Page:The Evolution of Modern Capitalism.djvu/32

12 THE EVOLUTION OF

early Eastern empire, but in the continuous exploitation of large quantities of forced labour.

The Portuguese and Spanish learned this lesson well, recognising that ‘the true riches of new-discovered lands are their inhabitants.” The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru, the Portuguese in West and East Africa, the Dutch in Malacca, Java, and Ceylon, bettered their early instructions, founding their economic dominion upon an even stronger basis of “forced” and ‘‘slave” labour with a fuller organisa- tion of the slave supply. The black population of Africa was, of course, the great reservoir for the new tropical. economy of the European colonial system which spread through Central America, Brazil, and the West Indies, taking root later on in North America. The dimensions of this trade from the beginnings of its development at the opening of the sixteenth century by the Portuguese were enormous: the actual number of slaves in use at any given time presents but a slight idea of its bulk, for the waste of life involved in it was so large and the duration of the economic life of the slaves so short. In 1830 the European colonies contained only about two and a half million slaves; but during three centuries a stream of countless millions had been flowing in to be used up as ‘raw material” in the colonial products which built the early fortunes of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British merchants.

The profits of the European companies embarking in early colonial trade were very large, for slave economy is not in itself and under all circumstances bad. Merivale clearly points out the main condition of its profitable use. ““When the pressure of population induces the freeman to offer his services, as he does in all old countries, for little more than the natural minimum of wages, those services are very certain to be more productive and less expensive than those of bondsmen, This being the case, it is obvious that the limit of the profitable duration of slavery is attained whenever the population has become so dense that it is cheaper to employ the free labour for hire.”} In other words, Western Europe until the nineteenth century did not present the large supply of landless 1 Merivale, Lecéuves on Colonisation, vol. i. pp. 297, 298.