You’d like to think, wouldn’t you, that countries about to embark on their ‘industrial revolutions’ could learn alot from what went wrong in the past. But the very nature of the forces behind it – globalisation, capitalism, post-colonialism – doesn’t really give you much hope. I can’t help but think, that at the very least it’s all an environmental disaster waiting to happen. But I’ve always been a bit of a doom monger…

I wonder if industrialisation has to be like this. Presumably at some point various African countries will undergo the rapid change and rise in living standards that characterise industrial revolutions, we can only hope that they will manage to do it without the risk and conflict that seem to characterise such episodes in other countries.