Economic Expansion 167Dutch traders ventured beyond the coast of India to the East Indies. By
1700, Venice—which, alone among the Italian city-states, had managed to
retain significant trade links with Asia—had become a virtual backwater
because it had failed to adapt to the global economy that was expanding
across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Spain, France, England, and
the Dutch United Provinces emerged as burgeoning colonial powers in the
late sixteenth century, developing trade routes to Asia and gradually estab
lishing empires.
Spain’s preeminence did not survive the end of the seventeenth-century
economic crisis. Its merchants lacked the flexibility shown by the English
and Dutch to adjust to the varying demand for colonial products and to cre
ate new trading opportunities. The extraction and importation of silver dom
inated their efforts. Furthermore, merchants in Amsterdam and London, not
those in the Spanish city of Seville, expanded trade by using innovative com
mercial techniques. Spanish merchants proved less able than their northern
rivals to lower costs of transportation from the New World. In contrast, En
glish textile merchants found new markets in Spain and the Mediterranean
for their cloth.
Increased Agricultural Productivity
Populations cannot grow unless the rural economy can produce enough
additional food to feed more people. During the sixteenth century, farmers
brought more land into cultivation at the expense of forests and fens (marsh
lands). Dutch reclamation of land from the sea in the Netherlands in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides the most spectacular example
of the expansion of farm land; the Dutch reclaimed more than 36,000 acres
between 1590 and 1615 alone. Modest agricultural progress was, however,
limited to Western Europe, in villages with access to urban merchants, mar
kets, and trade routes. In Russia and Eastern Europe, hundreds of thou
sands of serfs who were legally bound to the land labored to produce enough
grain to feed the population and to generate a surplus that their lords could
sell to Western European traders.
Population growth generated an expansion of small-scale manufacturing,
particularly handicrafts, textiles, and metallurgy in England, Flanders, parts
of northern Italy, the southwestern German states, and in parts of Spain.
Only iron smelting and mining required marshaling a significant amount of
capital. Rural industry was an intrinsic part of the expansion of industry.
Woolens and textile manufacturers, in particular, utilized rural cottage
(domestic) production, which took advantage of cheap and plentiful rural
labor. Members of poor peasant families spun or wove cloth and linens at
home for scant remuneration in an attempt to supplement meager family
income.