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.
The west-European merchants, British, French, and Dutch, sold the products of America and Asia to their own peoples and those of Central and eastern Europe. Trade with Germany and Italy was fairly stable. With Russia it enormously increased. To cite the British record only, Britain imported fifteen times as much goods in 1790 as in 1700, and sold the Russians six times as much. The Russian landlords, as they became Europeanised, desired Western manufactures and the colonial products such as sugar, tobacco, and tea which could be purchased only from western Europeans. They had grain, timber, and navel stores to offer in return. Similarly, landlords of Poland and north Germany, in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, found themselves increasingly able to move their agricultural products out through the Baltic and hence increasingly able to buy the products of western Europe, America, and Asia in return. Landlords of Eastern Europe thus had an incentive to make their estates more productive. “Big” agriculture spread,, developing in eastern Europe a system not unlike the plantation economy in the new world. It had many effects. It contributed, along with political causes, to reducing the bulk of the east-European population to serfdom. It helped to civilise and to refine, in a word, to “Europeanise,” the upper classes. And it helped to enrich the merchants of western Europe.
The contribution of political economy
[Anti-Dühring]. In agreement with positivism on this question, Marxism sees in development a property which is intrinsic in Western civilisation: old primitive communities could subsist for thousands of years before commerce with the outside would within them bring about differences in fortunes which caused their dissolution.
Marxism however innovates on two points of topical importance. In the first place, it gives credit to old primitive civilisations for discovery without which western development would not have been conceivable, and in relation to which the extent of development, as it could be envisaged in the 19th century, is reduced to modest proportions: the most remote of antiquity… has as starting point man distancing himself from the animal reign and, in content, victory over difficulties such as would never again present themselves to man associated with the future” [Engels, Anti-Düring]. In the second place and especially, Marx overturns the perspective in which the process of industrialisation and development are generally considered. For him industrialisation is not an autonomous phenomenon to be introduced from outside, into civilsations which have remained passive. To the contrary, industrialisation is a function of, and an indirect result, of the condition of so-called “primitive” societies or, more exactly, of historical ties between them and the west.
The basic question for Marxism is to know why and how labour produces added value. It has not been often enough noticed that Marx’s response to this question offers an ethnographic aspect. Primitive humanity was sufficiently reduced to establish itself only in regions of the world where natural conditions a positive result to his work. On the other hand, it is a property which is intrinsic of the culture in the sense given by ethnologists to this term. – to establish between surplus value and labour a relationship such that the former is always added to the latter. For these two reasons, one logical, the other historical, it can be postulated that at the beginning, every labour necessarily produces surplus value. The exploitation of man by man comes later, and it appears concretely in history in the form of the exploitation of the colonised by the coloniser, in other words by appropriation, in favour of the latter, of the excess of surplus value which as we showed is a intrinsic component of primitive being: if we suppose that it takes for the inhabitants of the insular twelve hours of work a week to meet all his needs; it arises that the first favour that providence accords him is plenty of leisure. For him to use it productively, there should be a chain with historical incidences; for him to spend it surplus work for a third person, he should be pushed by force” [Marx, Capital II].
It results from this, firstly that colonisation is historically and logically anterior to capitalism, and that the capitalist regime consists of the treatment of the people of the west as the west had in the past treated indigenous populations. For Marx, the relationship between the capitalist and the proletariat is thus only a particular case of the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. From this perspective, it could almost be posited that in Marxism, economics and sociology arise as belonging to ethnography. It is in The Capital, book one, Volume III, chapter 31, that the thesis is put forward with perfect clarity: the origin of the capitalist regime goes back to the discovery of gold and iron-rich regions of America, then the reduction of indigenes to slavery, and then the conquer and pillage of East Indies, and finally the transformation of Africa into “a sort of commercial garenne for the hunting of black skins.” This thus is the idyllic path to the primitive accumulation which signaled the capitalist era at its birth. Soon after, there was the outbreak of the mercantile war. For piedestal it needed the dissimulated slavery of salary earners of Europe, the nameless slavery in the New World.
Reflexive appraisal
Whether one accepts or rejects the positions of Marxism, these considerations are important for they alert on two aspects of the problem of development that contemporary thinkers too much tend to gloss over. In the first place, the societies which we today call “underdeveloped” are not so by their own making, and it would be false to conceive of them as being exterior to western development or as being indifferent to the development of the west. Actually, it is these societies, which through their direct or indirect destruction between the 16th and the 19th century made the development of the west possible. Between them and the west there exists a relationship of complementarity. Development itself, and its exigencies have made them what they are as development finds then today.
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