THE PROMETHEAN VISION 125 no way that absolute costs of production of these could be at all defined for the advanced countries. If absolute costs could not be defined, neither could relative cost. A statement like "Britain enjoyed a comparative cost advantage in cotton textiles whereas India had a comparative cost advantage in jute/tea/teak and this explains the historical pattern of specialisation and exchange where India exported primary crops and Britain exported manufactures" is a nonsensical proposition, for whereas comparative cost for India can be defined since it produces all commodities, the comparative cost of cloth relative to the other goods for Britain cannot even be defined since jute/tea/ teak are not producible there. Trade was not mutually beneficial: it certainly benefited the metropoles which could acquire goods it could never produce, but in many cases it precipitated falling food availability and even famine in the colonisd countries as they were made to divert their resources particularly land, to metropolitan needs. We have argued elsewhere that exactly the same structural features of colonialism are being replicated in the present era of loan-conditional liberalisation. The basic point is that the resource endowments, productive capacity and the range of the agricultural output vector of the advanced and colonised lands were and continue to be, very different. A great part of the motivation for subjugating and exploiting the agricultural and mineral endowment- wise richer populations of tropical and sub-tropical areas derived from this fact. It is not an accident that to this day trade theory ignores this and continues to pretend that "land" can be talked of as a homogeneous "factor of production", the same in productive capacity whether it is located in Iowa, Kamchatka, Iraq or Vietnam. The drive behind colonialism and imperialism was to acquire resources, raw materials and consumption goods for which no adequate equivalent could be supplied no matter how much manufactures were rammed down the throats of colonised consumers. It was therefore necessarily based on unilateral transfers from the third world to the first. Net transfers from the third world to the first continue in the present era, of neocolonialism, which has seen an increase in the inequality between nations. A theory of trade in which both metropolitan countries on the one hand and historically colonised or present -day developing countries on rhe other, are treated as being symmetrically placed, is a theory of what we would call "formally open economies". Received trade theory deals only with formally open economies, as do all extant