Where it lapsed, in southern slaveholding colonies, a long period of economic backwardness resulted.

ECONOMIST: Creating economic wealth

Mr Morales has a historic opportunity to use Bolivia's gas to overcome the country's backwardness.

ECONOMIST: Energy in South America

Still less do they associate the country with chaos and backwardness, or with futile wartime heroics.

ECONOMIST: Poland

He points out that, aside from some pockets of backwardness, the whole world has been getting much richer.

NEWYORKER: After America

Britain's backwardness may reinforce itself: if there is little demand for convergence, British consumers may get left behind in a converging world.

ECONOMIST: Battle of the boxes

It wasn't mathematical backwardness that led geographers away from this approach but the conviction that to rely too heavily on maths was a dead end.

ECONOMIST: Knowing your place

On the other hand, Mexico's governments have often seemed embarrassed by living Indians, whose backwardness is seen as a blot on the country's record of modernisation.

ECONOMIST: The Mexicans treated as aliens in their own country

If the will of the people called for high double-digit unemployment and economic backwardness, Europe's democratic governments could carry on supplying both quite happily, global market or no.

ECONOMIST: What is Europe?

Indeed he strongly suggests that it is only due to a combination of corruption and backwardness that the Kremlin considers the US any sort of a threat at all: if only they could see the world as he sees it, the Russian general staff would see that the US is really quite a well-adjusted and reasonable country.

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