THE AMERICAS IN THE RISE OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM

JOHN TUTINO

In 1500, the Americas were home to powerful states concentrated in western highlands, cultivating communities along Atlantic coasts and in eastern woodlands, and diverse hunting, gathering, and farming peoples in vast interiors. The peoples of the hemisphere faced war and trade, production and migration — yet lived in a world of their own. They were only connected to Europe, Africa, and Asia after Iberians arrived in the 1490s, an accident of Europeans' search for new routes to trade with Asia. China produced silks and porcelains, South Asia made printed cotton cloth, and Southeast Asia provided pepper, cinnamon, and other spices — all coveted by European consumers. Asians sought little made by Europeans; rather, they demanded payment in money, gold and silver, for their fine manufactures and rare commodities. China and South Asia were economic powers around 1500. Europe could charitably be called an emerging region.

Trade between Asia and Europe had a long history. Overland excursions departed Krakow and other towns in Eastern Europe with silver to swap for silks and other luxuries. Traders from Venice and Genoa sailed through the Bosporus and across the Black Sea to meet overland caravans heading east. Others landed in the eastern Mediterranean to deal with Muslim merchants who moved money and goods across the Levant and on to South Asia and China. The old trades were limited in two ways: Europe produced little gold and limited silver, the latter mostly in Germanic lands; and land routes and sealanes required traders to deal with intermediaries aiming to profit and states demanding revenue for protection. Still, trade flourished for centuries.

When fifteenth-century Portuguese mariners, often funded by Genoese bankers, aimed to sail around Africa to trade directly with South Asia, their goal was to enter established trades while limiting the involvement of merchants and monarchs along the way. When Columbus, a Genoese mariner sailing for Castile, headed west across the Atlantic, his goal was the same — however poor his global geography. For a time, the Americas became an obstacle in the search for direct trade with Asia (while Columbus insisted he had already arrived there). Soon enough, however, the hemisphere, long a world to itself, became a key producer of commodities that accelerated trades that for the first time were truly global. Spanish American gold and especially silver stimulated trade everywhere. Meanwhile, the Atlantic Americas produced rising quantities of sugar, sending the sweet that was also a preservative and in time became a staple to Europeans in exchange for growing numbers of enslaved Africans — people who were made commodities of trade, drawing their continent ever deeper into global circuits of profit and degradation.

The incorporation of the Americas into four European empires — first Spanish and Portuguese, later British, and French — grounded the first world economy. The empires spread European ways of rule and promises of justice; they promoted Christianity (with diverse emphases), and promised salvation to those who embraced new truths. They also aimed to subordinate native American majorities — while the smallpox and other diseases that came as fellow travelers from the Old World decimated indigenous numbers. Then, to replace the dying and replenish laboring populations, Europeans turned to buying young African men (and women too), setting them to work in pursuit of profit — justifying their enslavement with racial and religious legitimations.

The taking of the Americas into the European empires inserted the hemisphere in global trades — the founding moment of the world economy. In the sixteenth century and long after, the pivotal exchange was Asian manufactures for bullion — drawing Asian wares to Europe. The gold and silver that stimulated expanded trades came primarily from Spanish America. Most went to Spain, passed through Western Europe and Mediterranean cities, often sent to Muslim ports, and then on to South Asia and China — drawing Asian goods in return flow. After 1570, an important second flow sailed from Acapulco to Manila, where a Chinese merchant community assembled wares from across Asia — Chinese silks and porcelains, Indian cottons, Island spices — for shipment across the Pacific to Spain's America, which thanks to booming silver economies had means to buy them. After 1600, transpacific trade took up to a third of American silver for the next century — evidence of a truly global commercial economy. Meanwhile, sugar made by slaves sold out of Africa shaped Brazil in the seventeenth century, the greater Caribbean in the eighteenth. Silver, sugar, and slaves made the Americas pivotal to a new world economy for centuries — until everything changed around 1800.

The Americas in the World Economy: The Challenge

A new and more global understanding of the economic history of the world has emerged in recent decades. Through the twentieth century, the rise of European — or, better, Western European and North American — hegemony was presumed, and mostly explained by cultural characteristics and innovative efforts within European domains in analyses ranging from Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to the works of Douglass North, beginning with The Rise of the Western World (with Robert Paul Thomas) and culminating in Understanding the Process of Economic Change. The rise of China in the 1990s opened scholars to new visions. Asia was rediscovered, and the era of European hegemony was recognized as relatively brief — beginning about 1800 and of uncertain longevity as the twenty-first century began. The new understanding began with recognition of the long historic primacy of Asia in Andre Gunder Frank's ReOrient and Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence. In different ways, they emphasized the economic dominance of Asia in the sixteenth century and the...