During the pre-industrial early-modern period, 1400-1700, high Eurasian civilizations projected power across oceans...
I. Ming China--Zheng He's prestige voyages
- 25 K people in an armada of 100 ships
- Compare to British navy in mid-eighteenth century: 50 K
- Bring back oddities--giraffe--Qilin--King of Ceylon
But...
- Expensive
- Does nothing to challenge the view that China is the Central Country
- Politics leads to shutting-down of Ming Dynasty transoceanic exploration
- Under the Qing the sea was regarded as a place from which danger came
- Pirates
- Ming pretenders
- Managing the gentry elite in the Yangzi valley and the rest of the Chinese southland was hard enough
- Peach-blossom fan
II. Seaborne Empire
- Portugal--Holland--Britain (with France trying to get into the game)
- Invade the Indian ocean
- Sink everything that moves
- Acquire monopoly of ocean traffic
- Build bases
- Trade--from a highly advantageous position as a monopolist
Holland in late seventeenth century:
- Maybe 50 K people directly and indirectly engaged in East India trade (out of a total population of 4 million)
- 5% of Dutch GDP
- Healthy, but not overwhelming effect on the Portuguese, Dutch, and British economies
- But did have first-order effects on domestic politics
- Then in the late 1800s the British East India Company makes its bid for power in Inda ... but that carries us too far from our topic
III. Conquest and Occupation: Spain in the New World
- Conquest and plunder
- Encomienda/hacienda/mining--creation of an elite ruling class
- Largely uninterested in what we would see as economic development
- "To serve God, to win glory, and to grow rich"
- Nevertheless, over time things changed: no longer Spanish would-be aristocrats ruling over Amerindian serfs
IV. Slave Raiding
- The slave trade in historical perspective
- Gaius Julius Caesar
Firearms change things
- Europeans in West Africa, Middle Easterners in East Africa
- Trade guns for slaves on the African coast
- Kings to whom you have sold guns than capture slaves
- Ship slaves to sugar islands the turn them into a labor force
- Need (a) firearms, (b) and (c) plantation agriculture, plus (d) a middle class market
- Similar but much less terrible things going on in eastern Europe at the same time--the "second serfdom"
Terrible consequences for African civilizations...
- Extraordinary potential profitability of slavery: some rough numbers
*Consider a small slave ship: 150 slaves--100 survive--surplus value: 100 x 1/4 x 10 yrs = 250 man-years of value
- Amortized cost of ship: 25 man-years
- Cost of crew (2 voyages a year): 10 man-years
- Cost of trade goods (guns): 15 man-years
- A 5-1 ratio of revenue to cost--but exceptional hazards
- Cost to your conscience
- The slave trade in historical perspective
V. Plantation Agriculture on the Sugar Islands
- Use slaves to grow plantation crops
- Coffee, sugar, tobacco [chocolate, cocaine?]
- Digression on pests and parasites
- Extremely nasty social formations on the sugar islands
- Extremely profitable.
- Use slaves to grow plantation crops
VI. Small-Farmer Settlement
- Religious motive
- Company profit motive (except for the Hudson's Bay Company, didn't work)
- Get-a-farm motive
- Digression on Silver and Spain
- Allows Carlos V and Felipe II-IV to fight the Wars of the Counterreformation
- Deindustrializes Spain
- In the long run, Spain's American empire a source of wealth--and a cultural and industrial curse
- Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote
The sixth--small farm settlement--was, to contemporaries, the least attractive--it was what you did when you couldn't do anything else.
The sixth was also, in the long run, the most productive as far as economic growth is concerned.
Smithian Growth
The United States--at least the northern United States--as Adam Smith's Utopia:
Y = F(A, N/L, H/L, K/L)
- Literate and entrepreneurial population
- Good legal infrastructure
- Market exchange
- Abundant land (means high output per worker)
- Free land (means high wages)
Constrast with Engerman and Sokoloff's picture of Latin America: populations to exploit and ways to exploit them create extreme inequality... which has poisonous consequences....
And the economy prospers...
Population
| 1600 | 1,000 |
| 1640 | 24,000 |
| 1680 | 150,000 |
| 1700 | 260,000 |
| 1730 | 650,000 |
| 1780 | 2,700,000 |
Output... How to even claim to measure output?
Nevertheless, we have heroic guesses...
| Year | Y/Pop in 2004$ |
| 1710 | $800 |
| 1775 | $1,100 |
| 1840 | $1,800 |
| 1929 | $8,300 |
| 2004 | $40,000 |
Accumulation
Alice Hanson Jones... estates...
Top 20% of households have about 60% of wealth...
Median Wealth Estimates as of 1774:
| Region | Land | Slaves | Other |
|---|---|---|---|
| New England | $2800 | -- | $1200 |
| Middle States | $4800 | -- | $3200 |
| South | $4000 | $1600 | $2400 |
Note that slaves were fully a third of southern wealth, according to AHJ... Big skew in slave ownership...
Politics
| Year | Settlement/Event |
|---|---|
| 1607 | Jamestown |
| 1608 | Quebec |
| 1620 | Plymouth |
| 1624 | New Amsterdam |
| 1630 | Massachusetts Bay Company |
| 1643 | Swedesboro, Pennsylvania |
| 1640-1660 | English Revolution |
| 1689 | "Glorious Revolution" in England |
| 1754-1763 | French and Indian War |
Mercantile System...
Comments on DeLong and Eichengreen
J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen, "From Meltdown to Moral Hazard" http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/CIEP/CIEP_revision06102001.PDF
August 23, 2007 at 01:41 PM in Comments | Permalink | Comments (19)