reason, one must adopt an attitude of systematic skepticism toward theories about the dynamics of the Third World. The predictions from such theories suggest strategies, e.g. for economic planning, but one finds very often that the predictions are merely restatements of the assumptions originally chosen for a model that has not really been tested. The assumptions themselves turn out to be epigrams of imperialism. So economic development can become a way of phrasing imperialist strategy, not an alternative to imperialism. Few of us believe in the possibility of a perfectly objective science or history, so the foregoing argument should not be, in principle, unpalatable. If it gives some discomfort, this may be a symptom of the difficulty we have in swallowing the proposition that our lack of objectivity is not a random error, nor even a class or national bias, but a systematic tendency of Western thought, tied to the common Western imperialism. The tendency is rather slight at the level of individual research: an unconscious value-loading of adjectives; a not-absolutely-random sample; a project selected because research funds are available for this sort of thing and not that. The cumulative effect, like the Coriolus [sic] force and the solar wind, is no less powerful for being unnoticed. Hypotheses that clash with imperialism simply do not rise to the status of paradigms or truisms. Hence, over the decades and centuries, we maintain a body of belief that is truly the ethnoscience of the Western world; not, as it claims to be, the universal science and history of the world as a whole.
V
We can now compare the geographic models of imperialism which emerge from Western and Third- World systems of belief. I have said nothing thus far about the content of these ethnoscientific systems. Instead I gave an elaborate methodological fanfare, the aim of which was to raise some doubts in advance about the seeming self-evidence of the one set of beliefs and the seeming improbability of the other. I will discuss these beliefs only to the extent that each underlies or enters into its respective geographic model, but their basic form will emerge quite clearly as we proceed. I speak of the models as “geographic” because space and resources are perhaps their main dimensions. They span some 500 years of human