Global Frontiers and the Rise of Western Europe (from 1500 to 1914)

Edward B. Barbier

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511781131.006

5 - Global Frontiers and the Rise of Western Europe (from 1500 to 1914)

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

Edward B. Barbier

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Edward B. Barbier: Affiliation:
University of Wyoming

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Summary

It is beyond doubt that Europe as a whole gained vast new regions, with access to enormous amounts of natural resources that fuelled her expansion for centuries … These overseas territories provided the raw materials and the markets, the field for profitable investment, and eventually the destination for massive emigration from Europe.

(Findlay 1992, p. 161)

Introduction

Two events at the close of the fifteenth century marked an important turning point in global history: “Though a world economy had been operating for centuries, and even millennia, the decade of the 1490s which saw the voyages of Columbus and da Gama was undoubtedly the decisive moment in the formation of the world economy as we know it today.”

For the next four hundred years, global economic development was spurred by finding and exploiting new frontiers of land and other natural resources. The characteristic feature of such development was a pattern of capital investment, technological innovation and, where environmental conditions permitted, labor migration and settlement dependent on “opening up” new frontiers of land and natural resources. Thus economic progress became synonymous with frontier expansion. Since this pattern was repeated on a worldwide scale, the period from 1500 to 1914 was truly the era of economic expansion and development of “Global Frontiers.”

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Scarcity and Frontiers
How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource Exploitation
, pp. 225 - 305

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511781131.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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