CHAPTER XXVI

COLONIAL POLICY FROM THE SIXTEENTH TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ¹

At this point it is pertinent to inquire into the significance which the acquisition and exploitation of the great non-European regions had for the development of modern capitalism, although only the most characteristic features of the older colonial policy can be mentioned here. The acquisition of colonies by the European states led to a gigantic acquisition of wealth in Europe for all of them. The means of this accumulation was the monopolizing of colonial products, and also of the markets of the colonies, that is the right to take goods into them, and, finally, the profits of transportation between mother land and colony; the last were ensured especially by the English Navigation Act of 1651. This accumulation was secured by force, without exception and by all countries. The operations might take various forms. Either the state drew a profit from the colonies directly, administering them by its own agencies, or it leased them, in return for a payment, to companies. Two main types of exploitation are met with: the feudal type in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the capitalistic in the Dutch and English.

Forerunners of the feudal colonization form are especially the Venetian and Genoese colonies in the Levant, and those of the Templars. In both cases the opportunity for securing a money income was afforded by the subdivision of the region to be exploited into fiefs, “encomiendas” in the case of Spain.

The capitalistic colonies regularly developed into plantations. Labor power was furnished by the natives. The opportunities for application of this labor system, from which favorable results had been secured in Asia and Africa, seemed about to expand enormously when it was transferred to trans-oceanic lands. It was found however that the American Indians were entirely unsuitable for plantation labor,² and importation of black slaves to the West Indies took the place of their use and gradually grew into a regular commerce of enormous extent.³ It was carried on on the basis of slave trading privileges (“assiento”) the first of which was granted by the emperor Charles V in 1517 to the Flemings. These slave trading privileges played a large role in international relations well into the 18th century. In the treaty of Utrecht, England secured the right to import slaves into the Spanish possessions in South America, to the exclusion of all other powers, and at the same time assumed the obligation of delivering a certain minimum number. The results of the slave trade were considerable. It may be estimated that at the beginning of the 19th century some seven million slaves were living in the territory of the European colonies. Their mortality was extraordinarily high, running in the 19th century to 25% and to a multiple of that figure earlier. From 1807 to 1848, a further five million slaves were imported from Africa, and the aggregate of slaves transported thence overseas can be set equal to the population of a first class European power in the 18th century.

In addition to the black slaves there were white half-slaves, the “indentured servants”; they were especially numerous in the English North American colonies where in the 17th century their number surpassed that of the negroes. In part they were deported criminals, in part poor wretches who attempted in this way to earn their passage money, a small fortune.

The profits of the slave labor were by no means small. In England in the 18th century they were estimated at fifteen to twenty pounds sterling per slave per year. The profitableness of slave labor depended upon strict plantation discipline, ruthless driving of the slave, and perpetual importation—since the slaves did not perpetuate themselves—and finally exploitative agriculture.

This accumulation of wealth brought about through colonial trade has been of little significance for the development of modern capitalism—a fact which must be emphasized in opposition to Werner Sombart. It is true that the colonial trade made possible the accumulation of wealth to an enormous extent, but this did not further the specifically occidental form of the organization of labor, since colonial trade itself rested on the principle of exploitation and not that of securing an income through market operations. Furthermore, we know that in Bengal for example, the English garrison cost five times as much as the money value of all the goods carried thither. It follows that the markets for domestic industry furnished by the colonies under the conditions of the time were relatively unimportant, and that the main profit was derived from the transport business.

The end of the capitalistic method of exploiting colonies coincides with the abolition of slavery. Only in part did this come about through ethical motives. The only Christian sect which persistently and uniformly combated slavery was the Quakers; neither the Calvinists nor the Catholics nor any other denomination consistently and constantly advocated its abolition. A decisive event was the loss of the North American colonies. Even during the War for Independence, the northern colonies prohibited slavery, and in fact from purely democratic political principles, because the people wished to avoid the development of a plantation system and a planter aristocracy. A religious motive also played a part in the shape of the traditional repugnance of the Puritans to feudalism of any sort. In 1794 the French Convention declared for the abolition of slavery on political equalitarian grounds, which were dressed up in an appropriate ideology. In the meantime, in 1815, the Congress of Vienna prohibited the slave trade. The interest of England in slavery was much reduced through the loss of the principal slave consuming region, its North American colonies. The decrees of the Congress made it possible for the English to suppress the foreign slave trade and at the same time themselves to carry on a buoyant smuggling business. From 1807 to 1847, five million human beings were carried from Africa to the English colonial territories in this way, with the actual sufferance of the government. Only after the parliamentary reform in 1833, was slavery really prohibited in England and by England for all its colonies, and the prohibition was at once treated seriously.

In the period from the 16th to the 18th century, slavery signified as little for the economic organization of Europe as it did much for the accumulation of wealth in Europe. It produced a large number of annuitants, but contributed in very small degree toward bringing about the development of the capitalistic organization of industry and of economic life.