Also gotta remember about the Irish Potato Famine where the English just literally stood by and said "well yeah that's just how it is" due to "free market" reasons. (In fact, they made everything worse by demanding that Ireland continue to export wheat)
The Irish Potato Famine killed approximately 1 million people due to "free market above all" ideology.
Somebody let Spain know they're off the hook for all the colonizing, slavery and genocide since they hadn't invented capitalism yet!
“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
Additionally, check out Willam Blum's "Killing Hope" (pdf link), and/or "America's Deadliest Export", by same (pdf link).
I'd argue that it was the huge boats capable of crossing oceans, first built around the 14th century, which could comfortably sail around Africa. Look at the borders of the Portugese Empire, doing very similar stuff to what England was doing, but apparently that's different somehow? It's the boats that enabled them to become imperialists over huge distances.
This place is going downhill.
Due to Ukrainian anti-soviet (nazi) influence in 1990s, the famine was upgraded to a genocide for Ukraine (Holomodor). "Stalin bad" is a welcome narrative for US/CIA.
There was a genuine global famine at the time, and the US demanded Stalin pay USSR debt in food. Most of those exports went through Ukraine, and so Ukraine had some agency in its own famine levels. Ukraine's per capita food allotment was higher than most USSR states including non-nazi/non-antagonist Kazahkstan which had more deaths but did not declare famine a genocide.
The complex politics, like Syria's famine/drought that sowed the seeds for ISIS/Israel takeover, meant not making everyone happy. Bourgeois farmers outside of Ukraine, the Kulaks, wanted extortion, famine market, pricing, and Stalin wanted to pay them less.
The Irish Potato famine, was an oligarchist driven famine, the US would approve Stalin of having chosen. There was plenty of Irish potato production, but the prices were too high for the Irish to pay, so they were exported more. Stalin's "crime" was fighting extortion pricing.
Psh, Portugal was doing it before it was cool.
