history, wealth, outsourcing, colonialismHave wondered this for quite a while. My thinking is this: Colonialism was pursued because (among other things) it helped increase the wealth of the colonising nation. The colony would become a producer of raw goods, which would then be processed in the colonising nation and exported to the colony. This produces a net inflow of wealth into the colonising nation. This has the secondary effect of
Fast forwarding this about 50 years, can these imbalances created by colonialism said to be a cause of outsourcing?
PS: Can anybody tag these questions with “outsourcing” and “colonialism”?
I don’t think it needs to be as complex as that. India happens to have English as its primary means of internal communication because England was their coloniser (otherwise it might have been Portuguese, with their earlier toe-hold in Goa).
With their large English-speaking population, and low labour-cost, India was - therefore - poised to take advantage of requirements for same-language outsourcing to a low-cost base. This works well for services and software in other English-speaking ex-colonies like Egypt, Australia, the US, South Africa, etc. allowing them all to trade well together.
Ditto for Latin America and outsourcing for Portugal and Spain.
China, however, was never a colony (Hong Kong aside) but has become an outsource destination for manufacturing where common language skills (of the workers) is less necessary.
I would say that colonialism, by creating common language skills, has created favourable conditions for the outsourcing of certain types of services rather than that colonialism, as an objective itself, created the conditions for outsourcing.
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