Shipping and Staple Economies in the Periphery

Shipping was an important economic activity in various parts of the periphery during the process of globalization that began with the European voyages of discovery and lasted until the closing of the continental frontiers early in the twentieth century. This important shipping activity in the periphery contrasted with the dominance of ocean shipping in the late nineteenth century that Britain, the dominant core economy, experienced. Generally globalization before the late twentieth century involved a manufacturing core area trading with a staple raw material producing periphery. Although India was central to the imperialism of this period, prototypically, the periphery consisted of areas of recent settlement where discovery, growing core demand and falling transportation costs created potential profit opportunities for staple production (sugar and tobacco in the eighteenth century and grain, meat and agricultural/industrial raw materials in the nineteenth). Exploitation of these opportunities involved the mobilization of capital and labour and its movement to the staple periphery. This process has been systematized in the staple theory of economic development.1