Neo-colonialism continues to run rampant, as a few nations continue to grow rich at the expense of the rest. Traditional doctrine, resting on Ricardo’s theory of comparative costs, has dominated investigation of this problem for a century-and-a-half, and has proven itself incapable of providing any answer to the inequality that arises as a result of free trade within a global capitalist system.

Arghiri Emmanuel’s pathbreaking study, now a classic, upends the conventional assumptions, subjecting the phenomena of international trade to critical scrutiny, both systematically and with logical rigor. It integrates the theory of international value (and unequal exchange) into the general theory of value as propounded by the classical economists and Marx.

Emmanuel’s