Suchergebnisse

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.

In a seminal paper published nearly forty years ago, Frank Thistlethwaite argued that the migration process ought to be liberated from the stereotypical historiographical tradition. This tradition offered a homogeneous image of undifferentiated waves of uprooted peasants and artisans suffering from epidemics of emigration fever during times of crisis. Instead, he argued, a close study of the individual or group experience of emigrants from particular regions, to specific destinations, would reveal a great deal about the motives, characteristics and pathways of people participating in highly distinctive movements. Thus, emigration might be seen not as a phenomenon in its own right, but as an aspect of a process that stimulated the seasonal circulatory movements of specific occupational groups not only within Europe, but extending outwards around the Mediterranean basin and often culminating in a circular navigation of the 'Atlantic lake'. For millions of European workers, a natural extension of this 'proletariat globetrotting' was an individually-organized one-way voyage to the New World.