Through colonialism, neocolonialism and continuing imperialism, the Western elite and its proxies have been making war on the Global South for the last six centuries. This imperialism involves not only military war, the effects of which are obviously devastating (as in the latest case of the Israeli genocide in Gaza), but also an economic war, the negative impacts of which are less obvious (than those of war) and less obviously linked to Western imperialist aims. 

For this reason the economic war waged by the West against the Global South through colonialism and neocolonialism needs to be highlighted. 

These military and economic wars proceed in tandem and are both highly devastating to Southern peoples.  The intended effect of both is the impoverishment of the Global South (or “the globalization of poverty” as Prof. Michel Chossudovsky puts it), and the enrichment of imperialist Western states.

The combination of economic and military imperialism is particularly prominent in the case of Africa where: 

“The U.S. government has through the Pentagon, the CIA, the World Bank and the IMF, systematically demolished African economies, health and education sectors, and fueled eleven wars on the continent with arms transfers and military training. This genocidal imperial strategy has killed more than four million Africans and allowed the U.S. and the West to attain Africa’s abundant natural riches cheaply.”  

Western countries colonized 80% of the world’s surface and this process destroyed the economies of Africa, Asia and Latin America for more than five centuries spreading poverty and famine globally. 

India which was “the richest polity of its age” (according the New York Times) (India’s age being the 17th and 18th centuries) was converted by 200 years of British colonialism into an abyss of poverty.  The British looted $45 trillion from India and killed up to 165 million Indians through periodic famines, massacres, deindustrialization and high taxes. 

According to British Professor Jason Hickel ( a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts):

“Britain used this flow of tribute from India [the $45 trillion] to finance the expansion of capitalism in Europe and regions of European settlement, like Canada and Australia. So not only the industrialisation of Britain but also the industrialisation of much of the Western world was facilitated by extraction from the colonies.”

This British plunder destroyed Indian society as Hickel explains:

“During the last half of the 19th century – the heyday of British intervention – income in India collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920. Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine.”

As Member of the Indian Parliament Shashi Tharoor put it in a speech at the Oxford Union in July 2015:

“India’s share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23 per cent. By the time the British left it was down to below four per cent. Why? Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

 “In fact, Britain’s industrial revolution was actually premised upon the de-industrialisation of India...India went from having 27% of world trade to less than 2%.”

Colonialism and the slave trade had a similarly destructive impact on the African continent. For 400 years, more than 20 million Africans were enslaved by Britain, Portugal, Spain, Holland and France. These slaves were worked to death (in many cases) on Caribbean plantations and those in the United States and South America.  As Professor Sabelo J. Ndlovu Gatsheni  explains “This drained Africa of its most robust labour needed for its economic development.” It also impoverished African economies while enormously enriching Western countries.

Not surprisingly, Cambridge University history lecturer Dr. Richard Drayton’s Guardian article (August 2005) is titled “The Wealth of The West Was Built on Africa’s Exploitation.”  Drayton asks:

“Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves?…African slavery and colonialism are not ancient or foreign history; the world they made is around us in Britain.”

According to Drayton, the wealth that Britain alone looted from Africa is so enormous that its debt to the continent is “incalculable”: 

“For without Africa and its Caribbean plantation extensions, the modern world as we know it would not exist.

“Profits from slave trading and from sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco are only a small part of the story. What mattered was how the pull and push from these industries transformed western Europe’s economies. English banking, insurance, shipbuilding, wool and cotton manufacture, copper and iron smelting, and the cities of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, multiplied in response to the direct and indirect stimulus of the slave plantations.”

The effect of colonialism was to shut down Southern economies and subordinate them to Western requirements for cheap or free labour, captive markets for Western goods and cheap raw materials for Western industrialization.  This process of shutting down and poverty creation continued in the era of neocolonialism which followed that of colonialism. Neocolonialism continues today and is a form of economic and military warfare.  

Prominent in the West’s economic war arsenal are structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed on most Southern countries by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the last sixty years.  The World Bank and IMF are both U.S.-dominated and follow Washington’s dictates.  “Virtually all developing countries particularly in Latin America and Africa have implemented… SAPs.”

The region most devastated by SAPs has been Africa where they have decimated national economies and health and education sectors. SAPs offer loans on condition that governments drastically reduce public spending (especially on health, education and food subsidies) in favour of repayment of debt owed to Western banks, increase exports of raw materials to the West, encourage foreign investment and privatize state enterprises; the last two steps mean selling whatever national assets a poor country may have to Western multinational corporations.

Under SAPs, Sub-Saharan Africa’s external debt actually increased by more than 500%. In 1997, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) stated that in the absence of debt payments, severely indebted African countries could have saved the lives of 21 million people and given 90 million girls and women access to basic education by the year 2000. The All-African Conference of Churches has called the debt “a new form of slavery, as vicious as the slave trade.”

After forty years of SAPs, 490 million Africans lived in extreme poverty (40.8% of the 1.2 billion population) in 2021. This is up from 313 million Africans who lived in extreme poverty in 2001. Life expectancy in Africa today is 63 years, the lowest in the world. In February 2023, a fifth of the African population (278m) was undernourished, and 55 million African children below five years of age were stunted due to severe malnutrition according to OXFAM.

Due to SAPs, between 2001 and 2015, government spending on health, as a proportion of overall spending, decreased in 21 African countries. More than half of African citizens have no access to health care and every year 97 million Africans are faced with “catastrophic healthcare costs” which push 15 million of them into poverty.

With slashed government education budgets due to SAPs, 182 million African adults are unable to read and write, 98 million children are out of school in sub-Saharan Africa, 48 million youth are illiterate, more than 75% of all children (aged 5 to 9) do not go to school and the adult literacy rate in Africa is only 61% well below the developing country average. 72% of the world’s illiterate people are in Africa.

Given the annihilating social impact of SAPs all over Africa, it is not surprising that Emily Sikazwe, director of the Zambian anti-poverty group “Women for Change,” asked: “What would they [the World Bank and the IMF] say if we took them to the World Court in The Hague and accused them of genocide?”