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Chapter 4 - Slave-Based Commodity Production and the Growth of Atlantic Commerce

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2009

Joseph E. Inikori
Affiliation:
University of Rochester, New York
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Summary

THE EVIDENCE PRESENTED in the two preceding chapters makes it clear enough that the Industrial Revolution in England was the first example of trade-led economic development, and that the sources of trade expansion, or the “Commercial Revolution,” which propelled the process to higher grounds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were located in the Atlantic world. The task in this chapter is to show the factors that made possible the expansion of Atlantic commerce between 1500 and 1850. For this purpose, it is pertinent to examine the state of trade and production in the major regions of the Atlantic world in the middle decades of the fifteenth century before the establishment of regular seaborne contact across the Atlantic. This exercise helps to show the factors which operated to promote or constrain the growth of trade in the major regions of the Atlantic in the centuries preceding the development of multilateral trade across the Atlantic. It is argued that in the centuries or decades preceding the opening up of the Atlantic to regular seaborne commerce, the main constraint to the growth of production and consumption in the individual regions was limited opportunity to trade. In turn, limited opportunity to trade resulted from several factors – the range of resources in each region of the Atlantic; the level of development of the division of labor (local, regional, and international); inland transportation costs; and government trade policies.

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Chapter
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Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England
A Study in International Trade and Economic Development
, pp. 156 - 214
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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