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General Considerations
In the expanding global economy of the eighteenth century each continent played its special part. Almost useless as a market for European manufactures trade with Asia was subject to an ancient limitation. There was much that Europeans wanted from Asia, but almost nothing that Asians wanted from Europe. The peoples of Indian, Chinese and Malay cultures had elaborate civilisations with which they were content; they lacked the dynamic restlessness of Europeans, and their masses were (more so even than Europe) that they could not buy anything anyway. Europeans found that they could send little to Asia except gold. The drain of gold from Europe to Asia had gone on since ancient times and, accumulating over the centuries, was one source of fabulous treasures of Oriental princes. To finance the swelling demand for Asian products it was necessary for Europeans to constantly replenish their stocks of gold. The British found an important new supply in Africa along the Gulf of Guinea, where one region [the present Ghana] was long called Gold Coast. The word “guinea” became the name for gold coin minted in England. From 1663 to 1813 and long remained a fashionable way of saying twenty-one-shillings.
What Europeans sought from Asia was still in part spices – pepper and ginger, cinnamon and cloves – now brought in mainly by the Dutch from East India islands. But they wanted manufactured goods also. Asia was still in some considerations superior to Europe in technical skills. It is enough to mention rugs, chinaware, and cotton cloth. The very names by which cotton fabric are known in English and other European languages reveal the places from which they were thought to come. “Madras” and “calico” refer to the Indian cities of Madras and Callicut, “muslin” to the Arabic city of Mosul. Most of the Eastern manufactures were increasingly initiated in the eighteenth century Europe. Axminster and Anbusson carpets carpeted with Oriental rug. In 1709 a German named Boettcher discovered the formula for making a vitreous and translucent substance comparable to porcelain of China; this European “china,” made at Sèvres, Dresden, and in England, soon competed successfully with the imported original. Cotton fabrics were never produced in Europe at a price to compete with India until after the introduction of power machinery which began in India in about 1780. Before that date the demand for Indian cotton goods was so heavy that woolen, linen and silk interests became alarmed. They could produce nothing like the sheer muslin and calico prints which caught the public fancy, and many governments, to protect the jobs and capital involved in the old European textile industries, simply forbade the import of Indian cottons altogether.
America in the eighteenth century bulked larger than Asia in the trade of Western Europe. The American trade was based mainly on one commodity – sugar. Sugar had long been known in the east, and in the European Middle ages little bits of it had trickled to delight the palates of lords and prelates, About 1650 sugar cane was brought in quantities from the East and planted in the West Indies by Europeans. A whole new economic system arose from a few decades. It was based on the “plantation.” A plantation was an economic unit consisting of a considerable tract of land, a sizable investment of capital, often owned by absentees in France or England, and a force of imposed labour, supplies by blacks bought from Africa as slaves. Sugar, produced in large quantities with cheap labour at a low cost, proved to have an inexhaustible market.
The plantation economy, first established in sugar, and later in cotton [after 1800], brought Africa into the foreground. Slaves had been obtained from Black Africa from time immemorial, both by the Roman Empire and by the Muslim world, both of which, however, enslaved blacks and whites indiscriminately. After the European discovery of America, blacks were taken across the Atlantic by the Spanish and the Portuguese. Dutch traders landed them in Virginia in 1619, a year before the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts. But slavery in the Americas before 1650 may be described as occasional.
The Era of Plantations
With the rise of the plantation economy after 1650, and especially after 1700, it became a fundamental economic institution. Slavery now formed the labour supply of a very substantial and heavily capitalised branch of world production. About 610,000 blacks were landed from Africa in the island of Jamaica alone between 1700 and1786. Total figures are hard to give, but it is certain that, until well after 1800, far more Africans than Europeans made the voyage to the Americas. The trans-Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century was conducted mainly by English-speaking interests, principally in English but also in New England, followed as closely as they could manage it by the French. Yearly export of merchandise from Great Britain to Africa, used chiefly in exchange for slaves, increased tenfold between 1713 and 1792. As for merchandise coming into Britain from the British West Indies, virtually all produced by slaves, in 1790 it constituted almost a fourth of all British import. If we add British imports from the American mainland, including what in 1776 became the United States of America, the importance of black labour to the British economic system will appear still greater, since a great part of exports from the mainland consisted of agricultural products, such as tobacco and indigo, produced partly by slaves. It can scarcely be denied that the phenomenal rise of British capitalism in the eighteenth century was based to a considerable extent on the enslavement of Africans. The town Liverpool, an insignificant place o the Irish Sea in 1700, built itself up by the slave trade in the slave-produced wares to a busy trans-Atlantic commercial centre, which in turn stimulated the “industrial revolution” in Manchester and other neighbouring towns.
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Writer Profile
neant
We hold a B.Sc. [Honours] degree in Sociology and for some time now have been mostly engaged in the teaching of undergraduate Sociology [since 1999]. On scholarship we are inclined to systems of knowledge and systems analyses. We are a very private person and cherish musing and long solitary walks. We also enjoy the company of people with a good education and who are interested in Social Theory.When we are not in acivity we cherish reading, long solitary walks, conversations on spirituality and the company of fine people.
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