Conclusions: Comparative Developments in Trade, Industrialization, and Inequality Since 1850

This final chapter offers a brief reflection on the contributions that the book has made to the previous discussions of why Scandinavia and South America experienced such different trajectories during the twentieth century. While Scandinavia converged with the rich countries, South America fell behind. This bifurcation occurred even though the two regions developed a similar role as suppliers of natural resources as they were drawn into the emerging Atlantic economy of the late nineteenth century. Both regions were peripheral to the heartlands of industrialization, i.e., peripheral in the functions they performed in the world market for commodities. As mentioned in Chapter 2 , this divergence has intrigued scholars since at least the seminal contribution of Senghaas (1985), who compared the Scandinavian countries and southern settler economies of Australasia and South America. The string of studies in Senghaas’ wake, comparing economies that were geographically and culturally very distant from one another, thus preceded and paralleled the emergence and proliferation of the so-called Great Divergence debate (Pomerantz, 2000). The title of our book promises an attempt to examine the roles of trade, industrialization, and inequality in the diverging pathways of the two regions. We owe to the reader of this volume some final reflections on the ways in which our contributions have developed the issues that fascinated Dieter Senghaas and his followers as well as those areas that we consider fruitful for future research. We begin our reflections on the role of trade, followed by industrialization, and finally inequality.