Imperialism and Global Inequality with Jason Hickel
Return to Bandung
Unequal Exchange: Theory and Example
Explains the concept of unequal exchange—how price and wage gaps transfer real value Northward—and uses the iPhone and global wage disparities to illustrate embodied labor and value capture.
In this episode, I’m joined by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, author of The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (W.W. Norton, 2018), to discuss the complex and interconnected relationship between imperialism—both past and present—and global economic inequality. We examine why mainstream liberal frameworks for understanding the divide between rich and poor countries inevitably fall short, instead presenting an alternative account of global inequality that centers the crucial role of colonial plunder (as well as unequal exchange in the supposedly ‘postcolonial’ era) in keeping vast swaths of the world trapped in conditions of poverty, underdevelopment, and economic dependency.
About the show:
Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.
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Sources and helpful links:
Jason Hickel — The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (W.W. Norton, 2018)
Jason Hickel — Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World (Penguin Random House, 2020)
Jason Hickel — How Unequal Exchange Shapes our World (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, July 2025)
Margarita Fajardo — How CEPAL’s Latin American Theorists Changed Our Understanding of the “Third World” (interview in Jacobin, July 2022)
Jayati Ghosh — Interpreting contemporary imperialism: lessons from Samir Amin (Review of African Political Economy, March 2021)
Jason Hickel, Morena Hanbury Lemos, and Felix Barbour — Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy (Nature Communicastions, July 2024)
Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala — Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era: Quantifying Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1960–2018 (New Political Economy, 2021)
Jason Hickel, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, and Intan Suwandi — Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 (Global Environmental Change, March 2022)
Thomas Sankara — A United Front Against Debt (speech to the Organization of African Unity, July 1987)
Walter Rodney — The Roots and Consequences of African Underdevelopment (lecture given in May 1979)
Social links:
Return to Bandung:
Twitter: twitter.com/returntobandung
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/returntobandung/
Pranay Somayajula:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/p_somayajula
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pranay.somayajula/
Website: https://www.pranaysomayajula.com/
Substack: https://www.culture-shock.xyz/
Jason Hickel:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonhickel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjasonhickel/
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