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 is a sweeping indictment of the global economic order that systematically dismantles the comfortable narrative of "development" -- the story that rich countries are rich because they are more advanced, and poor countries simply need to catch up with a bit of aid. Drawing on his childhood in Swaziland, his fieldwork with World Vision, and years of academic research at the London School of Economics, Hickel constructs an alternative account: global poverty is not a natural condition but a political creation, manufactured over five centuries of colonial extraction, forced market integration, and institutional coercion.

The book opens by demolishing the statistical sleight-of-hand behind development's success narrative. Hickel shows how the World Bank's international poverty line ($1.25/day) is set so low as to be meaningless -- a threshold at which children still face a 60 percent chance of being underweight. Measured at a more realistic $5/day line, the global poverty headcount rises to 4.3 billion people and has been growing, not shrinking. The hunger statistics are similarly manipulated: the FAO revised its methodology in 2012 to make the numbers look better, and its definition of hunger only captures caloric deprivation lasting over a year at levels inadequate even for a sedentary lifestyle. Meanwhile, the inequality gap between rich and poor countries has roughly tripled since 1960.

Parts Two and Three form the book's formidable historical core. Hickel traces the origins of the divide back to Columbus, through the silver mines of Potosi, the Atlantic slave trade, the enclosure movement in England, the colonial devastation of India (where 30 million people starved during British-imposed famines in the late 19th century), the scramble for Africa, and the US-backed coups that overthrew democratically elected leaders across the global South during the Cold War -- from Mosaddegh in Iran to Allende in Chile. This is not simply a catalogue of crimes; Hickel weaves these episodes into a structural argument about how the global economic system was deliberately designed to channel wealth from periphery to core.

The "new colonialism" chapters are perhaps the most devastating. Hickel explains how the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s -- triggered by reckless lending by Western banks and the Volcker Shock's interest rate hikes -- was weaponised through structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and World Bank. These programmes forced developing countries to cut social spending, privatise public assets, and liberalise their economies, reversing the developmentalist gains of the 1960s and 1970s. The result was catastrophic: per capita income growth in the global South plunged from 3.2 percent during the developmentalist era to 0.7 percent under structural adjustment, and more than 1 billion people were added to the ranks of the poor.

Hickel extends this analysis to the World Trade Organization, showing how its "level playing field" rhetoric masks a system rigged in favour of rich countries that developed their own industries behind high tariff walls. He documents how tax havens -- centred on the City of London and its network of British overseas territories -- drain over $1 trillion annually from developing countries, eleven times the amount of aid they receive. Land grabs, financial speculation on food prices, and the disproportionate costs of climate change falling on the global South complete the picture of ongoing extraction.

The final chapters pivot from diagnosis to prescription. Hickel calls for debt cancellation, democratisation of global governance institutions, fair trade rules that give developing countries genuine policy space, a global minimum wage, and the dismantling of tax havens. But his most radical argument is reserved for the very end: that the growth imperative itself -- the obsession with GDP as a measure of progress -- is incompatible with ecological survival. Drawing on degrowth economics, he argues that rich countries must actively reduce their material consumption to free ecological space for the global South, while replacing GDP with measures like the Genuine Progress Indicator. He closes with a hopeful meditation on regenerative farming as both a climate solution and a symbol of the kind of thinking required -- rooted in care rather than extraction.

The book's strength lies in its ability to connect centuries of history into a coherent systemic analysis without losing the human thread. Hickel writes with moral clarity and rhetorical force, making complex economic arguments accessible without oversimplifying them. If there is a limitation, it is that the solutions chapters, while compelling, necessarily sketch rather than fully develop their proposals. But that is perhaps the nature of a book whose primary task is to shatter a dominant myth -- and on that count, The Divide succeeds powerfully.

Reviewed 2026-04-09

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