Winners and Losers:
The Balance Sheet
of Empire
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground
for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the coloni
sation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of ex
change and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to
industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary
element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
' —MARX and ENGELS, Manifesto of the Communist PartyT
he turn of the eighteenth century was both end and beginning.
It saw the liquidation of the Dutch East India Company; the pro
hibition of the British Atlantic slave trade (but not the end of slavery);*
the peak and decline of the sugar bonanza (including revolution and
the fall of planters and plantations in Saint-Domingue [now Haiti]); an
end to the Old Regime in France; an end to the period of Old Empire.
The new era would see Europe lose formal control of territory overseas
(Spain would be the big loser) but gain wider economic dominance.
Europe would also force its way into territories previously seen as in
accessible and untouchable (China, Japan), while creating in others
(India, Indonesia) a new kind of imperium in its own image.
The hinge of this metamorphosis was the Industrial Revolution,
begun in Britain in the eighteenth century and emulated around the
world. The Industrial Revolution made some countries richer and oth
ers (relatively) poorer; or more accurately, some countries made an in
dustrial revolution and became rich; and others did not and stayed
* In places such as the Caribbean, however, where the pool of slaves could not main
tain itself by natural reproduction, the interdiction of fresh supplies would kill the old
plantation system.