But in the Waalo kingdom, being too near to St. Louis, the attempt made by the Prophet Diile in 1830 failed in the face of French military intervention in support of the king.

Secondly, study of the Waalo case is of special interest because the slave trade took place alongside the trade in gum. However, the latter did not have the same impact on African society. The export of goods (instead of labor) does not necessarily have a negative effect, but may, on the contrary, lead to progress. This type of export was not characteristic of the mercantilist period for Africa as a whole, which almost exclusively supplied slaves. But here, exceptionally, it playec∣ an important role, because the slaves, like the gold of Galam, mainly followed the Gambia route. Now, the gum was supplied by the Waalo, but also and especially by the Trarza Moors. The latter could export it either via St. Louis, to the French alone, or else via Portendic, which was open to competition by the English and the Dutch. To cut off the Portendic route/ the French helped the Trarza to settle on the river, and to cross rt during the “Gum War” in the first quarter of the eighteenth centu­ry. These circumstances thus introduced into the region a specific secondary contradiction between the Waalo and the Trarza. It is this contradiction that explains the failure of the “war of the marabouts” in the seventeenth century, led simultaneously by the marabouts who were hostile to the slave trade, and by the Moors, who were putting increasing pressure on the Waalo in order to monopolize the gum trade.

Along the coast, from St. Louis to Quelimane, the slave trade affected almost the whole of the continent, except the northeastern area (the Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and East Africa). There were wars and anarchy everywhere, with the flight of peoples toward regions of refuge that were difficult to reach but also, for that same reason, very often poor — such as those of the paleonegritic peoples in the overpopulated mountains of West Africa. All this resulted in an alarming decrease in the population. The processes of integration of peoples were stopped, along with those of the construction of large entities that had begun in the premercantilist period. Instead there took place a fragmentation, isolation, and tangling-up of peoples, which is the root cause of one of the most serious handi­caps of contemporary Africa.

It is impossible to conclude this chapter without touching on the question of the Oriental mercantilist period — if one can define in this way the relations of Egypt and Arabia with the Africa of the Nile and the East coast, along the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean as far as Mozambique. Neither the Ottoman Empire, nor Egypt under Mehemet Ali, and still less the southern Arabian sultanates, were mercantilist societies similar to those of Europe from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. The disintegration of precapitalist relations — the necessary condition f∏^r the formation of a proletariat — was almost nonexistent. All that I wish to bring out here are the main trends in the evolution of the Sudan, which Mehemet Ali was to conquer in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was during the premercantilist period that two sultanates were established there, based on long-distance trade with Egypt and the East: the SuItanate of Darfur, still powerful at the time of the Egyptian conquest, and the Sultanate of Fung, between the two Niles, which was weakened as a result of the wars waged against it by Ethiopia. Mehemet Ali’s aim was simple: to loot the Sudan of gold, slaves, and ivory, and to export these in order to intensify the industrialization of Egypt. This was a process of primitive accumu­lation Similarto that of the European mercantilist period; and this is the justification for our speaking of Oriental mercantilism. The Industrial Revolution had, however, already occurred, and this was known to the Pasha; consequently the premercantilist period and that of the developed capitalist system were here mixed up together, in an attempt to industrialize Egypt by raising funds through state taxation of the peasants, the monopoly of foreign trade, and, whenever possible, the looting of colonies,

Down to 1850 it was the Egyptian army itself that hunted for slaves and robbed the Sudan of local products. After that date, the soldiers handed over their task to Sudanese nomads, particularly the Baqqara, who sold the slaves they seized to Turkish, Coptic, Syrian, and European merchants established under the aegis of the Khedive. These operations soon resulted in changes in the social system of the nomads concerned; their clan organization was replaced by “nomad feudalism,” a quasi-state organization founded on a territorial basis and dominated by warrior nobles. In the zones of secondary agriculture that had been conquered, the Egyptian army destroyed the old chiefdoms and subjected the villagers to a tax in kind (livestock and grain) for the purpose of feeding the officials and the army of the conquerors. Sheikhs were appointed by the Egyptians and made responsible for the collection of taxes; they rapidly became rich by this means. Moreover, the best lands were taken from the communities and given to Egyptian beys and to some of these Sudanese sheikhs. Peasants were taken from their villages and attached to these lands, half as slaves and half as serfs; the proceeds of the (largely commercial) farming of these lands went to swell the Egyptian treasury. Other peasants, hunted by. the nomads and impoverished by the sheikhs, flocked into the market towns established by the army at crossroads and on the borders of the slave-raiding areas. A craft industry grew up, distinct from agriculture, while on the lands given to the beys and sheikhs Egyptian farming methods were introduced, with higher productivity. By 1870 it was feasible to replace the tax in kind with a money tax, because of the increased marketed surplus. The Sudan was becoming unified, Islamized, and Arabized.

The Mahdist revolt, 1881-1898, was a rebellion of those who were oppressed by this system: the people of the village communi­ties, the slave-peasants of the estates, and the craftsmen, slaves, and beggars of the market towns. The successful revolt drove out the Egyptian army, the beys, and the sheikhs. But after the Mahdi’s death, the state organized around the Caliph Abdullah changed in content. The military leaders of the revolt, who had sprung from the people, together with the Baqqara warrior chiefs who joined it, organized for their own advantage a state similar to that of the Egyptians; they seized the estates and levied taxes on their own account. It is true that the export of slaves was prohibited by the Mahdist state, but this traffic had largely lost its old importance, because the labor force was not used on the spot. The new state intended to continue exploiting the masses for its benefit and to that end destroyed the popular elements grouped around the Mahdi’s family. They were imprisoned, and the most important of the people’s military leaders were executed. Furthermore, the Mahdist state gradually resumed the export of slaves, but this time for its own benefit: the caliph organized slave raiding among the neighboring peoples of the Upper Nile, outside his own territory, in Darfur, and in Ethiopia; he kept a large number to strengthen his army and his economy, but authorized Sudanese merchants to export some of them. The caliph’s army, which had lost the popular character that constituted its strength at the time of the revolt, was unable to withstand the British colonial expedition at the end of the century.

The slave trade organized from Zanzibar in the nineteenth century certainly falls within a mercantilist frame ∙ -k. Fo^r centu­ries, Arab trade on the coast, premercantilist in type, had brought these regions of Black Africa into contact with India, Indonesia, and even China. Here products were more important than slaves, as is shown by the very small black population of southern Arabia and the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. There was, though, one exception, at the time when the Abbasid caliphate was organizing sugar-cane plantations in Lower Iraq for which it imported black slaves. This experiment was quickly ended by the. revolt of these slaves (the Qarmathian rebellion). In the nineteenth century the slave trade suddenly became much more important. There were in fact two new markets: the island of Reunion, which was supplied in this way — although the slaves were disguised as “contract labor” since the British had abolished the slave trade — and the island of Zanzibar itself. In 1840 the Sultan had transferred his capital there from Oman and gradually established a slave-plantation economy producing the cloves for which European trade now offered a market. Zanzibar, hitherto an entrepot, now became a plantation,' on a model very similar to that of the West Indies, Reunion, or Mauritius — an Arab West Indies. Thus we once again see that integration into the world capitalist system was responsible for a devastating slave trade that had nothing in common with the long­distance trade of the precapitalist period.

The slave trade disappeared with the end of mercantilism. Capitalism at the center then took on its complete form; the func­tion of mercantilism ■— the primitive accumulation of wealth — lost its importance, and capital’s center of gravity shifted from the commercial sector to industry. The old periphery of the plantations of America — and that periphery’s own periphery, the- Africa of the slave trade — had now to give way to a new periphery whose function was to provide products that would help to reduce the value of both the constant and the variable capital used at the center: raw materials and agricultural produce. The condition ensuring that these products were supplied on terms advantageous to the center has been revealed by the theory of unequal exchange.

However, central capital had only very limited means of achieving that goal, until the end of the nineteenth century. It was only when monopolies appeared at the center that large-scale exports of capital became possible, and that central capital had the means of organizing directly in the periphery, by modern methods, the pro­duction that suited it, under conditions that were convenient to it. Until then the center could only rely on the ability of local social formations to adjust themselves to the system’s new requirements.

The project of agricultural colonization in Waalo, turning it into a country of plantations for cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, etc., first formulated by the, British governor of St. Louis, O’Hara, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, was put on the agenda again during the French Revolution and the First Empire as a consequence of the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. When Waalo was “bought” in 1819 by Governor Schmaltz, the experiment began. Barry analyzes the causes of its failure: the resistance of the village communities to their dispossession in favor of European planters, which had been agreed to by the aristocracy in return for extra “customs,” was the main cause. Another cause was the lack of manpower, since there was no reason why the peasants should leave their communities and become proletarians on the planta­tions. The king provided some warriors who to all intents and purposes were slaves — long-term recruits. But the scheme could only use makeshift methods. It was not until the colonial conquest that a proletariat could be created: by taxation, by pure and simple dispossession, and by forced labor. The fact remains that the Waalo agricultural colonization scheme ended in failure in 1831. But the attempt had accentuated the people’s hatred of their own aristoc­racy and had prepared the way for their conversion to Islam: outside the range of the official authority, Muslim communities organized themselves. When Faidherbe conquered the Waalo between 1855 and 1859, with the intention of restarting the agricultural coloniza­tion scheme, and at last procuring for French industry the cotton it needed, the vanquished aristocracy embraced Islam, which thus changed its content a second time: instead of being a resistance ideology, it was now to become a means of integrating the new periphery.

Other African societies made an effort to adjust themselves spontaneously to this process, even before they were conquered. Walter Rodney points out that, all along the Benin coast, the slaves who were still being raided for, but who could no longer be exported, were put to work inside the local society, to produce among other things the exports that Europe demanded. Catherine Coquery has analyzed in these terms the prodigious development of palm groves in Dahomey. Onwuka Dike has shown how another society, that of. the Ibo, unable to make use of slaves, nevertheless adapted itself to the production of palm oil for export.

The collection of products for export and the conveyance of imports received in exchange strengthened the position of the Dioula Muslims, a minority inherited from remote premercantilist days. The “Dioula revolution” enabled them to establish a state under their own control. But this belated episode occurred when the colonial period had already begun. The state had scarcely been founded by Samory when it had to face the conquerors who destroyed it; they reorganized the channels of trade in the direction that suited them and reduced the Dioula to the subordinate functions of colonial trade.

The partitioning of the continent, which was completed by the end of the nineteenth century, multiplied the means available to the colonialists to attain the purpose of capital at the center, namely, to obtain cheap exports. To achieve this end, central capital — which had now reached the monopoly stage — could organize production directly on the spot, and there exploit both the cheap labor and the natural resources (by paying a price for the latter that did not enable alternative activities to replace them when they were exhausted). Moreover, through direct and brutal political domination, incidental expenses could be kept down by maintaining the local social classes as transmission belts and using direct political methods of coercion. Hence the late development in Africa of the peripheral model of industrialization by import­substitution. It was not until independence that the local strata who took over from the colonial administration constituted the first element of a domestic market for luxury goods.

However, although the target was the same everywhere, differ­ent variants of the system of colonial exploitation were developed. These did not depend, or only slightly, on the nationality of the colonizer. The classical contrast between French direct and British indirect rule is not very noticeable in Africa. It is true that a few differences are attributable to the nationality of the masters. British capital, being richer and more developed, and having, moreover, acquired the “best bits,” carried out an earlier and more thorough development than French capital. Thus, the structures established in the Gold Coast from 1890 onward, and still characteristic of Ghana, did not appear in the Ivory Coast until after the abolition of forced labor. Belgium, a small power that had been forced to come to terms with the “great powers,” did not possess the direct colonial monopolies that France used to advantage. Portugal similarly agreed to share colonies with big Anglo-American capital.

In the region I have called “Africa of the labor reserves,” central capital needed to have a large proletariat immediately available. This was because there was great mineral wealth to be exploited (gold and diamonds in South Africa, and copper in Northern Rhodesia), and a settler agriculture that was exceptional in Tropi­cal Africa (the old Boer colonies in South Africa, and the new British ones in Southern Rhodesia and, in the extreme north of the region, in Kenya, separated until 1919 from the southern part of the Africa of labor reserves by German Tanganyika). In order to obtain this proletariat quickly, the colonialists dispossessed the African rural communities by force and deliberately drove them back into confined, poor regions, with no means of modernizing and intensifying their farming. They thus compelled the traditional society to become a supplier of temporary or permanent migrants, so providing a cheap proletariat for the European mines and farms, and later for the manufacturing industries of South Africa, Rhode­sia, and Kenya. Henceforth ^we can no longer speak of a traditional society in this part of the continent, since the society of the labor reserves had acquired a wholly new function. The African social formations of this region, distorted and impoverished, lost even the semblance of independence: the unhappy Africa of apartheid and Bantustans was born, and was to supply the greatest return to central capital.

Until recently there was no known large-scale mineral wealth in West Africa likely to attract foreign capital, nor was there any settler colonization. On the other hand, the slave trade was very active on this coast and caused the development of complex social structures that made possible the large-scale production of tropical agricultural products for export.

The net result of these methods, and the structures to which they gave rise, constituted the economic de traite. The principal methods were these: (1) the organization of a dominant trade monopoly, that of the colonial import-export houses and the py­ramidal structuring of the trade network they dominated, in which the Lebanese occupied the intermediate positions while the former African traders were crushed and had to be content with subordinate positions; (2) the taxation of the peasants in money terms, which forced them to produce whatever the monopolists offered to buy; (3) political support to the social strata and classes that were allowed to appropriate de facto some of the tribal lands, and organization of internal migrations from regions that were deliberately left poor so as to be used as labor reserves for the plantation zones; (4) polit­ical alliance with social groups which, in the theocratic framework of the Muslim confraternities, were interested in putting to com­mercial use the tribute they levied from the peasants; and (5) when the foregoing procedures proved ineffective, recourse pure and simple to administrative coercion: forced labor.

Traditional society was distorted to the point of being unrecog­nizable; it lost its independence, and its main function was now to produce for the world market under conditions which, because they impoverished it, deprived this society of any prospect of radical modernization. This traditional society was not, therefore, in transition to modernity; as a dependent, peripheral society it was complete, and hence a dead end; its progress blocked. It consequently retained certain traditional appearances, which constituted its only means of survival. The economic de traite defined all the subordination­domination relationships between this pseudo-traditional society integrated into the world system, and the central capitalist economy that shaped and dominated iL The concept of the economie de traite has often been used as a mere description of the exchange of agri­cultural products for imported manufactured goods: actually, it describes analytically the exchange of agricultural commodities pro­vided by a peripheral society, shaped in this way, for the products of a central capitalist industry, either imported or produced on the spot by European enterprises.

The results of this economy have varied in different regions. When, at the beginning of colonization, Lever Brothers asked the governor of the Gold Coast to grant concessions that would enable them to develop modern plantations, he refused because “this was not necessary.” It would be enough, the governor explained, to help the “traditional” chiefs to appropriate the best lands so that these export products could be obtained without extra investment costs. The complete model of the economie de traite was achieved in the Gold Coast and German Togo by the end of the nineteenth century and was reproduced much later in French West Africa and then in French Equatorial Africa. This lateness, which reflects that of French capitalism, explains the attempts to form quasi-settler colonies even in not very favorable conditions (French planters in the Ivory Coast and Equatorial Africa), and the corresponding main­tenance of forced labor right down to our own time, after the Second World War.

The economie de traite takes two main forms. Kulakization, i.e., the constitution of a class of native planters of rural origin; the quasi-exclusive appropriation of the soil by these planters and the employment of wage labor is the dominant form on the Gulf of Guinea, where conditions made possible the development of the economie de traite. But in the savannah country, extending from Senegal to the Sudan, through northern Nigeria, the Moslem con­fraternities facilitated a different type of economy: the organiza­tion of export production (groundnuts and cotton) in the context of vast areas subject to a theocratic-political authority — that of the Murid confraternities of Senegal, the sultanates of Nigeria, the Ansar and Ashiqqa in the Sudan — which kept the form of a tribute-paying social formation, but one that was integrated into the international system, since the surplus appropriated in the form of tribute exacted from the village communities was itself marketed. It was the Egyptian colonization of the Sudan that created the most advanced conditions for the development of this type of organization, which in that country tends to become a latifundium, pure and simple. The British merely reaped the fruits of this evolution. The new Iatifundia-Owners who rallied after 1898 to the colonial administration cultivated cotton for the benefit of British industry, and powerful modern technical facilities were made available to them.

But the second mutation of Islam in West Aftⁱ after the colonial conquest, opened the way to an evolution of the same kind, though slower and less overt. “Taken over” by the aristoc­racy and the colonizers, Islam became the ideology of those controlling the peasants in order to organize the export production desired by the colonizers. The Murid phenomenon in Senegal is the most striking example of this second mutation. Small matter that the initiators of the confraternity and some narrow-minded colonial administrators thought themselves hostile to each other. In fact, the confraternity was the most important vector of expansion of the groundnut economy, by getting the peasants to submit to the aim of that economy: to produce a great deal and to accept a very low and stagnant reward for this work, despite progress in productivity.

To organize the economic de traite it was necessary to destroy the precolonial trade and to reshape the circuits in the direction required by the outward orientation of the economy. For before the conquest there had existed regional complementarities with an important natural basis (forest and savannah) and strengthened by the history of the relations between the different societies of West Africa. The internal trade in cola and salt, the exchanges between livestock breeders and farmers, the disposal of exported commodities and the dissemination of imported commodities, constituted a dense and integrated network, dominated by African merchants. The colonial trading houses had to capture all those flows and guide them all toward the coast, and for this reason colonialism destroyed the internal African trade and then reduced the African traders to

the role of subordinate primary collectors, when it did not purely and simply do away with them altogether. The destruction of Samory’s trade, like that of the trade of the half-breeds of St. Louis, Goree, and Freetown, the destruction of the Hausa and Ashanti trade of Salaga and that of the Ibo of the Niger delta bear witness to this devastating socioeconomic effect of the economic de traite.

At regional level, then, the colonial economy necessarily engendered a polarization of dependent peripheral development. The wealth of the coast had as a necessary corollary the impoverishment of the hinterland. Africa, whose geography and history dictated a continental development — organized around the major river arteries of the interior, facilitating transport, irrigation, and the supply of power — was doomed to be developed only in its narrow coastal zone. The exclusive allocation of resources to the Iatterzone — (a planned policy of the economie de trade) — accentuated the regional imbal­ance. The massive emigration from the hinterland to the coast is part of the logic of the system: it makes cheap labor available to capital where capital requires it, and it is only the ideology of “universal harmonies” that sees in these migrations anything but movements that impoverish the zones of origin of the migrants. The economie de trade culminated, moreover, in balkanization, since the “gaining” microregions had no interest in sharing with their reserves in the hinterland the crumbs of the colonial cake that they secured for themselves.

It was not possible to establish this system in the third macroregion of the continent, Central Africa. Here the ecological conditions had protected the peoples, who had taken refuge in areas difficult to penetrate from the coast, from the ravages of the slave trade. The low population density and the absence of adequate hierarchical structures made the economie de trade model impossible. Discouraged, the colonizers abandoned the country to adventurers who were willing to try “to get something out of it” without big resources, since the undertaking did not attract capital. The concessionary companies that, from 1890 to 1930, ravaged French Equatorial Africa with no result other than a paltry profit, and King Leopold’s policy in the Congo, have been duly denounced. In the Belgian Congo, where the alternative of industrial plantations established directly by big capital was adopted (Lever Brothers, who were refused permission to establish themselves in the Gold Coast, were welcomed by the Belgians), it was only after the First World War that, as an extension of these plantation zones controlled by foreign capital, a small-scale economic de traite emerged. As to French Equatorial Africa, it was not until 1950 that the first symptoms of the 6conomie de traite appeared. But the imprint left by the concessionary-company period, still omnipresent, justified the title of “Africa of the concessionary companies” that we give to this region.

In all three cases the colonial system organized society so as to produce, under the best possible conditions from the point of view of the metropolitan country, export commodities thu_l provided only a very low and stagnant reward of labor. Once this aim was achieved, there were no longer any traditional societies in contem­porary Africa, but only dependent peripheral societies.

The original history of Ethiopia must be seen as a contrast to the wretched dependent societies established by colonialism in Africa. The current prejudice is to consider colonialism as a stage in modernization. In fact Ethiopia was fortunate not to have been colonized. The ancient state of Axum belonged to that group of trading centers of Antiquity in which the brilliant civilization of the court derived its resources from the taxation of long-distance trade. Abyssinia, isolated by the Moslem establishments along the coast, became feudalized from the ninth century onward: the scattered ruling class tried to survive by taxing its peasantry. In the ninth century the Negus Menelik, aware of the imperialist danger, took the initiative and conquered the southern half of present-day Ethiopia (including the Galla and Sidamo countries) before the arrival of the Europeans. He subsequently modernized his state, without alienating it, by the methods of “enlightened despotism.” The exploitation of his own Abyssinian peasantry and that of the conquered regions enabled him to mobilize a large surplus for the state and thus to strengthen the administrative apparatus. Preserving control of the system, the empire obtained from abroad the means necessary to achieve its goal, particularly firearms. The historic significance of this effort can be judged if it is recalled that the Galla and Sidamo peasants were at that time ignorant of the use of the plough and, like those of the other regions of Black Africa, cultivated by means of the hoe. The Ethiopian administration and feudal lords introduced the use of the plough between 1880 and 1935. The British, French, and Belgian colonial administrations had aimed at the same goal and failed. There can be no doubt that, between 1880 and 1935, the modernization of Ethiopian agriculture, and the rates of growth of its productivity, were far more marked than elsewhere in Africa. Indeed, it was this progress that gave rise to a population growth that was also higher than in colonial Africa. Ethiopia, isolated from the world market, did not suffer from the competition of imported products. The surplus, necessarily formed of foodstuffs, was destined for the home market; hence the development c^rthis period was autocentric. The result was a more cohesive national state, with less alienated elites, despite the persistence of problems of regionalism that showed there were limits to the methods of enlightened despotism, which were inadequate to assimilate the variegated peasant masses and fuse them into a single nation. It _iwas only after the Italian conquest of 1935 and, above all, after the Second World War that Ethiopia really entered the world system. It is also since then that the phenomena of underdevelopment have begun to appear.