(^152) Chapter Fire
The really important result of the balance between superior armed
force and almost untrammeled commercial self-seeking that charac
terized European ventures overseas in the eighteenth century was the
fact that the daily lives of hundreds of thousands, and by the end of the
century of millions, of Asians, Africans, and Americans were trans
formed by the activity of European entrepreneurs. Market-regulated
activity, managed and controlled by a handful of Europeans, began to
eat into and break down older social structures in nearly all the parts
of the earth that were easily accessible by sea. Africans, enslaved by
raiding parties, marched to ports for shipment across the Atlantic, and
consigned to work on sugar plantations, represent a brutal and ex
treme example of the way the profit motive could and did transform
older patterns of life fundamentally. Indonesians, required to work in
spice groves by local princelings who in their turn obeyed Dutch
commands, were less completely abstracted from their accustomed
routines and social setting; and the same was true of Indian cotton
manufacturers who produced cloth for the East India Company to sell
in markets hundreds or even thousands of miles removed from their
spinning wheels and looms. Tobacco and cotton growers in the
Mediterranean Levant and in North America represent yet another
degree of personal independence vis-à-vis the merchants and brokers
who put the product of their labor into international circulation. But
all such people shared the fact that their daily routines of life came to
depend upon a worldwide European-managed system of trade, in
which the supply of goods, credit, and protection affected the liveli
hood, and often governed the physical survival of persons who had no
understanding of, nor the slightest degree of control over, the com
mercial network in which they found themselves enmeshed.
No doubt Europeans gathered most of the profits into their own
hands; but specialization of production also meant that wealth in
creased generally, even if it was very unevenly distributed among
social classes and between European organizers and those who worked
at their command or in response to their inducements. Even in Africa,
where the devastation of slave raiding certainly crippled many com
munities and blasted innumerable human lives, it was also the case that
new techniques and skills—most notably the spread of maize cultiva
tion—enhanced African wealth; and the power of strategically sit-
European soldiers, 10 field guns, and about 2,100 Indians trained and equipped ac
cording to European methods. He routed an army of some 50,000. Cf. Mark Bence-
Jones, Clive of India (New York, 1974), pp. 133–43.
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