The slave trade
and the Atlantic economies 1451-187063to every part of the globe; the opportunities offered for developing new indus-
tries based on raw materials previously scarce and expensive, or wholly unavail-
able, such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, etc., and for developing new products in
response to new demands and tastes; the economies of scale associated with
production for a greatly extended world market—these and many other factors
stimulated the institutional developments and the radical structural shifts
which occurred in western Europe at that time. They were all produced by the
growth of world trade in this period. The technical developments and the tech-
nological innovations of the period were all called forth and made economic
by the practical problems of production for an extended world market. It is
the verdict of a British economic historian that
Colonial trade introduced to English industry the quite new possibility of exporting
in great quantities manufactures other than woollen goods, to markets where there
was no question of the exchange of manufactures for other manufactures.... The
process of industrialization in England from the second quarter of the eighteenth
century was to an important extent a response to colonial demands for nails, axes,
firearms, buckets, coaches, clocks, saddles, handkerchiefs, buttons, cordage and a
thousand other things.^19
It was this which made possible the concentration of large-scale industrial
production at all levels in the small country that England was in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, being peopled by less than 7 million inhabitants by the
mid-eighteenth century, and by just over 8 million by 1790,^20 and with no ususual
endowment of natural resources. The opportunities offered for large exports
of ironwares and later of cottons 'played a vital part in the building of those
industries to the point where technical change transformed their momentum
of growth'.^21 For Europe generally, and for France in particular, a French
Economic historian wrote :
The eighteenth century can be truly called the Atlantic stage of European economic
development. Foreign trade, and especially trade with the Americas, was the most
dynamic sector of the whole economy (for instance, French colonial trade increased
tenfold between 1716 and 1787), and furthermore the demand from overseas was
stimulating the growth of a wide range of industries as well as increased specialization
and division of labour. Owing to the superiority of sea transport over land transport,
the eighteenth-century European economy was organized around a number of big
seaports, the most prosperous being those with the largest share in the growing colo-
nial trade, such as Bordeaux or Nantes; each of these had, not only its own industries,
but also its industrial hinterland in the river base of which it was the outlet.2a
He further points out that if'Americanization' of trade and industry was the most pronounced for countries which