Marx was just vindicated with hard data

Or how anti-imperialism is the secret to getting rich as a country

I'm normally not a fan of Thomas Piketty. What kind of person calls their book 'The Capital' but simultaneously badmouths Marx and says he "never managed really to read" the original "Das Kapital"?

But, credit when credit is due, he just published a groundbreaking new study that is genuinely fascinating.

It is in fact - somewhat ironically - the data-driven and unequivocal proof that Marx was correct when he said that capitalist wealth accumulation in Western imperialist countries was fundamentally based on exploitation and unequal power relations rather than fair market exchange.

Let's look through the paper.

First of all, a key value of the work is that Piketty and Gastón Nievas (a PhD student) base their study on a new database that they put together (which you can access here) that systematically reconstructs global trade flows and balance of payments for the entire world over more than two centuries (1800-2025).

This is genuinely groundbreaking work. No one - to my knowledge - has ever before created such a comprehensive database that tracks not just the "visible flows" of goods trade, but crucially the "invisible flows" of services, foreign income, and foreign transfers across the entire world - covering 48 major countries individually plus 9 residual regions that together achieve complete global coverage of population and GDP over more than 2 centuries.

What makes this database particularly valuable is that it allows us, for the first time, to see the complete picture of how wealth actually flowed between regions since 1800.

And not just what was officially traded, but the colonial transfers, tribute payments, "home charges" from India to Britain, debt impositions on Haiti and China, and all the other mechanisms through which the West extracted wealth from the Global South.

What the data shows is what everyone in the Global South knew instinctively but was contradicted by the dominant economic narrative: the West's wealth was built not through superior productivity or "free trade," but through systematic extraction, forced transfers, and colonial plunder on a scale that dwarfs anything previously quantified.

Take this extraordinary metric for instance: the authors' simulations show that a mere 20% increase in primary commodity prices over the 1800-1914 period, which the study says "corresponds to an absolute lower bound estimate of the value of unpaid forced labor in the export production of cotton, sugar, grain, etc. over this period," would have left Europe with foreign debts equivalent to 160% of its GDP, completely reversing global wealth patterns.

Put another way: had Western imperialist powers actually paid for what they took instead of extracting it through colonial violence and unpaid forced labor, the "developed" world would have been the "developing" world, and vice versa.

What’s also extraordinary is that this system of extraction very much continues to this day.