In looking for examples of a power imbalance between the strong and the weak, the best examples are the empires such as the Romans, the Mongols under Genghis Khan, the British Raj etc.  Fortunately (for our purposes only), the British Raj happened relatively recently, and is well documented.  So let us examine the relationship between the strong (the British) and the weak (Indians as an example) under the British Raj.

It surprises most Indians that India did very poorly under the British ~ a reaction that always surprises me.  By any key metric that measures the health of a people, India took a huge leap backwards under the British.  Life expectancy, for instance, decreased from an average of about 32 years in 1757 (which marks the beginning of the British Raj) to an average of about 25 years in 1947 (the end of the British Raj, it is now about 70 years).  The decrease in life expectancy was brought about by multiple factors, but a major reason was the famines that seemed to occur with almost clockwork precision under the British Raj.  "Late Victorian Holocausts" is the moniker now given to those disasters that were almost certainly man-made...all of them (the moniker comes from an excellent book by the same name).

There were about 10 famines in India in the 1000 years prior to the arrival of the British.  Under British rule, there were 10 famines in 190 years, with about 80 million people that died, and some of those famines lasted for multiple years (and yes, those numbers are not typos).  Since the British left, there has been 0 famines in 60 years (with one near miss in 1966).  (As an aside, the Chinese experience is very similar).

So let us delve deeper into the relationship between the strong (the British) and the weak (the Indians).  From "Late Victorian Holocausts", (an excellent book by Mike Davis)

The British rulers of Madras had every reason to be apprehensive. The life-giving southwest monsoon had already failed much of southern and central India the previous summer. The Madras Observatory would record only 6.3 inches of precipitation for all of 1876 in contrast to the annual average of 27.6 inches during the previous decade. The fate of millions now hung on the timely arrival of generous winter rains. Despite Ellis's warning, the governor of Madras, Richard Grenville, the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, who was a greenhorn to India and its discontents, sailed away on a leisurely tour of the Andaman Islands, Burma and Ceylon. When he finally reached Colombo, he found urgent cables detailing the grain riots sweeping the so-called Ceded Districts of Kurnool, Cuddapah and Bellary in the wake of another monsoon failure. Popular outbursts against impossibly high prices were likewise occurring in the Deccan districts of the neighboring Bombay Presidency, especially in Ahmednagar and Sholapur. Having tried to survive on roots while awaiting the rains, multitudes of peasants and laborers were now on the move, fleeing a slowly dying countryside.

   As the old-hands at Fort St. George undoubtedly realized, the semi-arid interior of India was primed for disaster. The worsening depression in world trade had been spreading misery and igniting discontent throughout cotton-exporting districts of the Deccan, where in any case forest enclosures and the displacement of gram by cotton had greatly reduced local food security. The traditional system of household and village grain reserves regulated by complex networks of patrimonial obligation had been largely supplanted since the Mutiny by merchant inventories and the cash nexus. Although rice and wheat production in the rest of India (which now included bonanzas of coarse rice from the recently conquered Irrawaddy delta) had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England. Londoners were in effect eating India's bread. "It seems an anomaly," wrote a troubled observer, "that, with her famines on hand, India is able to supply food for other parts of the world."

   There were other "anomalies." The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends. Moreover, British antipathy to price control invited anyone who had the money to join in the frenzy of grain speculation. "Besides regular traders," a British official reported from Meerut in late 1876, "men of all sorts embarked in it who had or could raise any capital; jewelers and cloth dealers pledging their stocks, even their wives' jewels, to engage in business and import grain." Buckingham, not a free-trade fundamentalist, was appalled by the speed with which modern markets accelerated rather than relieved the famine:

The rise [of prices] was so extraordinary, and the available supply, as compared with well-known requirements, so scanty that merchants and dealers, hopeful of enormous future gains, appeared determined to hold their stocks for some indefinite time and not to part with the article which was becoming of such unwonted value. It was apparent to the Government that facilities for moving grain by the rail were rapidly raising prices everywhere, and that the activity of apparent importation and railway transit, did not indicate any addition to the food stocks of the Presidency ... retail trade up-country was almost at standstill. Either prices were asked which were beyond the means of the multitude to pay, or shops remained entirely closed.

The emphasis in the above text is mine.  The key points that this incident teaches us is that:
(1) During a disaster, the strong will exploit the weak.  Hence, Indian farmers were forced to make bread for Londoners, but would end up starving themselves.
(2) The temples of globalization (railways and telegraph, in this case), and that of the free market are used as tools to better exploit the weak.

I hope you had a nice meal =)

The point of recounting such stories is not to make you miserable, but to point out the ways in which the temples of globalization and free markets have been used to exploit the weak.  This process is ongoing ~ if you look deeply at Darfur, you will see the same pattern.  Ethiopia was the same, as was Sudan.  The pattern is always the same.

It is our responsibility, as progressives, to recognize these patterns, and to put and end to this.