Page:The Evolution of Modern Capitalism.djvu/33
MODERN CAPITALISM. 13
labourers required as one condition of great profitable
capitalism. It is for this reason that colonial economy
must be regarded as one of the necessary conditions
of modern capitalism. Its trade, largely compulsory,
was in large measure little other than a system of veiled
robbery, and was in no sense an equal exchange of
commodities. Trading profits were supplemented by
the industrial profits representing the “surplus-value” of
slave or forced labour, and by the yield of taxation and
plunder.
“The particular significance of the colonial economy is
that it affords undertaker’s profits before the conditions of
true capitalism are ripe, before the required accumulation
of money has taken place, before there is a proletariat, and
before free land has disappeared.”?!
§ 7. The growth of a large proletariat in Western Europe was an essential condition for capitalist industry. That meant an increase of rural population beyond the means of subsistence on the soil, according to current modes of agriculture and land tenure, and an increase of town population incapable of earning a livelihood as independent artificers or craftsmen. Now this condition was long de- layed by the slow growth of population in the European nations. Famine, plague, and war kept down the popula- tion through the Middle Ages: the death-rate of children was enormous, and the effective life for the mass of the people was very short. Though no really reliable statistics are available, it is pretty well established that up to the eighteenth century the rate of increase of population for Europe as a whole was very slow, and even during the eighteenth century showed no great expansion. In Germany for a long time after the Thirty Years’ War the population actually fell off, recovering only in the eighteenth century. France about the middle of the eighteenth century reached again the numbers she had attained in the first half of the fourteenth century, and still stood below the 18,000,000 she had attained after the death of Louis XIV. Holland and Belgium seem hardly to have increased for three cen- turies. From the last half of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century Italy was stagnant at
1 Sombart, vol. i. p. 358.