India, Liberal Economic Development, Inequality and Imperialism

Introduction

Lenin had written his famous book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism at a time when the World War I was looming large, the entire third world was divided into areas of domination by the nation-state backed finance capital of the colonizers. The colonialism imposed on countries like India resulted in a situation where the potentialities of capitalist development in these countries were severely retarded, primarily because the economic surplus of these countries was siphoned off to the colonizing power. Since this happened across the third world, a division of the word into two clear segments, with the advanced capitalist countries oppressing the third world colonized ones, was clearly visible. Theories of imperialism starting from Rosa Luxemburg to Lenin have emphasized on imperialism as being a structure whereby the advanced capitalist countries oppress the poorer third world countries.

It can be argued that this entire process of subjugation of the third world...