''The Industrial Revolution was a more profound discontinuity than historians of technology generally acknowledge. In the late eighteenth century, British capitalists developed technologies that depended not only on ingenuity applied to nature, but also on global market prices of embodied labor and other biophysical resources. From this point on, most technological innovations have been contingent on asymmetric flows of resources in the colonial and neo-colonial world-system—that is, ecologically unequal exchange. Such asymmetric physical flows are the result of global differences in the prices of labor, land, materials, energy, and other resources, but to this day remain invisible to mainstream economics. In not acknowledging the reliance of modern technologies on such flows, we tend to think that their only social implications are in terms of downstream consequences, while ignoring that the very existence of those technologies is a manifestation of an abysmally unequal world order''.

Alf Hornborg