Western Empires. Christianity and the Inequalities between the West and the Rest, 1500-2010

Title: Western Empires
Subtitle: Christianity and the Inequalities between the West and the Rest, 1500-2010
Author: Sampie Terreblanche
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Penguin Books
Cape Town, South Africa 2014
ISBN 9780143539070 / ISBN 978-0-14-353907-0
EU-Import: Namibiana Buchdepot
Hardcover, dustjacket, 16 x 24 cm, 600 pages

About: Western Empires. Christianity and the Inequalities between the West and the Rest, 1500-2010

The reality of inequality has moved to the centre of the political stage at both global and at national level. To understand the problem, history has made a welcome and long overdue return to economic analysis. Acemoglu & Robinson in Why Nations Fail (2012),Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2013) and now (2014) Sampie Terreblanche, on the roots of inequality between the West and the Rest, are asking the big questions and digging deep into the past to explore how we have come to where we are.

Sampie Terreblanche takes a critical look at how social and economic inequality became entrenched in the current world order dominated by Western powers since the 1500s. Western Empires, Christianity and the Inequalities between the West and the Rest 1500-2010, details how five centuries of Western empire-building shaped our society into the deeply unequal and gratuitously unjust place that it is today. Sampie Terreblanche shows how growing income inequality, environmental damage and increasingly higher financial market risks have impaired our ability to establish a society built on a long-term and sustainable developmental model.

Sampie Terreblanche (1933-2018) obtained his DPhil in Economics from the University of Stellenbosch in 1963. He also attended Harvard University and, at twenty-three, began teaching at the University of the Orange Free State. He spent the lion's share of his teaching career at the University of Stellenbosch, where he retired as Professor of Economics in 1995 and was appointed as Professor Emeritus the following year. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of the Free State in 2005 and by the University of Pretoria in 2013. Professor Terreblanche participated in numerous international conferences and was hosted by the governments of Belgium, Britain and the USA. He was a Visiting Professor at Princeton, Columbia and the University of Santa Cruz, California.

In the 1970s, Terreblanche sat on the seminal Theron Commission into chronic poverty of the coloured community of the Western Cape. He has been an increasingly vocal critic, first of the apartheid government and then the democratic South African government because of the failure of the state to address inequality. Terreblanche is the author of twelve books, including Politieke ekonomie en sosiale welvaart (Political Economics and Social Prosperity) (1986) and A History of Inequality in South Africa: 1952-2002 (2002). He has also written more than thirty articles for journals and chapters in books, and hundreds of articles and letters in the consumer press.

Content: Western Empires. Christianity and the Inequalities between the West and the Rest, 1500-2010

Author's note
Part I: WESTERN MARITIME EMPIRES DIVIDE THE WORLD INTO A RICH WESTERN WORLD AND A POOR RESTERN WORLD
Reasons for the rise of the Western world in the centuries after 1500
Power configurations and the periodisation of Western empires (1500-2010)
Profiling Western maritime empires and understanding their unique characteristics
Western empires and the dynamics of social and imperial power over the past 500 years
Western industrialisation and the Great Divergence between the West and the Rest (1820-1950)
Part II: THE FIRST PATTERN OF WESTERN EMPIRES: EMPIRES OF PLUNDERERS, SLAVE TRADERS AND SETTLEMENT COLONIALISTS 1530-1830
The first period of deep systemic chaos: The Church in retreat, the yoke of feudalism breaks, two Europes
The systemic period of the Iberian and the Catholic empires 1530-1630
The systemic period of the Dutch Empire 1648-1713
The systemic period of the first British Empire 1713-1883
Part III: THE SECOND PATTERN OF WESTERN EMPIRES: EMPIRES OF EXPLOITATION AND LABOUR REPRESSION (1820-1950)
The second period of deep systemic chaos: Revolutionary upheavals against the ancien regime (1775-1820)
The systemic period of the second British Empire (1846-1914/31)
The origins of the third world during the second pattern of Western empires (1820-1945)
Part IV: THE THIRD PATTERN OF WESTERN EMPIRES: THE PERNICIOUS DRAINING OF THE RESTERN WORLD BY MULTIPLE AMERICAN-LED EMPIRES AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR
The third period of deep systemic chaos during the Thirty-One Years War (1914-1945)
Anti-systemic revolts against Western empires and decolonisation in the twentieth century
The multiple American post-colonial empires that inconspicuously disrupted, exploited and drained the Rest of the world after the Second World War
Part V: CAPITALISM AND GROWING DOMESTIC INEQUALITIES DURING THE PAST 500 YEARS
Successive politico-economic systems and the almost uninterrupted dominance of 'capitalisms' over 'democracies' since 1500