62 Joseph E. Inikoriparticipated in the period 1451-1870. It will be shown later that thus pheno-
menal expansion of world trade was due largely to the availability of African
slave labour in the Americas. But for the moment we have to establish the
relationship between this growth of world trade and the economic development
of Western Europe and North America.
Between the late Middle Ages and the first half of the seventeenth century
some very important internal developments occurred in West European econ-
omies, which were due to changes in some internal factors, such as population,
leading to the growth of intra-European trade, particularly in raw wool, woollen
products, metal products and silver, as well as inter-regional trade within the
individual West European countries. These early developments stimulated in
the different West European countries differing institutional changes, political,
social and economic. Particularly in Great Britain and Holland, the changes
which occurred at this time created
a hospitable environment for the evolution of a body of property rights which pro-
moted institutional arrangements, leading to fee-simple absolute ownership in land,
free labour, the protection of privately owned goods, patent laws and other encourage-
ments to ownership of intellectual property, and a host of institutional arrangements
to reduce market imperfection in product and capital markets.^18
The main contribution of the Atlantic system to these early developments was
in the supply of bullion which greatly promoted the growth of exchange in
all Western Europe, thereby giving a fillip to the expansion of the market
sector of West European economies. Besides this contribution, much of West
European development at this early stage depended on European resources.
The 'hospitable environment' created by these early developments are very
important in explaining the responsiveness of West European economies to
the external stimuli emanating from the growth of world trade from the second
half of the seventeenth century onwards.
But, it is one thing to say that these early internal developments made
West European economies responsive to external stimuli arising from the
growth of the Atlantic system. It is quite another thing to say that from these
early developments the institutional arrangements that evolved in Western
Europe between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that great
structural transformation called the Industrial Revolution which occurred in
Great Britain during this period, were inevitable. The explanation for those
developments is to be found in the new problems and possibilities created by
the growth of world trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries : the new
problems of regularly carrying large quantities of goods over very long distances
across turbulent seas ; of processing and distributing large quantities of products
imported from distant places ; of accommodation in a trade system stretching