A history of the global south

So I'm in Glasgow, a really working class city, and our neighborhood has like the plaza of the people and stuff in it.  And we go into a little book shop nearby one of our days there.

And it's run by get this a union organizer who in his spare time decided there wasn't a good leftist bookshop around so he'd run one, basically breaking even on the poor side of town and they had everything from books on the Scottish working class football team to Marxist pamphlets to scholarly chronicles.

I picked up a book which seemed pretty scholarly and I just finished it bc I had to leave it behind. Fav quotes:

-What does the South have?... The answer is obvious, but too often overlooked : the energy of the people.

This one just reminded me a lot of a thing I've felt a lot traveling in the third world. Like wow these people lack everything. The only thing there's a surplus of is people. So like if you need intelligence, or hard working labor, or energy, or creative solutions to random problems, definitely come here there's an oversupply of that. Everything else, under supplied.

About the slums: - - They will tell you that they are secure in their neighborhood because everyone knows everyone else, no outsider can enter without someone noticing the person, and at times of need most people come out to help. Gadgets like CCTV cameras cannot enhance their sense of security.  What they want is secure housing, a place where they do not need to worry about the municipality's demolition squads, or the designs of a builder wanting to redevelop the land on which they have lived for decades.  No one speaks of that kind of security.

I thought that was interesting on its own terms but also in how we think about security. Like my favorite line from grapes of wrath - And money that could have been spent on food was spent on poison and money that could have been spent on food was spent on fences and the salaries of the guards and rifles and the grapes of wrath kept growing, ripening on the vines.

But like what makes you unsafe depends so much on your circumstances.

He had some other interesting more general ideas as well,  about the third world/ developing world as initially this very optimistic movement as opposed to a stand in for lots of poor people.

Or intellectual property as core to the issue of development, because third world nations can't catch up without being able to more quickly produce and replicate technology.

And the importance of Nyerere as an international figure.

And what the international standard for currency exchange is. He argues the dollar is the new gold which protects the dollar from inflation.

And he was a left wing author capable of seeing left wing and right wing populist movements both as populist movements.

It was also interesting to read his book, with a southern hemisphere left leaning bias, so soon after my African history, with a euro centric Centre right bias so soon after each other because they treat some of the same time periods and figures.

And the benefit of reading left wing bias texts, even if you don't buy any of their prescriptions, is that they treat with ordinary people in their discussion at all. You can read a whole centre right book and never hear anyone but a world leader mentioned. So there was a mine of interesting facts and statistics just dealing with, percentage of people in rural areas, in slums, living in absolute poverty, how much hunger grew or shrank in different time periods, world equality indices, indigenous movements, etc. Which gives you really good and interesting information that can sometimes be leapfrogged right over.