Search results

Did the expansion of Europe create large numbers of unfree labourers in Africa, Asia and the New World or was the use of unfree labour in a colonial setting nothing else but an adaptation to the labour traditions of the non-European world? It is fascinating to see how unique free labour actually was in the early modern world. Historically speaking, free labour was usually the exception and unfree labour the rule, especially when we consider non-European controlled labour systems.

In surveying the negative effects of the expansion of Europe it seems difficult to find an area which was worse affected than the Caribbean. The autochthonous population of Amerindians had been decimated on a scale unknown elsewhere. Rather than becoming an attractive refuge for migrant Europeans, the Caribbean became the home of plantation agriculture, which ruthlessly destroyed the existing environment and small scale farming. To top it all, the Caribbean plantations needed a constant influx of labourers. The success of Caribbean exports created a paradox: the region was in constant and increasing need of manpower while at the same time the number European migrants was decreasing rapidly

Has Europe grown rich because it expanded overseas? According to recent scholarship the answer must be no. During the period between 1500 and 1750 Europe's economy did not provide its inhabitants with a per capita income that was significantly higher than that in other parts of the world. Europe – and only the Western part of it – started to become richer after the Industrial Revolution from 1750 onwards. This far most attempts at linking the expansion of Europe to the Industrial Revolution have failed.

The drive towards the abolition of the slave trade at the beginning of the 19th century was not effective until the 1850s. It was perhaps the only migratory intercontinental movement in history which came to a complete stop because of political pressures in spite of the fact that neither the supply nor the demand for African slaves had disappeared.Because of the continuing demand for bonded labour in some of the plantation areas in the New World (notably the Guiana's, Trinidad, Cuba and Brazil) and because of a new demand for bonded labour in the developing sugar and mining industries in Mauritius, Réunion, Queensland (Australia), Natal (South Africa), the Fiji-islands and Hawaii an international search for 'newslaves' started.