The Resurgence Of Mid-Latitude Attitudes

14 Pages 3530 Words

since 1492. The stage was set for the consumer age to begin.
In Britain, William Lever founded his empire on Sunlight soap in the 1880s and his company became the first to use packaging to sell its products. In order to feed its demand for natural resources, especially vegetable oil for margarine, he went abroad and developed plantation economies in Africa. When Lever Bros. amalgamated with a Dutch company, UNI, it became Unilever, the first multinational food company. Its exploitation of underdeveloped countries in Africa, Asia, and South America was the blueprint for what is known as neocolonialism.
This was the second major stage in capitalism’s evolution: the first was industrialization, and we are now witnessing the third: globalization. Under neocolonialism the underdeveloped world was used as a source of cheap raw materials for markets in Western Europe and North America, and under globalization the whole world becomes a market. Capital is switched between nations and continents wherever the rate of profit is higher. Older industr...