ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF EXPANSION

Hope of economic gain was the principal motivator behind exploration and the formation of overseas enclaves and settlements. Profits could be realized by obtain­ing, at minimal production or purchase cost, commodities highly valued in Europe that mostly were available only outside it.

Oceanic trade developed along two axes, the first linking metropoles vertically with their colonies, the second linking non-European areas laterally with each other. Trade of the first kind brought commodities a metropole’s consumers valued. These included raw and semiprocessed primary products: gold, silver, and precious stones; spices, dyewoods, sugar, tobacco, indigo, beaver furs, and cattle hides. Also shipped to Europe were such handcrafted luxury goods from Asia and the Near East as silk brocades, cotton cloth and piece goods, porcelains and chinaware, lacquerware, fine- tempered steel, and ivory and wood carvings. Early contacts with the New World generated vertical trade of another sort that Alfred Crosby has called “the Columbian exchange.” An astonishing variety of flora and fauna moved in both directions across the Atlantic, in many instances becoming commercially valuable in their new en­vironments. Europe sent to the Americas sugar, citrus fruits, horses, cows, and pigs while importing maize and potatoes.¹⁹ Successful propagation of these plants and animals in their new settings enabled both hemispheres to become more nutri­tionally self-sufficient.

The doctrine of mercantilism, which originated during phase i and became the dominant way of thinking about imperial economic relations, stressed vertical trade.

Yet the most significant trade patterns in phase i violated the mercantilist ideal by being lateral, not vertical. In the course of creating what Wallerstein termed the first genuine “world-economy,” Europeans found they could profit by connecting non-European regions with each other. Africa was linked to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade. Slave ships also transferred staple crops (notably cassava and maize) from the New World to Africa, and peanuts and bananas in the reverse direction. The staple crops, initially planted to feed Africans held in coastal “facto­ries” pending the ocean voyage, spread inland and probably increased population densities in areas heavily hit by slave raiding. East Asia and the New World were connected by “Manila galleons” that exchanged bullion from the mines of New Spain and Peru for silks, tea, chinaware, and other Asian luxury goods.²⁰ Coffee, initially grown in the Middle East, became a commercial tree crop in the Dutch East Indies and the Americas. Indian textiles and Indian Ocean cowries were exchanged for slaves along the West African coast. Indeed, Indian textiles were for a considerable time the most important and expensive category of European trade with Africa.²¹ In the eastern Indian Ocean, among the Moluccas and other Spice Islands, and along the Chinese and Japanese coasts chartered companies amassed trade goods and profits by exchanging raw materials and manufactured goods. Bengal cloth, for example, was traded for Amboina spices, which were then sold for Chinese teas and silks. Opium from India, whose production was strongly encouraged by the English East India Company, bought access to the Chinese market. European merchants sometimes purchased Asian commodities with gold from southern Africa.

Paradoxically, the dominant theory of intercontinental trade in phase i em­phasized the vertical, north-south component. But the dominant practice was a complex series of lateral, south-south links.

The volume of transactions in phase i, whether vertical or horizontal, was limited by the technology of maritime transport. Obvious constraints were the size, speed, and safety of wooden ships utterly dependent on ocean winds and currents. These limits affected the composition of trade, which consisted principally of com­modities with high ratios of value to bulk. Most trade goods were destined for consumption by economic elites, above all those in metropoles and New World settler communities.²²

Existing production technologies set another constraint. What western Europe exported during phase i it produced in modest amounts, at least in comparison with its performance in later centuries. The astounding advances marking the early In­dustrial Revolution—notably the substitution of inanimate for human energy and economies of scale from factory production—had yet to take place.²³ Europe enjoyed no decided technological edge over many of the societies its explorers encountered. If anything, it lagged behind some trading partners in certain respects, including the production of silk, cotton cloth, and tempered steel.

Moreover, the first round of the Industrial Revolution may be said to have occurred not in Europe but in New World plantation colonies, with greater effects on the composition of Europe’s imports than of its exports. Sugar plantations were in effect huge outdoor factories. They employed advanced techniques of mass pro­duction and processing, involved a landless labor force whose work patterns were monitored and controlled, and enabled plantation owners to amass great fortunes. C. L. R. James writes of the slaves in Saint Domingue, “Working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories that covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modem proletariat than any group of workers at the time.”²⁴

Limits on the volume of exports were sometimes set by indigenous elites.

Writing of the English East India Company, chartered in 1600, the Indian historian and diplomat K. M. Panikkar notes that during the first few years “the company’s affairs did not progress very satisfactorily, for nothing was available in England to sell in exchange” for the spices and gems English merchants desired.²⁷ Not until the company carved out a share of the inter-Asian carrying trade did it start to earn sizable profits. Until well into the nineteenth century the Chinese imperial court actively discouraged trade with Europeans. The famous edict in 1793 of the Ch’ien-lung emperor to Britain’s King George III noted that of material goods “there is nothing we lack, as your principal envoy and others have themselves observed. We have never set much store on strange or ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country’s manufactures.”²⁸ What rulers of the great Asian polities wanted more than Europe’s luxury goods were gold and silver from the Americas and Africa that foreign traders had on board.

In the Americas and along Africa’s west coast, where material culture was generally not as technologically advanced as in Asia, European trade goods found a decidedly more favorable reception. “Weapons were of paramount importance to the feudal native polities of North America,” writes James Axtell, “but metal objects of any kind, doth goods, and cleverly designed or sizable wooden objects also drew their admiration.”²’ Even here, however, the impact of foreign commodities on indigenous economies was limited. (The effect of guns on political life was another matter.) Many societies remained self-sufficient, minimally altering familiar produc­tion patterns to gain access to the new goods. Frequently, however, indigenous people became more aggressive outside their community boundaries, searching for resources to exchange for metal goods, cloth, alcohol, and the like. Slave raiding was hugely disruptive in many parts of Africa. In North America a vast increase in trapping visibly impacted the physical environment that beavers had done so much to shape.

Europeans in phase 1 had a long fist of raw materials and manufactured goods they wanted from other parts of the world. But in general they were unable or unwilling to provide goods from their home economies to purchase what they wanted in free market settings. The simplest way to get something without exchang­ing it for what others are prepared to offer is to use force. A striking feature of phase 1 was the extensive European reliance upon coercion to satisfy economic demands. This was most evident in the New World. The Spanish colonial state used a variety of mechanisms—encomienda and corregimiento, mita (Peru) and repartimiento (New Spain)—to force Amerindians to work at minimal expense on large agricultural and mining operations.³⁰ The profitability of New World plantation economies depended upon efficient, coercion-intensive exploitation of black slaves, who had to work long hours in exchange for derisory material comforts and little or no acknowl­edgment of their humanity. Plantation owners had no compunctions about using torture and terror to put down the slave revolts that repeatedly erupted in the Caribbean basin.³¹ Europeans routinely employed force to extract profits from Old World trading enclaves. Weapons supplied to indigenous agents to mount slave raids or collect spices imposed heavy burdens upon people living far from the coastal zones where these operations were planned.