Description:

For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich countries and poor countries.

We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It's a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world's most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?

Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined.

What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn't just exist, it has been created.

Poor...

For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich countries and poor countries.

We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?

Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined.

What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.

Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world.

Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change.

Review

Jason Hickel's The Divide opens with a line that reads less like an argument than a verdict: "Poverty doesn't just exist, it has been created." Most books about global inequality spend their pages debating which policies might best alleviate the problem, implicitly accepting that the problem itself is a kind of natural baseline from which we must gradually ascend. Hickel rejects that framing outright. The book that follows is a sustained attempt to show that the poverty of roughly 4.3 billion people is not a developmental lag or a failure of integration into the world economy, but the structural product of that integration — a five-century project of extraction, dispossession, and institutional rigging that continues, in mutated form, into the present. The Divide is polemical, historically ambitious, and deliberately uncomfortable. It is also, within the terms it sets for itself, difficult to dismiss.

The book belongs to a lineage that runs from dependency theory and world-systems analysis through the anti-imperialist political economy of figures like Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah, updated with twenty-first-century data on tax havens, land grabs, and climate emissions. Hickel, an anthropologist who grew up in Swaziland, writes with the conviction of someone who has seen the machinery from both the inside — he worked for World Vision, an aid organisation — and the outside. His central methodological move is to treat the official development narrative not as a framework to be refined but as an artifact to be deconstructed. That narrative, he argues, was invented in 1949 when a State Department functionary named Benjamin Hardy inserted a "Point Four" technical-assistance pledge into Harry Truman's inaugural address as a public-relations gambit for the first televised inauguration. The effect was to recast a history of colonial plunder as a story of generous assistance to societies that simply hadn't yet caught up.

Hickel's position is clearest in what he does with the statistics that undergird the "good news" story of global poverty reduction. The widely celebrated claim that the world has halved extreme poverty since 1990 rests, he demonstrates, on three statistical manoeuvres: switching from absolute numbers to proportions, choosing a 1990 baseline that captures the entirety of China's post-reform growth, and repeatedly rebasing the international poverty line downward in real terms. When the World Bank's own researchers acknowledged in 2000 that poverty was rising, then-president James Wolfensohn delivered a speech the following year claiming the opposite — a reversal made possible, Hickel argues, by a lowered poverty line. At a more honest threshold of $5 per day, roughly sixty per cent of humanity remains in poverty, and the absolute number has risen by about a billion since 1981. The effect is a kind of statistical jiu-jitsu: the institutions that set the terms of measurement also control the appearance of progress.

The book's historical core — Part Two — is where Hickel makes his most ambitious argument, and where readers sympathetic to his politics may still find themselves unsettled. His reconstruction of what Marx called "primitive accumulation" ranges from the silver mines of Potosí to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean to the English enclosure movement, threading them into a single story: European industrialisation was not an endogenous miracle but the product of a violent global extraction that freed labour from the land, supplied cheap raw materials, and generated the capital that financed the factory system. He cites figures that are, if accurate, staggering: 100 million kilograms of silver drained from Latin America between 1500 and 1800; 222 billion hours of slave labour in the United States; a calculation that the silver alone, compounded at five per cent interest, would be worth $165 trillion today. The same "improvement" logic was then exported: Ireland, India — where Hickel cites thirty million famine deaths — China during the Opium Wars, the Congo under Leopold II, where an estimated ten million died under the rubber regime, and South Africa, where the Natives Land Act of 1913 funnelled Africans into the mines.

Colonialism and imperialism have not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn from our territories. The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.

Hickel quotes Fanon here not as rhetorical decoration but as the book's operational thesis. His implication is that aid should be reframed not as charity but as repayment, and that the existing aid paradigm — some $128 billion annually — is dwarfed by the roughly $3 trillion in net annual outflows from poor countries to rich ones through debt service, illicit financial flows, and rigged trade terms. "It is delusional," he writes, "to believe that aid is a commensurate, let alone honest and meaningful, solution to this kind of problem. The aid paradigm allows rich countries and individuals to pretend to fix with one hand what they destroy with the other."

One of the book's most revealing chapters concerns the post-1945 developmentalist moment and its destruction. Hickel argues that the 1950s through the 1970s represented a genuine narrowing of the global income gap — per capita income in the global South grew at 3.2 per cent annually during the 1960s and 1970s, faster than Western industrialisation rates — driven by import substitution, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the demand for a New International Economic Order articulated through the G77. This convergence was crushed, he contends, by a coordinated Western counter-revolution: CIA-backed coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965–66, with an estimated 500,000 to one million killed), the Congo (1960, with Patrice Lumumba assassinated), Ghana (1966, removing Nkrumah), and Chile (1973, where Salvador Allende was killed and the Pinochet regime installed). Hickel characterises the Cold War framing of these interventions as "a kind of public-relations cover" for the defence of corporate interests — an argument that will strike some readers as reductive but that is anchored in the historical record of what each targeted government was doing: nationalising resources, imposing capital controls, redistributing land.

What makes The Divide more than a historical polemic is the detailed attention it gives to the institutional mechanisms through which contemporary extraction operates. The 1982 debt crisis, triggered when Paul Volcker raised US interest rates to twenty-one per cent and Mexico defaulted, becomes in Hickel's telling the pivot point through which the IMF was transformed from a Keynesian lender of last resort into a "global debt enforcer." Structural adjustment programmes — austerity, privatisation, liberalisation — were imposed as conditions for debt refinancing across the global South. The results, by Hickel's accounting: growth in the South fell to 0.7 per cent per year, sub-Saharan African poverty doubled, and 146 "IMF riots" erupted across thirty-nine countries by 1992. He frames this as a "spatial fix" for Western capitalism's overaccumulation crisis: US foreign investment returns rose from five per cent in 1975 to eleven per cent in 1990. Thomas Sankara, the assassinated president of Burkina Faso, supplies the chapter's devastating epigraph — "The debt cannot be repaid. If we don't repay, the lenders will not die. That is for sure. But if we do repay, we will die. That is also for sure." — and Hickel deploys it to argue that debt has functioned as a continuation of colonial extraction by financial means.

The subsequent chapters on trade and contemporary plunder are the book's most granular, and they contain some of its sharpest analysis. The transformation of GATT into the WTO represents, for Hickel, a structural coup against the policy sovereignty of developing countries. He draws explicitly on Ha-Joon Chang's "kicking away the ladder" thesis: all rich countries industrialised behind high tariff walls — the United States was "the most heavily protected economy in the world" from the 1860s through the 1930s — yet the WTO regime forbids developing countries from using the same tools. The TRIPS agreement, which extended patent protection "down to the level of the molecule itself," blocked Indian generic manufacturers from producing AIDS antiretrovirals at $350 per year, locking African patients out of drugs priced at $15,000 annually and contributing to what Hickel estimates as roughly ten million AIDS deaths before the 2003 public-health exception. Investor-state dispute settlement tribunals — more than five hundred cases filed, rising from fewer than ten per year in the 1990s to fifty-nine in 2012 — allow corporations to sue sovereign states in secret proceedings for regulations that reduce expected profits. Hickel calls this "a corporate coup d'état on an international scale," and the phrase, while dramatic, accurately describes the structural asymmetry of a system in which a Canadian company can extract a $15.6 million settlement from Mexico for an environmental regulation.

The chapter on twenty-first-century plunder documents three mechanisms that together dwarf aid flows many times over. Illicit financial outflows — mostly trade misinvoicing — amount to roughly $1.1 trillion annually from the global South. Tax havens, the British Virgin Islands foremost among them, host at least $21 to $32 trillion in private wealth, including an estimated $9 trillion from poor countries. Land grabs have claimed 162 million acres in roughly 1,500 transnational deals since 2000, two-thirds of them in Africa, on collectively held land without formal title. And the climate crisis — where rich industrial economies are responsible for seventy per cent of cumulative historical emissions yet bear only twelve per cent of the damages, while ninety-eight per cent of climate-related deaths occur in countries producing only two per cent of emissions — is, in Hickel's framing, colonial extraction by atmospheric means. The Paris Agreement's voluntary pledges sum to 2.7 to 3.7 degrees of warming, and the 1.5-degree budget is exhausted by roughly 2020. The implication is that gradualism is a form of denial.

The book's solutions chapters — "From Charity to Justice" and "The Necessary Madness of Imagination" — are where The Divide moves from diagnosis to prescription, and they are likely to be where many readers part company with Hickel, or at least begin to ask harder questions. The five structural interventions in Chapter 8 are individually compelling: WTO and TRIPS reform, ending rich-country agricultural subsidies, a global minimum wage set at fifty per cent of each country's median wage, closing tax havens and ending land grabs, and aggressive climate action including ending fossil fuel subsidies and keeping ninety-three per cent of known reserves in the ground. Hickel anchors each in existing movements — Jubilee debt cancellation, La Via Campesina's land-rights organising, the Tax Justice Network, Standing Rock — and the effect is to make them feel less like utopian wish lists and more like demands already under construction.

The difficulty arrives in Chapter 9, where Hickel argues that the planet cannot accommodate catch-up growth by the global South because rich countries already overshoot ecological capacity by roughly sixty per cent. The implication is radical: the global South should not pursue Western-style GDP growth, and the rich world must pursue managed degrowth. Hickel's critique of GDP is bracing — he quotes Joseph Stiglitz ("what we measure informs what we do. And if we're measuring the wrong thing, we're going to do the wrong thing") and David Attenborough ("anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist") — and his proposals are specific: replace GDP with the Genuine Progress Indicator, abolish the Dodge v. Ford shareholder-primacy doctrine, reform debt-based money creation along Chicago Plan lines, shorten the working week to thirty or even twenty hours, and introduce a basic income funded by land-value, financial-transaction, and carbon taxes. The degrowth pathway he outlines, drawing on climate scientist Kevin Anderson's scenarios, requires rich countries to cut emissions at roughly ten per cent per year and reach zero by 2035 — efficiency and clean technology can deliver perhaps four per cent annually, leaving six per cent in straightforward production-and-consumption downscaling.

Hickel is at his most persuasive here when he grounds alternatives in existing experiments: Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index, Ecuador and Bolivia's constitutional embedding of sumak kawsay (the Quechua concept of living well in harmony), India's ecological swaraj movements practising direct democracy over resources, the Rojava experiment in northern Syria. These are not abstractions. But the transition from enclave experiments to systemic transformation is where the book's analytical engine — so powerful in its historical and institutional critique — begins to spin without quite engaging the terrain. Hickel is asking the global South to forgo a growth path while the rich world, which created the ecological crisis through precisely that path, is asked to voluntarily degrow. The politics of this are extraordinarily fraught, and Hickel's invocation of Sankara's call for "the courage to turn your back on the old formulas" does not fully address the objection that the old formulas have, for some, delivered tangible improvements in life expectancy, literacy, and material security that alternative models have not yet demonstrated at scale.

There are other limitations worth noting. The book's treatment of gender, despite acknowledging that ninety per cent of the 25,000 Swazi textile workers retrenched after the 2005 WTO quota abolition were women, never develops gender as a sustained analytical lens. The postwar Keynesian compromise, Hickel acknowledges, "worked mostly for people who conformed to a particular norm — white, male and straight" and depended on unpaid reproductive labour, but this observation sits at the edge of the analysis rather than restructuring it. Similarly, education and healthcare appear primarily as casualties of structural adjustment rather than as domains with their own political economies. And Hickel's rhetorical strategy — which treats transparency as a moral solvent that will dissolve the structural arrangements he critiques once people see them clearly — underplays the ideological depth of the consensus he is challenging. The book is strongest when it documents mechanisms and weakest when it assumes that exposure of those mechanisms will generate the political will to dismantle them.

Within the library's intellectual geography, The Divide occupies a distinctive intersection. It draws on the Marxist tradition of primitive accumulation critique, the anti-imperialist political economy of Fanon and Nkrumah, the dependency theory of Raúl Prebisch and Eduardo Galeano, and the world-systems analysis of core-periphery relations, while integrating them with ecological economics and degrowth thought in ways those earlier traditions did not fully anticipate. It is, in this sense, a work of synthesis — but a synthesis pushed toward a political horizon that many of its intellectual ancestors would not have recognised, one in which the developmentalist ambition of the Bandung generation is itself questioned. Hickel quotes Fanon — "Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different" — to argue that catching up with Europe is the wrong goal, a position that places him in tension with the developmentalist strand of the anti-colonial tradition he otherwise draws upon.

The book's cross-references trace its intellectual debts precisely: the critique of Rostow's "non-communist manifesto" stages of growth, the engagement with Jeffrey Sachs's aid evangelism, the deployment of Ha-Joon Chang's historical work on protectionism, the reliance on Naomi Klein's shock doctrine thesis for the structural adjustment period, and the grounding of the degrowth pathway in Kevin Anderson's climate modelling. These are not passing citations but the scaffolding of the argument. Hickel writes as a participant in a live debate, not a dispassionate surveyor, and his willingness to name adversaries — the World Bank, the IMF, Transparency International's corruption rankings, the celebrity-philanthropist complex — gives the book a prosecutorial energy that is part of its rhetorical power.

What, then, is The Divide for? It is not a balanced textbook, and it does not pretend to be one. It is an intervention designed to make the standard development narrative uninhabitable for anyone who has read it. Readers who come to it already convinced that global poverty is primarily a problem of insufficient market integration or inadequate aid will find their assumptions systematically dismantled. Readers on the left who share Hickel's premises may still find themselves unsettled by the degrowth conclusion, particularly its implications for the global South. The book's most lasting contribution may be less its specific policy prescriptions — nineteen of them, enumerated in the closing chapters — than the framework it provides for understanding why those prescriptions are necessary: a framework in which inequality is not a gap to be closed but a relation that must be restructured, and in which the charity paradigm is not a flawed solution but part of the problem. "Charity degrades and demoralises," Hickel quotes Oscar Wilde. The point is not that kindness is suspect but that a system that demands charity to manage the misery it produces is a system that must be changed rather than managed. The Divide is an argument that the change must be structural, and that it must begin by acknowledging that poverty has been made, and can therefore be unmade.

Notable Quotes

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant.

Harry Truman's 1949 inaugural address -- the speech that launched the modern 'development' narrative as a PR gimmick, reframing global inequality as a technical problem rather than a political one — development narrative, propaganda, Cold War origins

The morally relevant comparison of existing poverty is not with historical benchmarks but with present possibilities: How much of this poverty is really unavoidable today? By this standard, our generation is doing worse than any in human history.

Thomas Pogge's reframing of the poverty debate -- arguing that the real measure of moral failure is not whether poverty has declined from some past baseline, but how much needless poverty persists given our current wealth and capacity — poverty measurement, moral philosophy, inequality

There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.

John Adams quote used by Hickel to open the chapter on how the Third World debt crisis became the most powerful tool of Western economic control over the global South — debt, imperialism, economic coercion

They lifted up the gold as if they were monkeys, with expressions of joy, as if it put new life into them and lit their hearts. As if it were certainly something for which they yearn with great thirst. Their bodies fatten on it and they hunger violently for it. They crave gold like hungry swine.

A Nahuatl text describing the Spanish conquistadors' reaction to gold, quoted by Hickel to illustrate the rapacious extractive logic that drove European colonialism from its earliest moments — colonialism, extraction, indigenous perspective

The debt cannot be repaid. If we don't repay, the lenders will not die. That is for sure. But if we do repay, we will die. That is also for sure.

Thomas Sankara's 1987 speech at the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, challenging the postcolonial debt order. Three months later he was assassinated in a coup widely believed to have been backed by France — debt resistance, African sovereignty, neocolonialism, political courage

Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1,000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medicine and your bag of tricks to governments and to people in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind's eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving people.

Davidson Budhoo's 1988 resignation letter to IMF managing director Michel Camdessus, from a senior economist who spent twelve years implementing structural adjustment programmes across the global South — institutional critique, moral conscience, structural adjustment, IMF

In order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

Cecil Rhodes explaining imperialism as a pressure valve for domestic class conflict in Britain, quoted by Hickel to show how colonialism served as a 'spatial fix' for the internal contradictions of industrial capitalism — imperialism, class conflict, spatial fix, colonialism

Countries don't go bust.

Citibank CEO Walter Wriston's infamous justification for reckless lending to developing countries in the 1970s -- a phrase that encapsulated the hubris of 'go-go banking' and the predatory loan-pushing that led directly to the Third World debt crisis — debt crisis, reckless lending, financial hubris

Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth, there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.

Henry Wallich, former US Federal Reserve Board member, revealing the political logic of growth ideology -- Hickel inverts this to argue that if growth is a substitute for equality, then equality is a substitute for growth — GDP growth, inequality, degrowth, political economy

Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.

David Attenborough quote used by Hickel to crystallize the absurdity of the exponential growth imperative that governs our global economic system — degrowth, ecological limits, economics critique

Our economic system and our planetary system are at war. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature.

Naomi Klein, quoted by Hickel to frame the fundamental incompatibility between capitalism's growth imperative and ecological survival — climate crisis, capitalism, ecological limits, degrowth

There's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt -- above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

David Graeber's insight on the moral power of debt, used by Hickel to explain why global South countries remain trapped in debt servitude despite having repaid their loans many times over — debt, morality, power relations, ideology

People find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

Oscar Wilde on charity, quoted by Hickel to argue that the development aid industry not only fails to address the structural causes of poverty but actively obscures them, allowing the system that produces poverty to persist — charity critique, structural analysis, development industry

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

Thoreau quote used to open Hickel's solutions chapter, framing the core argument that addressing poverty requires changing the system that produces it rather than ameliorating its symptoms — systemic change, charity critique, root causes

You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future.

Thomas Sankara, quoted to open Hickel's final chapter on imagining economic alternatives beyond the growth paradigm — revolution, imagination, political courage, alternatives

We believe that providing clean water and sanitation services is a real business opportunity.

A World Bank official's response when asked in 2008 why the Bank supports water privatisation despite evidence it harms the poor -- encapsulating how the Bank treats basic human needs as profit-making ventures — privatisation, World Bank, water rights, commodification

What we measure informs what we do. And if we're measuring the wrong thing, we're going to do the wrong thing.

Joseph Stiglitz on GDP, quoted by Hickel to argue that our obsession with GDP growth as a measure of progress incentivises environmental destruction and inequality while ignoring genuine human well-being — GDP critique, measurement, degrowth, well-being

Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe.

Frantz Fanon writing in the early 1960s as colonialism collapsed, urging the global South to chart an alternative path rather than replicate Europe's destructive model of development — decolonization, alternative development, anti-imperialism

The arc of history bends towards justice. But it won't bend on its own.

Hickel's adaptation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous words, used to close the preface -- asserting that overcoming global inequality requires active political struggle, not passive faith in progress — justice, political agency, hope, struggle

No one colonises innocently.

Aime Cesaire's epigraph to the chapter on the colonial origins of poverty, a condensation of the argument that colonialism was not a civilising mission but a deliberate process of extraction and destruction — colonialism, moral responsibility, extraction