MEANWHILE IN EUROPE 215actor on the historical stage, and just as the synergy between individualism
and resurgent classical learning was giving rise to modern science.
In 1488, the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape
of Good Hope, proving at last that a ship could sail from the Atlantic
Coast to the Indian Ocean. A stream of traffic followed his route. In 1492,
Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic and discovered two
big continents hitherto unknown to Europeans. A stream of traffic was
soon going back and forth to the Americas.
Because Spain financed Columbus, Spain got first crack at the wealth
of the Americas. This good fortune made Spain the richest nation in Eu-
rope for a while. Spain sucked so much gold out of the Americas, and
spent it so freely at home, that the European gold market crashed. Ironi-
cally, that crash destroyed the Spanish economy, and Spain ended up as
one of the poorest European nations.
The gold of the Americas, however, also washed through the whole
economy of Europe. This happened just around the time that western Eu-
rope was firming up into nation-states, and nation-states have such coher-
ence that they tend to operate as if they were individual persons. Before
the nation-state emerged, it wasn't possible for some guy in England to
hope that "England" would get richer, and to take personal satisfaction
and pride in this happening. He might want wealth to flow to his area; he
might want his town to get richer, or his family, or even his king, but Eng-
land? What was England? Now, however, in areas where the people
thought of themselves collectively as "a nation" it was easy and inevitable
for people to think in terms of policies that would benefit the nation. One
such policy was mercantilism.
Mercantilism was quite a simple concept, really. It was based on the
notion that the economy of nations was like that of individual people. An
individual person who earns a lot of money and spends very little be-
comes rich: guaranteed. For any individual person, the most desirable
form that (incoming) money can take is gold. Accumulate lots of gold
and you're set. So people in western Europe easily fell into thinking that
the wealth of their nations depended on bringing in as much gold as they
could and letting out as little as possible. And they saw how this could be
done: by selling lots of products to their friends and neighbors for gold
and buying-ideally-nothing.