Meanwhile the economic development of Western countries, including the former rulers of South Asia, has been proceeding faster and more steadily than it did in the troubled period between the two world wars. Indeed with the major exceptions of Britain and the United States the national product of Western countries has been rising least as fast and as steadily as did in the half century before the First World War. when the colonial power system was reaching the ultimate limits of its geographical expansion, This rapid economic growth bluntly contradicts the belief that the critics of imperialism, following the theories of Hobhouse. Hilferding Luxemburg and Lenin and the supporters of imperialism shared in common, particularly in Britain and even in recent decades, namely that a metropolitan county was boud to suffer a decline in its standard of living if it lost its empire. Certainly today it never occurs to anyone to ascribe the relative economic stagnation of Britain or the United States in recent years to the loss of colonial possessions. The historical co-incidence of these three momentous trends of change has broadly determined the present day pattern of international relationships. It has fashioned the international setting within which the economic problems of the newly independent states of South Asia have acquired political importance in the world. One obvious feature of this setting was the trend towards a polarization of international relationships within the magnetic field created by tension and rivalry between the Communist bloc and most of the Western Power. That not all inter-state relationships have become polarized in this way is due partly to developing uncertainties and differences within these two major power blocs but more to the attractions of a policy of nonalignment for a number of the newly independent countries.