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.

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.

During the past few decades, many scholars have studied the various demographic consequences of European overseas expansion. One focus of attention has been the fatal impact of European expansion on the native populations of the New World. Before contact with Europeans, the native populations of the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific were generally free of infectious diseases, and so lacked immunity to diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, which were introduced by Europeans. A second focus of attention has been the mortality among Europeans when they went overseas and encountered new diseases, such as malaria, yellow fever, and cholera, to which they had no immunity. And a third focus of attention has been the mortality among various African, Asian, and Pacific Islander labourers when they were procured as slaves or indentured servants for work on European plantations in various parts of the world.

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

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.

Human migration has a long and complicated history. A survey of the various migration streams reveals that between 1492 and the present, Europeans have benefitted in much greater numbers from the ‘migration escape hatch’ than have Africans and Asians.

The European debate on immigration is marred by stereotypes, such as the supposition that Europe is full, that asylum seekers can be separated from economic immigrants, that the sending countries suffer from brain drain and that immigrants take jobs away from the population in the receiving countries. Many of these arguments can be reversed, but recently immigrants have indeed been costly to the EU taxpayer. However, demographic decline will force Europe to devise a system by which labour immigration can be profitable again for the host countries.