The European Expansion

In this chapter, the focus is on what happened to the population of external areas after their incorporation into the capitalist world-economy. European expansion since the Long Sixteenth Century simply intensified long-established contacts with world-empires such as India and China, initially only through increased investments in trade. The balance of power between these worldempires and the capitalist world-economy changed with the ever-improving European armaments resulting from the incessant state of war between large and small powers on the continent ( Kennedy 1988; Cipolla 1999). In particular, effective artillery gave European military forces superiority over these ancient civilizations, not only at sea, as before, but also on land. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English thus assumed political control of ever-larger portions of foreign territories even in the Old World, not only in the New World, where Europeans had established colonies exterminating the natives in wars and with diseases. The decline of Native American populations is estimated to be from 54–61 million in 1492 to 6 million in 1650. In North America, settlers gradually took over the territory of the sparse populations of hunter-gatherers and the few agricultural settlements, defeating them militarily. In Central and South America, depopulation resulted mainly from the contagion of diseases from which Europeans were relatively immunized because they were endemic to the Old Continent, but against which the natives had no defenses (Crosby 1988). In colonial Mexico there was a “desperate lack of workforce” as illustrated in Table 6.

In Africa, on the contrary, it was the Europeans who were defeated by diseases, until the discovery and use of drugs against the sleeping sickness (African trypanosomiasis), which killed men and cattle. The imperialist race was then unleashed, with the partition of the continent in 1878 during the Congress of Berlin, when the European powers drew boundary lines across unexplored places. Before 1750, the emigration from Europe to other continents was small, due in part to the cost of transport. This cost dropped after the Napoleonic wars, as the wood trade between England and North America grew due to the Continental Blockade and led to the accruement of shipping capacity for intercontinental transport (Belich 2009, 106 ff.).