Export Commodities

Debates about western European exceptionalism continue, with no agreement in sight. Why did this relatively underdeveloped area expand around the world, while China, for example, a sophisticated empire, spread abroad mainly by the informal migrations of Chinese people, and then only to the eastern Pacific Ocean, and mostly in modern times?

Economic needs clearly played a part in driving European expansion. One series of discussions points to the intensity of European exchanges, including warfare, migration, and trade, coupled with a relative lack of important raw materials (e.g., precious metals, dyes, and such "miracle" cereals as maize and paddy rice) and items of elite consumption, such as silk textiles. (The industrial uses of coal and petroleum, later plentiful in Europe, had not yet developed.)

Contacts between the medieval Italian city-states and China showed the potential for profit in trade with Asia, particularly through the export to Europe of high-value spices, such as pepper and cinnamon. These contacts were cut off in the later fourteenth century by the black death (an epidemic of bubonic plague that killed nearly a quarter of Europe's population), the breakup of the Tatar Empire, and the incursions of the Ottoman Turks. But with a demographic recovery from the plague-ridden fourteenth century and a combination of Mediterranean and Atlantic maritime and military technologies in the fifteenth century, Europeans resumed their search for valuable commercial commodities.

Portuguese sailors who traveled down the West African coast demonstrated the possibilities for obtaining sub-Saharan gold and ivory. Portuguese fishermen went even further into the ocean in search of fishing grounds to supply the salt fish trade. The kings of Portugal and Castile both sought to take control of the Atlantic islands (Madeira, the Azores, and the Canaries), and their subjects grew increasingly interested in opening maritime routes to the sources of valuable commodities in Africa and Asia.

Cultural influences and geographical location also played a part in making Portugal and Spain into the pioneers of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European exploration and conquest. Some historians emphasize the militarism and crusading religious impulses brought on by centuries of warfare against Islam. Others have pointed out that the coastline from Lisbon to Cadiz in southern Spain is western Europe's most favored corner in an age of sailing ships, with northeasterly winds for part of the year permitting much easier and faster voyages to the south and southwest.

Moreover, Portugal and Spain controlled the clusters of "steppingstone" islands—the Cape Verdes, the Canaries, the Azores, and Madeira—which, two or three weeks out to sea, provided places to rest the crews, land the sick, and resupply with food and water. Thus Lisbon and the small Spanish ports west of Cadiz were especially favored for explorations of the West African coast and for the southern crossing to the Caribbean.

CONDITIONS INFLUENCING THE DEVELOPMENT OF LONG-DISTANCE TRADE

Europeans met very different local conditions after arriving in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the two Americas, and Oceania, and these influenced their ability to exploit the resources that they encountered in these lands. The influences that affected their ability to exercise power and develop long-distance trade can be roughly grouped into three categories: (1) demography and distance; (2) disease barriers; and (3) the impact of disease on native peoples.

Demography and Distance

The Portuguese, after voyages of four to six months in small ships, had the firepower and warlike temperament to bombard and destroy Indian coastal cities. But they could not dream of conquering the Indian landmass, much less that of China, because both were occupied by dense populations and strong state structures, and both shared a similar stock of diseases with the Europeans.

The Portuguese were, then, limited to establishing trading enclaves such as Goa in India and Macao in southern China, and to using warships and strategic forts to tax merchants'ships, especially when they were passing though narrow straits such as Hormuz, Palk, and Malacca. Small cargo holds, plus limits imposed by time, distance, and the cost of freight, restricted exports to Portugal to compact items of high value, such as exotic spices, precious stones, and silks. Only much later could such Europeans as the Dutch and the English occupy larger areas and export mundane commodities like jute, cotton, and tea.

Disease Barriers

Unlike the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa was fertile ground for diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, and sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis). The European newcomers to Africa, lacking immunities to or treatments for such illnesses, suffered disastrous mortality when they attempted to penetrate inland. As a result, they were usually limited to offshore islands, such as Fernando Póo (now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea) and São Tomé, and breezy, cooler enclaves such as Elmina (in Ghana) and Mozambique. Even the southern tip of Africa, with its more temperate climate, saw little European expansion from the coast until the eighteenth century.

In these circumstances, Europe's largest exports were slaves, usually purchased from intermediaries. Most of them were then sold in the Americas as plantation labor. European colonization of tropical Africa had to wait for the medical revolution of the nineteenth century.

The Impact of Disease on Native Peoples

In the Americas, Hawaii, Australia, and other isolated regions, Old World diseases have been described as the "shock troops" of the conquest. No doubt such factors as weapon superiority including gunpowder, destructive and close-cropping animals such as pigs and sheep, and internecine warfare among native polities, all played major roles in the subjugation of these areas. But disease, by reducing indigenous populations so drastically, helped the invaders not only with the conquests, but also with the establishment and maintenance of social control in the new colonies.

In fact, early colonial exports and imports of this third regional category were to a large degree determined by disease and distance. Distance, time, and freight rates inhibited the development of exports from the Americas and Australia, as was the case in Asia. To give one example, the development of sugar as an export was delayed until the reduced native populations could be replaced, in part, by African slaves. Even when this happened, sugar could pay its way to European markets only from the Caribbean and northeast Brazil, which were relatively close to Europe. Distant Mexico, even more distant Peru, and the far-off Philippines could show a profit only when shipping such valuable products as bullion, precious stones, spices, and silks. These were, in fact, the major exports of the first two centuries of colonial rule.

Diseases brought by Europeans and Africans, plus colonial wars, not only aided conquest and the establishment of new regimes, but also cleared space for immigration, especially in such areas as Hawaii, New Zealand, and parts of Australia and America that because of latitude or altitude had relatively temperate climates. Thus the largest European export to these regions was people—soldiers, administrators, farmers, miners, herders, and others. Conquered territories, such as New England, present-day Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand, brutally cleared in whole or in part of their native inhabitants, soon became populated with transplanted Europeans.

COLONIAL GOVERNMENTS AND EXPORTS

The mechanisms of colonial control set up by Europeans also depended to a considerable extent on the above factors. Where the Portuguese were able to establish commercial enclaves, their control was limited to monopolizing sea lanes, manipulating local politics and trade, forming strategic alliances with native rulers, staging occasional shows of force, and incorporating marginal peoples, such as untouchables and low-caste fisherfolk. Later colonial rulers, such as the British in Hong Kong and the Dutch in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), used essentially the same tactics.

In the densely-populated regions of India, where European newcomers never numbered more than a tiny minority, the British used more elaborate methods. Local troops under British officers defeated rebellions and followed them with spectacular ceremonial punishments. Native elites were co-opted and often educated in England, new broker classes were assigned to serve as bureaucrats and minor traders, and trade and trade items were stimulated or discouraged to suit imperial needs.

In spite of enormous population losses and considerable Spanish immigration, the densely inhabited parts of America remained largely indigenous during the Spanish colonial period. There, imperial rule and the manipulation of trade, trade items, and exports had to adopt different methods.

Both the so-called Aztec and Inca empires had been based on various forms of tribute exactions from the peasantry in goods and labor. The Spanish regime, accustomed to such tributary systems, continued them with little change at first. Products such as maize, beans, and cotton cloth were collected in large quantities, then sold within the cities or redistributed via official auctions. Luxury goods such as feathers, seashells, and obsidian, culturally useless to Spaniards, were soon eliminated from the tribute system, and silver coinage and European crops and animals replaced them.

Early efforts to find American commodities suitable for export to Europe led to the development of plantation crops such as sugar and tobacco. However, it was the discovery of rich sources of precious metals that underpinned the rapid development of economic relations between Europe and the Americas. Spaniards found silver in great quantities in two major areas: in an arc of mines, including Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí, northwest of Mexico City; and in Upper Peru (now Bolivia), where the famous "rich hill" of Potosí may well be the richest silver mine ever discovered.

Here again, especially in Peru, the Spanish found a system of labor drafts, the Incan mita, which they expanded and used mainly as a way of supplying labor to Potosí. Thus, tribute payments and silver mines supplied Spanish America's great export—refined silver bars and silver coinage, sometimes debased. Large annual fleets, loading in Veracruz in Mexico and ports on the Isthmus of Panama, trundled slowly across the Atlantic to Seville and later Cadiz.

Conspicuous consumption of precious metals had long been a feature of European noble courts and of ecclesiastical ornamentation, but until the discovery of America, commercial Europe had been short of a high value, malleable, symbolic coinage. The influx of American silver caused what was apparently the first European general inflation, as well as a rapid monetization of even mundane transactions and a consequent speeding up of exchanges and credit understandings based on silver. Much of the imported silver soon left Spain for more advanced European economies, such as France and later the Netherlands. American silver also fuelled the development of European trade with the East.

As trade with the Pacific expanded, American silver was transferred across the Pacific via galleons traveling from Acapulco in Mexico to Manila in the Philippines; or directly to China by the age-old silk route across central Asia; or by the much longer route around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean. Europe's problem, until the British organized the export of opium from India to China, was that China had little need of European goods, but Europeans craved Chinese and other Asian products, especially silks, teas, and spices. The solution for Europe was to pay in silver, much of which was turned into coinage or was hoarded.

Gold exports to Europe had an older history than the Iberian conquest of America. The trans-Saharan trade from coastal West Africa, via the great warehouse cities of Gao and Timbuktu in present-day Mali, was precolonial. Forest gold was exchanged for salt and Mediterranean goods as early as the establishment of the Mali Empire of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the trade continued into the colonial era.

After this trade declined, the hiatus in European gold imports was filled by gold panned from streams after the Spanish conquests of the major Caribbean islands. Hispaniola (the island now occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was the main source. The decline in the native population, along with shrinking yields from gold-bearing streams, put an end to this brief boom and was one reason why Spaniards left the islands to seek other sources of wealth on the American mainland. The empty Antillean landscapes became filled with semiferal cattle, and the main export became hides.

MANILA GALLEON TRADE

After the discovery of a sea route from the Philippines to Mexico in 1565, the Spanish began employing a highly profitable, though dangerous, trade route. Ships especially outfitted to carry large cargoes set sail from Acapulco, carrying silver mined in the Americas, and headed to Manila, where the metal was exchanged for Chinese silks, porcelains, and ivory, as well as for fragrant goods from the Spice Islands and jewels from Burma, Ceylon, and Siam. The galleons then returned the much sought-after Asian goods back to Acapulco, where they were carried overland to Mexico City and then sent across the Atlantic to Spain. The first Manila galleon set sail for Acapulco in 1573.

Whereas the wind-aided passage from Acapulco to Manila took only eight to ten weeks, the return trip from Manila to Acapulco took between four and six months. Navigating the treacherous Philippine archipelago with an overloaded galleon often took over a month, and many ships that did not complete the journey before typhoon season began perished in the rough weather. Because the profits from the Manila galleon trade averaged 30 to 50 percent, adequate provisions were often rejected in favor of loading more goods on the galleons. Consequently, many ships saw 30 to 40 percent of their crews perish, with losses of 75 percent not uncommon in some years. Despite these risks, however, the Manila galleon trade continued for nearly 250 years, remaining an important source of income for Spanish merchants.

Gold from the Chocó in what is today Colombia was mined mostly by black slaves. The next boom arose in Minas Gerais in Portuguese colonial Brazil. Eighteenth-century exports were so large that some have described Portugal of that era as a gold empire in contrast to Spain's silver empire. Gold exports also arrived from convict-era Australia, from South Africa, and from elsewhere. The famous North American gold strikes in California and the Yukon were postcolonial for the most part.

American depopulation gave rise to a transatlantic trade of its own. As populations collapsed, imported cattle and horses grazed on emptied fields and eventually swarmed everywhere. Meat consumption, much of it as jerky (dried meat strips), increased enormously in parts of the Americas. Still, the major resultant American product was hides, which were shipped to Europe in huge quantities, especially from the Caribbean islands in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when the native population had vanished and many Spaniards had moved on to mainland conquests. Lacking inexpensive glass, Europeans used hides for many kinds of containers, door and window coverings, shoes, and clothing, and, in an era of equine transportation, for saddles, tack, and wheel rims.

FOOD EXPORTS AND DIETARY CHANGES

Europe's expansion around the world changed food preferences and diet in many places. Although the American colonies did not export large quantities of foodstuffs, the Americas provided dynamic crops unknown elsewhere. Many parts of Africa subsist today on a diet of American maize, probably first brought to the west coast by Portuguese ships. American cacao in the form of chocolate occupies a special niche worldwide, although most of it today is grown in the Ivory Coast and nearby countries. Chinese, Indian, or Sri Lankan tea is the favorite beverage of many, especially in Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Coffee, imported from areas that, for the most part, were not colonized, is even more popular worldwide. The potato originated in an Andean tuber; tomatoes are another New World cultigen; and even Indian curry is based on chilies, originally found in America.

THE INDUSTRIAL AND SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS

Two eighteenth-century European intensifications dramatically changed the nature and volume of colonial exports. The first was the growth of the old West African slave trade. Millions of people were brutally exported to Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. Plantation slavery in the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies gave rise to a sugar boom of such intensity and relative efficiency that sugar became the basis of many European fortunes and a staple of the diet there. In fact, some scholars would add sugar, a cheap and plentiful source of calories via candies, soft drinks, jams, and pastries, to coal and iron ore as essential ingredients of the Industrial Revolution in northwestern Europe.

The other relevant phenomenon of the eighteenth century was the Industrial Revolution itself. The rise of the factory and of mass production was accompanied by significant technological advances in transportation, both by land and sea, and by the beginnings of modern sanitary and epidemiological medicine. There were three main consequences for colonial exports. The first was the increased European demand for cheap, abundant raw materials such as cotton, hemp, coal, unrefined ores, and plantation foodstuffs.

In addition, the revolution in sea transportation meant that the constricting determinants of time, distance, cargo space, and freight rates were all diminished. This meant, in turn, that common mass-produced goods could now be transported for long distances and still show a profit. Australian coal could begin to supply naval stations all the way from Japan to California to central Chile. Indian and Egyptian cotton filled the needs of the mills of Lancashire in England (a role later taken by the U.S. South). The common people of Europe began to consume enormous quantities of Asian teas, Middle Eastern and Latin American coffees, and African chocolate.

The Industrial Revolution, along with lower transportation costs and an increased speed of delivery, also led to a significant rise in mass-produced, inexpensive, European exports to the colonies, where imperial preferences and monopolistic privileges were additional disadvantages for colonial producers. Examples abound. Inexpensive British textiles ruined many, although not all, local mills all the way from Mexico to Chile and throughout the Indian Subcontinent. The metallurgical revolution, with its inexpensive pots and pans, furniture, and tools undercut artisanal production throughout the colonial world. Aniline dyes from Germany ruined local and international trades in such natural colorants as indigo and cochineal. With the new availability of rapid transportation, millions of the poor left Europe for the colonies, where they expelled native peoples from their lands and purchased some of their needs from Europe.

The third consequence of the Industrial Revolution was the opening up of previously exempted areas to European colonization and exploitation. With the medical revolution, sub-Saharan Africa became less deadly for Europeans, and the race for Africa was on, bringing intense competition among the leading western European powers to establish colonies there. African colonial production of raw materials and foodstuffs, from diamonds and gold to palm oil, rubber, ivory, tin, and copper, flowed north. The Belgian Congo was perhaps the leading example of a brutal, export-oriented, colonial economy, although much of its population, as elsewhere, continued as subsistence farmers.

Other areas also became exploitable. French Indochina, Burma (Myanmar), Malaya, and even parts of Borneo and Sulawesi in present-day Indonesia witnessed the rise of plantations and mines, as well as exports of such goods as rice, copra, timber, tin, and rubber. Latecomers as colonialists were Russia, which gradually seized Siberia and much of central Asia, and the United States, which conquered Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines in 1898. These colonies quickly became tied to the U.S. market.

Many colonial exports and imports were far from tangible. Europeans took with them their cultures, ideologies, and institutions. Some of these imports, such as racism, were noxious. Others, such as the fruits of the Enlightenment, no doubt helped to weaken caste divisions in some regions, and bore within them the paradoxical seeds of the future anticolonial struggles of the subject peoples.

Western Europe also imported, acculturated, and educated many native elites, in some cases setting them further apart from their own people. Again, some of the results were contrary to the intentions of the colonial powers: Ho Chi Min (1890–1969) of Vietnam, partly educated in Paris and Moscow; Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) of Ghana, who studied in both the United States and Great Britain; and José Rizal (1861–1896) of the Philippines, educated in Spain, are three of the many examples of Western-educated leaders of colonial independence struggles.

The European search for resources that could be converted into commodities for long-distance trade had several important consequences. First, it helped stimulate the drive to establish overseas colonies in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Second, colonial exports, such as maize, potatoes, cacao, and quinine, revolutionized diets and medicines around the world.

Some colonial products, such as tobacco, were noxious. Some, such as opium, were a blessing for humanity in the form of pain-relieving opiates such as morphine, but also a curse in their use as addictive drugs. Even the potato, which so vastly increased population and production on marginal lands, had disadvantages, since it also caused the development of fragile monocultures. The Great Irish Famine of the mid-1800s arose from political decisions made by the colonial power, but overdependence on the potato, struck by blight, contributed greatly to the disaster.

Sugar is a case apart. Introduced to the colonies from Europe, it was then reexported to the industrializing world in quantity, where it revolutionized diets, not always for the better. Sugar also provided the inexpensive calories needed to feed workers brought from the countryside to the factory.

Bullion's effects have been studied more than most exports. It caused inflation, but also provided a widely recognized monetary exchange, thus speeding up exchanges and the extension of credit. The hunger for precious metals, of course, led to some of the world's most dreadful injustices. Luxury products such as silk, spices, some dyestuffs, and exotic perfumes were consumed largely by elites and may have reinforced class divisions by making them more apparent.

The slave trade is yet another special case. Today, no one can reasonably defend the inhumane exploitation of so many millions, but it must be recognized that, against their will, African slaves built the economies of the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America. Slaves also contributed to the emergence of new and distinctive cultures. The role of convicts and indentured servants exported to the colonies, though less notable, also deserves mention.

In the long term, colonial exports fueled the Industrial Revolution, homogenized cultures worldwide, and helped to reduce the stock of languages and other cultural differences. In short, export commodities helped to shape many of the basic characteristics of our world today.

see also Cacao; Cotton; Sugar Cultivation and Trade.

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