Globalization, Indigenous Peoples, and Alternative Economics

Indigenous Peoples and the Impact of Development

As Bodley notes, indigenous cultures are often small in scale — though not always, as the Inca and Maya demonstrate. Development brings these cultures into a larger world, where they are influenced by other cultures, including global culture. Many of the cultures today viewed as indigenous came into contact with larger external cultures during the past five hundred years, a period characterized by a shift towards a global-scale culture. The degree of shock that small-scale cultures experience when encountering global-scale culture is much higher than it would have been prior to globalization, as there would previously have been greater balance between the sizes of the cultures meeting.

With development has come modern notions of property and the politicization of non-governmental entities such as corporations. These concepts were foreign to most indigenous populations, leaving them unprepared for these changes. As a result, many suffered significant losses of land, cultural artifacts, and political power over the territories they inhabit. This, in turn, contributed to an erosion of cultural self-identity. Significant development efforts in the modern era have focused specifically on assimilation, based on the notion that modern lifestyles are superior — a form of cultural imperialism in which dominant cultures assume that because they seek progress, all cultures must want the same. Examples of this can be found among native populations in North America and in the Chinese government's approach to Tibetans and Uyghurs.

The outcomes of this process are by no means universally positive. Adverse health outcomes resulting from shifts in diet and lifestyle are common, as changing consumption patterns run counter to the physiological evolution of indigenous peoples. Hardest hit are cultures that are less commercially oriented — precisely those most likely to have avoided significant outside contact until after 1500.

The Atlantic Complex and Its Legacy

The Atlantic Complex refers to the movement of goods and people across the Atlantic among the Americas, Africa, and Europe. It has had long-lasting effects on all three continents. In Europe, the major colonial powers gained substantial economic and political power through their exploitation of other continents. The wealth accumulated through this trade allowed these countries to remain dominant powers to this day, fueling technological and political innovation and establishing Europe as the preeminent global force of the modern era. Europeans also became the dominant power in the Americas, though their influence has finally waned in Africa.

The Europeans effectively destroyed Africa's human capital and undertook substantial exploitation of the continent's mineral wealth. The fact that colonial powers held the continent well into the twentieth century caused considerable damage to Africa's political and social institutions. Africa's diverse peoples were left with only a loose political structure relative to what existed before the Atlantic Complex.

In the Americas, the Atlantic Complex had devastating impacts. The slave trade enabled rapid economic expansion, which in turn displaced indigenous populations and drove large-scale environmental destruction as Native American land was expropriated for agricultural use. Over time, Native Americans became minorities in their own lands.

Global White Supremacy and Racial Inequality

Charles Mills argues that the global economic and political system is largely ruled by European settler countries and the European nations themselves. In his view, global white supremacy reflects the pervasive influence of European culture throughout the world as a vestige of the age of European expansion. This expansion produced a high level of racial dichotomization, in which white-dominated societies exercise power over other cultures. According to Mills, the European character of globalization and internationalization has led to a situation in which European nations frequently band together against other powers.

The counter to this trend, as Mills explains, emerges in movements such as pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and pan-Asianism, as well as in indigenous peoples' movements. Global white supremacy has produced its complement: global non-white subordination, a dynamic that helped shape the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mills argues that racial inequality is embedded in global structures. While he sets aside cases involving non-white superior-subordinate relationships — such as Chinese hegemony over its minorities or Malay hegemony over Malaysia's Chinese and Indian minorities — his central thesis holds that wealth, power, and prestige largely flow to the advantaged, who effectively make the rules governing the global economy.