By Jason Hickel

The Divide; Global Inequality from Conquests to Free Markets
Editions:ePub: € 23.99
ISBN: 9780393651379
Paperback: € 12.99
ISBN: 9781786090034
Pages: 368
Hardcover: € 24.99
ISBN: 9780393651362
Pages: 352
Audiobook: € 32.99
ISBN: 9781684410286

Global inequality doesn’t just exist; it has been created.


Also published as:
The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions


More than four billion people—some 60 percent of humanity—live in debilitating poverty, on less than $5 per day. The standard narrative tells us this crisis is a natural phenomenon, having to do with things like climate and geography and culture. It tells us that all we have to do is give a bit of aid here and there to help poor countries up the development ladder. It insists that if poor countries would only adopt the right institutions and economic policies, they could overcome their disadvantages and join the ranks of the rich world.

Anthropologist Jason Hickel argues in The Divide that this story ignores the broader political forces at play. Global poverty—and the growing inequality between the rich countries of Europe and North America and the poor ones of Africa, Asia, and South America—has come about because the global economy has been designed over the course of five hundred years of conquest, colonialism, regime change, and globalization to favor the interests of the richest and most powerful nations. Global inequality is not natural or inevitable, and it is certainly not accidental.

To close the divide, Hickel proposes dramatic action rooted in real justice: abolishing debt burdens in the global South, democratizing the institutions of global governance, and rolling out an international minimum wage, among many other vital steps. Only then will we have a chance at a world where all begin on more equal footing.

Excerpt:

Table of Contents of The Divide

Part One - The Divide

  1. The Development Delusion
  2. The End of Poverty... Has Been Postponed

Part Two - Concerning Violence

  1. Where Did Poverty Come From? A Creation Story
  2. From Colonialism to the Coup

Part Three - The New Colonialism

  1. Debt and the Economics of Planned Misery
  2. Free Trade and the Rise of the Virtual Senate
  3. Plunder in the 21st Century

Part Four - Closing the Divide

  1. From Charity to Justice
  2. The Necessary Madness of Imagination

About Jason Hickel

Jason HickelJason Hickel is an award-winning professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Virginia in 2011. He specializes on globalization, finance, democracy, violence, and ritual, and has been engaged in ethnographic and archival research in Southern Africa since 2004. His work has been funded by Fulbright-Hays, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation. He presently holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.