Document-based question

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Indian lawyer and anticolonial activist then living in South Africa, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), a pamphlet addressed to Indian nationalists, 1909.

It is machinery that has impoverished India. It is difficult to measure the harm that Manchester has done to us. It is due to Manchester that Indian handicraft has all but disappeared. But I make a mistake. How can Manchester be blamed? We wore Manchester cloth, and that is why Manchester wove it. I was delighted when I read about the bravery of Bengal. There are no cloth-mills in that Presidency. They were, therefore, able to restore the original hand-weaving occupation. . . . The workers in the mills of Bombay have become slaves. The condition of the women working in the mills is shocking. When there were no mills, these women were not starving. . . . I fear we will have to admit that moneyed men support British rule; their interest is bound up with its stability.

John Maynard Keynes, British economist who had resigned as the British Treasury's official representative at the Paris Peace Conference, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919.

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914! . . . The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world . . . He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality . . . The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.

Henry Morgenthau Jr., United States secretary of the treasury and president of the conference, closing address to the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 1944.

We came to work out methods which would do away with the economic evils—the competitive currency devaluation and destructive impediments to trade—which preceded the present war. We have succeeded in that effort. . . . What we have done here in Bretton Woods is to devise machinery by which men and women everywhere can exchange freely, on a fair and stable basis, the goods which they produce through fair labor. . . . To seek the achievement of our aims separately through the planless, senseless rivalry that divided us in the past, or through the outright economic aggression which turned neighbors into enemies would be to invite ruin again upon us all. Worse, it would be once more to start our steps irretraceably down the steep, disastrous road to war. That sort of extreme nationalism belongs to an era that is dead. . . . A revival of international trade is indispensable if full employment is to be achieved in a peaceful world . . . .

Houari Boumediene, head of state of Algeria and chair of the Non-Aligned Movement, speech to a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on raw materials and development convened at Algeria's request, New York, 1974.

However, it is inevitable that we should recognize first that in the world in which we live all the strings of the world economy are in the hands of a minority composed of the highly developed countries. . . . In fact, the colonialist and imperialist Powers accepted the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination only when they had already succeeded in setting up the institutions and machinery that would perpetuate the system of pillage established in the colonial era. Owing to the fact that the developed countries have virtual control of the raw materials markets . . . , they have been able to proceed at will in fixing the prices of both the raw materials they take from the developing countries and the goods and services with which they furnish those countries. . . . That is the basis of the economic order of the world in which we live today. In the eyes of the vast majority of humanity it is an order as unjust and as outdated as the colonial order to which it owes its origin and substance.

Photograph of demonstrators protesting the World Trade Organization's ministerial meeting, Seattle, United States, 1999.

Value of merchandise exports as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), the world and selected countries, 1913–2014. Data from Michel Fouquin and Jules Hugot, TRADHIST database, CEPII, 2016, processed by Our World in Data; figures rounded.

Year | World | United Kingdom | Brazil | China
1913 | 14.0% | 21.7% | 17.2% | no data
1929 | 10.8% | 15.5% | 15.4% | no data
1932 | 6.2% | 8.6% | 14.1% | 1.5%
1950 | 7.8% | 16.4% | 9.4% | 3.2%
1973 | 10.8% | 16.1% | 7.9% | 4.3%
1990 | 15.2% | 16.9% | 7.8% | 24.8%
2008 | 26.2% | 17.1% | 13.3% | 36.2%
2014 | 24.2% | 15.4% | 10.0% | 22.9%

Wayne M. Morrison, specialist in Asian trade and finance, Congressional Research Service, report prepared for members of the United States Congress, 2019.

Prior to the initiation of economic reforms and trade liberalization nearly 40 years ago, China maintained policies that kept the economy very poor, stagnant, centrally controlled, vastly inefficient, and relatively isolated from the global economy. Since opening up to foreign trade and investment and implementing free-market reforms in 1979, China has been among the world's fastest-growing economies . . . China has become the world's largest economy (on a purchasing power parity basis), manufacturer, merchandise trader, and holder of foreign exchange reserves. This in turn has made China a major commercial partner of the United States. . . . China is also the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities, which help fund the federal debt and keep U.S. interest rates low. . . . In 2017, the Trump Administration launched a Section 301 investigation of China's innovation and intellectual property policies deemed harmful to U.S. economic interests. It subsequently raised tariffs by 25% on $250 billion worth of imports from China, while China increased tariffs (ranging from 5% to 25%) on $110 billion worth of imports from the United States.