David

“To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, economic history is a deaf man answering questions no economist has put to him.”
― Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes

“British colonial investments in Africa did not generally yield ‘superprofits’ in the form of higher- than-average returns, but coercive labour market regulation (including the widespread use of ‘native reserves’) did secure a ready supply of inexpensive labour that undergirded the profitability of British capital.”
― Zak Cope, The Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism

“Long dismissed as ideological representatives of the dominant powers, liberal economists have never experienced the pessimism of many modern Marxists regarding economic development of the periphery. It has come as something of a shock to Marxian writers that the empirical evidence on economic growth in the periphery since the Second World War has borne out much of the liberal case. Those countries which adopted strategies of export-oriented growth have achieved the most spectacular performance, while countries favouring self-sufficiency have done relatively poorly. Countries which have resisted distorting market prices have out-performed the heavily interventionist backward economies, which have in varying degrees emulated the Soviet model and and replaced economic mechanisms with direct controls and administrative allocation.”
― Michael Charles Howard, A History of Marxian Economics Volume II, 1929-1990

“Vulgar economy actually does no more than interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations. It should not astonish us, then, that vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the estranged outward appearances of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd and perfect contradictions appear and that these relations seem the more self-evident the more their internal relationships are concealed from it, although they are understandable to the popular mind. But all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3