European Colonialism in the Americas

Read the article by Kent MacDougall on The Empire Strikes Back at Itself (below) and then examine the material on plantation agriculture, particularly bananas -- which relates to the readings in class. Also read another perspective on colonialism. With European colonialism in particular, global trade grew rapidly. We are impressed by economic globalization today but this has its roots in 19th century colonialism-- the second greatest event in the past 1,000 years (after the first, the Black Death in the Middle Ages; and the third was the Industrial Revolution of the early 18th century). 

Newspaper, magazine, and television celebrations of the 1492 "discovery" have paid scant attention, however, to its effects on Europeans themselves. The unspoken assumption is that the Americans' and Africans' loss must have been the Europeans' gain, that all the misery, destruction, and death in the New World must have benefited people in the Old. Progress, however uneven, must have been served.

The opposite is true. Ordinary Europeans suffered terribly and for centuries from the conquest. The Europeanization of the Americas touched off the military arms race, inflation, and falling standards of living. How this happened and its parallels with the present provide an instructive warning of what's to come in the contemporary world if current trends continue.

The gold and silver mined with forced labor in Mexico and what is now Bolivia constituted a windfall that could have been used to develop Spanish agriculture, industry, and commerce. It could have helped the country catch up with northwestern Europe's more developed economies. Such development would sooner or later have benefited the impoverished peasantry that comprised 95 per cent of Spain's population.

But Spain was in the grip of a tiny ruling class of royalty, Catholic Church hierarchy, and landed aristocracy. Two to three per cent of the population owned 97 per cent of the land in Castile, Spain's heartland. The great landowners had no incentive to modernize Spain. They just wanted to raise more sheep and sell more wool. The environmental degradation that overgrazing vast numbers of sheep entailed seems to have bothered the ruling class no more than the cutting of forests for timber to build ships and provide charcoal to smelt domestic Spanish silver ore. And so, what if the wool went to Holland to be manufactured into cloth rather than being processed in Spain itself.

Meanwhile, successes in the New World swelled the Spanish monarchy's ambitions in the Old. The bonanza of bullion from the Americas encouraged Spain's rulers to build up the army into Europe's largest military force, setting off an arms race that forced rivals to multiply their armed forces as well. Spain hired German, Italian, and Irish mercenaries, building and buying a vast fleet of heavily armed ships. Hegemonic wars against the French, Dutch, and English followed.

These wars were as costly as they were ill-advised, as economically ruinous as they were militarily unsuccessful. To pay for them, the Spanish crown raised taxes, bleeding the peasantry even more mercilessly. It borrowed heavily from foreign bankers, incurring mounting interest obligations that eventually proved insupportable. The gold and silver flowing in from the Americas flowed swiftly out again to foreign bankers and military suppliers. Little trickled down to benefit Spaniards themselves.

The most lasting and far-reaching effect of the increase of money in circulation was to set off a long wave of inflation that spread throughout Western Europe. To be sure, deficit spending on unproductive armies, navies, and wars as well as debasement of coinage by monarchs in search of additional royal revenue contributed to the run-up in prices. The pressure of growing populations on scarce resources and the lagging production of goods also pressured prices. But the trigger was the 20 per cent increase in Europe's stock of gold by 1660 and the tripling of its silver supply.

By 1600, prices had risen five-fold in Andalusia, two-and-a-half-fold in France, and four-fold in England, without anything like a comparable increase in wages. Before long, English carpenters and masons had to work four times as long to buy a loaf of bread.  Their real wages did not return to the pre-1540 level until 1880. As British historian John Burnett recounts in A History of the Cost of Living, inflation created "a new category of the poor -- those who had employment but whose wages were inadequate to support life at a reasonable level." The deterioration continued for centuries -- in 1850 one of every seven persons in England and Wales was still a pauper.

Peasants all over Europe suffered as rising prices for farm products prompted landlords to jack up rents beyond what many of their tenants could pay.  Sheep were now raised on enclosed land that traditionally had been common pasture, available to peasants and landowners alike. Peasants displaced by these moves migrated to the cities. There they swelled the ranks of unskilled labor, further depressing wages, and often ended up in the large underclass of unemployed vagrants, beggars, and criminals.

In his magisterial Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, the late French historian Fernand Braudal refutes the conventional wisdom that "hardship increases the farther back toward the Middle Ages one goes." In fact, the deterioration in living standards that began about 1550 grew "progressively worse, lasting well into the Nineteenth Century. In some regions of Eastern Europe, the downward movement continued for another century, to the middle of the Twentieth."

The turnaround began about 1850, when increases in productivity, brought on by industrialization, began trickling down to workers in in the form of higher wages and shorter working hours. Equally important was the export of a large part of Europe's surplus labor force to the less populated New World -- an estimated 55 million Europeans emigrated overseas between 1820 and 1920. [The "overpopulation" of Europe was "solved" by exporting people abroad; yet, today wealthy countries prevent Third World countries from using this method to solve their "overpopulation!"]

The impact on Europe of the opening of the Americas to the developing world economy suggests some hard lessons for our own times. Here are three:

• Superexploitation of labor on the periphery of the world capitalist economy leads to increased exploitation of workers at the core. This process is all too evident today as the international runaway shop erodes jobs, wages, and living standards in industrialized Europe and North America.

• Squandering a bonanza, be it gold and silver as before or cheap petroleum and other natural resources now, on luxury imports, skewed development, and military buildups can leave an economy worse off after the bubble bursts than before. The recent and rapid transformation of the United States from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor nation is a symptom of cancer at the core and a sign of worse to come. Another symptom is the declining competitiveness of U.S. goods in the global marketplace.

• Imperial overreach is as much a threat to today's number-one power, the United States, as it was to once-mighty but now second-rank Spain. Expanding global investments, interests, and commitments beyond a nation's ability to protect them against real and imagined enemies carries the seeds of self-destruction. Only a complete turnaround in priorities and policies can halt our country's continued decline. [Source: A. Kent MacDougall (professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley), "The Empire Strikes Back at Itself," The Progressive, March 1992.]

Look at the consequences of the imperial dominations by the changing percentages of Whites, Blacks, and Indians in three regions of the Americas and their respective share of the total New World population.