David

“Marxism-Leninism as a theory of hierarchical organization and engineered change can be applied to countries like Angola or Mozambique with a low degree of social conflict and class consciousness without much difficulty. The dictatorship of the proletariat may make little sense in any African country, but a vanguard party is an admirable instrument of rule in new nation-states in need of a centralizing institution.”
― David Ottaway, Afrocommunism

“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

“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

“Yet, in most of the world, US power was hegemonic more than coercive. The United States’ offer to serve as policeman of the world has been accepted by a majority of the world since 1945, and by almost the entire world after 1991. Many countries look to the US military’s command of the commons (the world’s airspace and seas as well as outer space) to ensure global order and to protect them from nearby regional powers that, in the absence of American military dominance, could dominate or invade their neighbors. Thus, communist Vietnam, after decades of fighting and millions of deaths to free itself from US domination, eagerly signed up for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and is considering allowing the United States to base warships at Cam Ranh Bay to deflect Chinese power—and of course each and every Eastern European country begged for admission to NATO and the EU, just as Western European governments positioned themselves after World War II within a geopolitical and economic structure designed and controlled by the United States in return for protection from the USSR. American aid through the Marshall Plan came after the recipient governments had already cast their lot with the United States.”
― Richard Lachmann, First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers