Today’s emerging powers are not worthy successors to their anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist ancestors. The countries of the South control a growing share of wealth, which is only proper, but its distribution is so inequitable that income differences are even greater in South Africa and China than in the US. The money is more often spent on buying western prime assets and luxury goods than on improving the living conditions and health of the Indian, Chinese, Arab or African people.
This is a return to the age of the robber barons. At the end of the 19th century, powerful and notoriously rapacious industrial dynasties rose in America, including those of John D Rockefeller, J P Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt, which gradually took over from the old European families in oil, transport and banking.
looking beyond borders 