Non-Western countries in the global economy

[cathy_ndiaye2]

It’s interesting to see that from the 1830s when the European demand for silk increased, some investors started to build infrastructures in Syria to produce more silk ( Gualtieri, 10). One of the reasons that are given in the text is that the demand for silk in France amongst other places was getting more important and French secularists wanted to take advantage of that and build bigger infrastructures to increase productivity, but they did not want to increase the salaries of the European/French workers (in the case of silk) (Gualtieri, 29-30). Hence, the solution was to decentralize the factories towards the East. This is a phenomenon that we still see nowadays, many big clothing companies and brand like Shein, H&M, Zara, Nike etc. have their CEO offices in American and European cities but they decide to have their factories and chain of production in countries in the global South, like Pakistan, India, Congo, for example, to be able to pay the workers with cheaper wages than what would be accepted by workers and permissible within workers legislations in Western countries. Sometimes they even employ young children to do this kind of work. Today the source of this phenomenon is the lifestyle we have with fast fashion and ''overconsumption cultural'', so it might be different than the situation of the silk market in France in the 1830’s but it’s interesting to make the parallel with the fact that in both situations workers from the Global Souths are being taken exploited or taken advantage of.

Also, we see that in the case of Syria in the 19th century, when local peasants saw that silk production was part of the global economy, more and more started to ‘’turn to the cultivation of mulberry trees, the staple of the silkworm diet. ‘’(Gualtieri, 30) When I read about local peasants changing the type of crops they were growing to turn towards what the Western economic market wanted, it made me think of some regions in sub-Saharan Africa. For example, around the 1960s, some peasants and farmers in Senegal shifted from subsistence-oriented agriculture to market-oriented agriculture. Market-oriented agriculture, like with peanuts, for example, was a way to bring revenue to the country by producing and offering a large quantity of products that the global economic market was asking for. On a smaller scale, with that shift families who were able to grow their food from their land and exchange with others who were growing or selling different products lost this ‘’ food self-sufficiency’’ when they turned exclusively to what the global markets (and their government) were encouraging.