Knowledge and Global Inequality Since 1800
Interrogating the Present as History

Knowledge monopoly leads to global inequality between 1800 up to the present.

Dev Nathan (Author)

9781009455176, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 May 2024

86 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1 cm, 0.27 kg

'In this fascinating and highly original study veteran scholar Dev Nathan explains how the knowledge monopoly of advanced technologies created global inequality from 1800 to the present. Importantly he convincingly demonstrates how it was not always like this and shows how a more equal world could be constructed. Knowledge and Global Inequality provides a much neglected Southern perspective in Inequality Studies. It is likely to become a key text in this growing field of scholarship.' Edward Webster, Distinguished Professor, Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, WITS University, Johannesburg

The Element highlights the monopolization and exclusion from high-value knowledge in analysing divergent and, recently, partially convergent income trends across 200-odd years of the global capitalist economy. A Southern lens interrogates this history, in the process showing how developing command over knowledge creation sheds light on the middle-income trap. Overall, it shows a new way of looking at global capitalist economic history, highlighting the creation of, command over and exclusion from knowledge. This forces us to analyse the role of the subjective or agential element in making history; a subjective element that, however, always works from within and transforms existing structures and processes. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

1. Global Inequality
2. Knowledge and Its Enclosure
3. Adverse Specialization and Divergence, 1820–1950
4. Limited Convergence, 1950 to the Present
5. The Middle-Income Trap
6. Developing the Knowledge Economy
7. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Development economics & emerging economies [KCM]