by Jason Hickel
So how did this change? How did a small number of countries in Western Europe become so much richer and more powerful than the rest of the world?
The usual answer to these questions is the one we all learned in school. A series of technological innovations in Britain jump-started the Industrial Revolution that spread through Europe and the United States. The invention of the flying shuttle in 1733 made textile weaving much more efficient, and James Watt’s steam engine in 1781 made it possible to build large and powerful machines. Britain’s coal fields, which were usefully proximate to the large cities, provided cheap and abundant energy, and because the landscape was relatively flat it was easy to transport both coal and manufactured goods around the country via canals. By virtue of scientific enquiry and geographical accident, Britain was able to build productive industries, and the sale of manufactured goods drove living standards to unprecedented new heights.
This story is powerful in its simplicity, but by focusing only on what happened within Britain’s borders, it makes it seem as though these developments occurred in isolation from the rest of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, by the time Watt built his steam engine, Britain was already at the centre of a world system that was roughly organised into two zones: the ‘core’ nations of Western Europe and the young United States, surrounded by the ‘peripheral’ regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America. And the two zones were in constant interaction, linked by a dense network of connections. Importantly, these interactions were not equitable or mutually agreed – indeed, they were marked by violence and coercion. Europe’s industrial innovations are only a part of the story. To really understand how the divide began, we need to go back further.
The Making of the World System
In 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail to discover a new sea route to the Indies. He never made it that far, of course. Victim of shoddy geographical calculations, he was intercepted by a landmass he had not anticipated. When he landed in Cuba, which he insisted was India (stubbornly never admitting otherwise), he encountered a remarkable people – a civilisation very unlike his own. In his journals, Columbus reported that the people were ‘so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.’ They lived in communal buildings, and enjoyed a remarkable degree of equality, even between genders: women were free to leave their partners if they felt they were being mistreated. The people were healthy and strong. Columbus described them as ‘well-built, with good bodies and handsome features’. Other observers marvelled at how far they could swim, and noted that even pregnant women were agile and independent, gave birth with ease, and were up and about again shortly thereafter.
Columbus noticed that in addition to being open and generous, the people he encountered were a peaceful lot. ‘They do not bear arms, and do not know them,’ he wrote. ‘When I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.’ Columbus was eager to exploit this vulnerability, jotting a rather ominous note in his journal: ‘With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.’
During his second expedition, this time with seventeen ships and 1,200 men, Columbus travelled around the Caribbean capturing thousands of indigenous Americans to be sent back and sold in Spain as slaves. But this time his real objective was gold. He had noticed the indigenous people wearing gold ornaments and assumed that the metal must be abundant in the region. Yet he was having a difficult time finding the source, so he resorted to coercive measures. From his base on Hispaniola, the island shared today by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he forced the local inhabitants – the Arawaks – to bring him a certain quantity of gold every three months. Those who failed to do so would have their hands chopped off or were hunted down and killed. Men were forced to spend their lives in mines, stripping the mountains in search of gold. Up to a third of workers died every six months. Within two years of the Spanish invasion, some 125,000 people had been killed – half the island’s population. Most of the remaining inhabitants of Hispaniola were forced into slave labour on plantations. A few decades later, only a few hundred Arawaks remained alive.
One European witness, Bartolomé de Las Casas, reported startling statistics of the slow-motion genocide unfolding in the Caribbean region: ‘From 1494 to 1508,’ he wrote, ‘over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it . . .’
Columbus was only the first in a long line of European conquistadors. Shortly after him came Hernán Cortés, who landed in Mexico in 1519, claimed it for the Spanish Crown and proceeded to march inland towards the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, where Mexico City now lies. Once again, the indigenous inhabitants of the land responded to their European invaders with hospitality, and their generous gestures are well documented. But Cortés was unmoved. He proceeded with his march, destroying towns along the way and massacring their inhabitants in the squares, conquering by virtue of his superior weapons: cannons, crossbows and horses. When he arrived at Tenochtitlán, Emperor Montezuma welcomed him with marvellous gifts of gold and silver. Cortés imprisoned him in his own palace and took control of the city. By 1521, Montezuma had been killed and the capital plundered of its treasures.
Francisco Pizarro, yet another Spanish conquistador, followed suit. In 1532 he was invited into the Inca capital in Peru by Emperor Atahuallpa, who – protected by an army of 80,000 men – did not consider Pizarro and his soldiers to be a threat. Yet Pizarro, enabled by his weapons, managed to sack the city and capture Atahuallpa. To spare his life, the emperor offered to fill a large room with gold and then to fill it twice again with silver, within two months, for he knew how much the Spanish loved precious metals. As a Nahuatl text from the time put it: ‘They lifted up the gold as if they were monkeys, with expressions of joy, as if it put new life into them and lit their hearts. As if it were certainly something for which they yearn with great thirst. Their bodies fatten on it and they hunger violently for it. They crave gold like hungry swine.’ Pizarro agreed to the emperor’s offer and Atahuallpa proceeded to pile the precious metals high. But it was a trick. Having received the gold and silver, Pizarro executed Atahuallpa after sentencing him in a mock court for the ‘crime’ of resisting the Spanish invasion.
A few decades later, Europeans discovered the immense network of silver mines centred on Potosi, in what is now Bolivia. Before long the metal came to account for 99 per cent of the mineral exports from the Spanish colonies. Between 1503 and 1660, 16 million kilograms of silver was shipped to Europe, amounting to three times the total European reserves of the metal. And that was on top of the 185,000 kilograms of gold that arrived in Spanish ports during the same period. By the early 1800s, a total of 100 million kilograms of silver had been drained from Latin America and pumped into the European economy – first into Spain, and then out to the rest of Europe as payment on Spain’s debts.
To get a sense of the scale of this wealth, consider this thought experiment: if 100 million kilograms of silver was invested in 1800 at 5 per cent interest – the historical average – it would amount to $165 trillion today, more than double the world’s total GDP in 2015. Europe had to purchase some of this silver from indigenous Americans in exchange for goods, of course, but much of it came for free – the product of coercive extraction. It was a massive infusion of windfall wealth into the European economy.
What happened to all of this silver and gold from Latin America? Some of it went to building up the military capacity of European states, which would help secure their political advantage over the rest of the world. But most of it lubricated their trade with China and India. Silver was one of the only European commodities that Eastern states actually wanted; without it, Europe would have suffered a crippling trade deficit, leaving it largely frozen out of the worl
d economy. The silver trade allowed Europe to import land-intensive goods and natural resources that it lacked the land capacity to provide for itself. We can think of this as an ‘ecological windfall’ – a transfusion of resources that allowed Europe to grow its economy beyond its natural limits at the time, to the point of catching up with and surpassing China and India around 1800. China and India, then, provided a kind of ecological relief to overstrained Europe. Outsourcing land-intensive production also allowed Europe to reallocate its labour into capital-intensive industrial activities – like textile mills – which other states did not have the luxury of doing.
But while Europe benefited from this arrangement, Latin America suffered tremendously. It is estimated that Mexico had a population of up to 30 million indigenous inhabitants before the arrival of the Europeans. The Andean region had a similar number. Central America is thought to have supported around 13 million. The numbers vary by source to some extent, but scholars agree that in 1492 the Latin American region had a combined population of between 50 and 100 million. By the middle of the 1600s, however, the continent’s population had been slashed to 3.5 million. In other words, around 95 per cent had been killed.
Much of this genocide played out in the form of massacres perpetrated by the conquistadors. Some of it had to do with the forced dispossession of indigenous Americans and the dismantling of their social and economic systems, which made it impossible for them to subsist. Many also died in slavery, their labour used by Europeans to dig precious metals out of the mountains. Mining was not only exceedingly dangerous, it was poisonous too: the use of mercury to extract silver from the rocks exacted an enormous death toll among miners. And of course much of it had to do with diseases such as smallpox, which Europeans brought with them across the Atlantic – sometimes intentionally, as in cases where infected blankets were distributed as ‘gifts’ to indigenous Americans. Because indigenous Americans lacked immunity to these foreign diseases, the germs took a heavy toll. Epidemics were as useful to the European conquest as horses and cannons.
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Indigenous Americans were not the only ones forcibly roped into the expanding empires of Europe. Europeans’ labour requirements in the New World were also slaked by slaves from Africa. The slave trade began early in the 1500s, shortly after Columbus’s first colony was founded in Hispaniola, and was led by European merchants – at first the Spanish and Portuguese, but later the British dominated – who purchased slaves from the shores of West Africa in exchange for European goods (or, more accurately, goods that Europeans had bought from China and India, paid for with precious metals taken from the New World). Most of these slaves were prisoners of war captured in conflicts between West African states. Once transported to the Americas, they were put to work on European sugar plantations in the Caribbean and in the mines of Brazil. In the 1700s, Portuguese Brazil produced more gold using slave labour than the total volume Spain had extracted from its colonies in the previous two centuries.
By the end of the slave trade in 1853, somewhere between 12 million and 15 million Africans had been shipped across the Atlantic. Between 1.2 million and 2.4 million died en route, in the darkness below the decks of the slave ships, their bodies cast into the sea. It is almost impossible to imagine the scale of the human devastation that these numbers represent.
How much did Western states gain from this enormous quantity of free labour? It is estimated that the United States alone benefited from a total of 222,505,049 hours of forced labour between 1619 and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that is worth $97 trillion today. And that’s just the United States. Right now, fourteen Caribbean nations – represented by the law firm Leigh Day – are in the process of suing Britain for slavery reparations. They have not disclosed how much they seek in damages, but they have pointed out that when Britain abolished slavery in 1834 it paid its slave owners compensation of £20 million for loss of property (paying no compensation to the slaves themselves), which would be the equivalent of $300 billion today. It is worth noting that this figure reflects only the price of the slaves, and tells us nothing of the total value they produced during their lifetimes, nor of the trauma they endured, nor of the hundreds of thousands of slaves who worked and died during the centuries before 1834.
Yet the real benefit that Europe derived from the slave economy was not just in the form of value extracted coercively from the bodies of Africans and indigenous Americans. The sugar and cotton plantations of the New World supplied Europe with another ecological windfall, much as silver did. For example, sugar came to account for up to 22 per cent of the calories Britain consumed, which reduced the need for domestic agricultural production and freed up labour power for industrial pursuits. Cotton provided a key raw material for Europe’s Industrial Revolution, and without diverting from food production or straining Europe’s labour and land capacities. If we add timber imports to sugar and cotton, we see that the New World contributed some 25 million to 30 million ‘ghost acres’ of productive land to Britain alone – roughly double the size of Britain’s own total arable land. These slave-produced imports were one of the single largest factors in spurring Europe’s rapid economic development – more significant even than the windfall energy provided by the region’s rich seams of coal. Without the ecological windfall from the slave colonies, Europe would not have been able to shift its economic capacity towards indus-trialisation.
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Because the Latin American economy was organised by the colonisers to produce only a handful of agricultural products, it was prevented from developing its own domestic industries. Instead, it became dependent on Europe for the manufactured goods it needed. This arrangement proved to be tremendously beneficial to Europe; Latin America was a captive market, providing a steady demand for Europe’s industrial exports. Indeed, without the slave colonies of the New World to consume its goods, Europe’s industrialisation would have been impossible.
The consequences of this arrangement for the periphery of the world system were immense. As we will see, Latin America would be stuck in a relationship of economic dependency on Europe even into the 21st century, one marked by declining terms of trade, with the price of Latin America’s exports falling relative to the price of industrial imports from the West. Africa, for its part, suffered a serious loss of labour power to the Atlantic slave trade. What if the sum of the value produced by African slaves in the New World – worth the equivalent of hundreds of trillions of dollars today – was subtracted from Western wealth and added to the total wealth of Africa? Or even just a proportion of this sum, subtracting, for example, the gains that African kings made through the trade?
Economists often speculate that the global South failed to develop because of a lack of capital. But there was no such lack. The wealth that might have provided the capital for development (precious metals in Latin America and surplus labour in Africa) was effectively stolen by Europe and harnessed to the service of Europe’s own development. The global South could theoretically have developed as Europe did were it not for the plunder of its resources and labour, and were it not for the fact that it was forced by Europe to supply raw materials while importing manufactured goods. Whether or not they would or should have done so is another matter, of course – after all, much of European-style development required violence towards other lands and other peoples. But the point remains: it is impossible to examine the economic growth of the West without looking at the base on which it drew.
The Great Dispossession
For many decades, the main alternative to the received story of the Industrial Revolution in Europe held that the resources and labour extracted from the periphery of the world system provided the wealth that was necessary for significant capital investment to occur. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, called this ‘previous accumulation’ – the initial process of amassing capital that is necessary for capitalism to get going, and without which capitalism cannot exist
. Karl Marx called it ‘primitive accumulation’, perhaps to highlight its barbaric nature, for the process of accumulation was violent: ‘The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.’ Colonial extraction, according to this view, was the driver of accumulation, and accumulation is what made capitalism possible.
As we have seen, however, the real benefit that Europe gained from this first period of colonialism was not just that it allowed for the extraction and direct accumulation of wealth (in the form of value transferred from the New World colonies directly into the coffers of Europe), but rather that it provided ecological windfalls that allowed Europe to pivot towards industrial production, and captive markets where it could sell its manufactured goods. These became the primary forces of accumulation.
But accumulation alone does not explain the rise of industrialisation in Europe. Historians tell us that there were many states that accumulated immense wealth but never became capitalist. In order for capitalism to work, it needs something else: it needs workers. Budding capitalists cannot get very far unless there are people willing to work for them in exchange for wages. We take this for granted today, but there was a time, not so long ago, when it wasn’t quite so easy. Up through the Middle Ages, the vast majority of people in Europe – at least outside the city states – wouldn’t have wanted to work for wages. People didn’t need to earn wages in order to live. Most people lived as ‘peasants’ – in other words, as small farmers cultivating the land to provide for their own needs. And for the most part they were quite happy doing so.
