CHAPTER 19
The Expansion of Europe in the Eighteenth Century
INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES
After reading and studying this chapter, students should be able to describe the causes and effects
of the agricultural revolution and explain why certain nations led the way in these developments.
They should be able to discuss Europe’s dramatic rise in population in the eighteenth century.
They should also be able to assess the contribution of cottage industries to Europe’s economic
and social development. Finally, they should be able to discuss the place of colonial markets in
Europe’s transformation and identify the key costs and conflicts that resulted from the growth of
global trade.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I.
II.
Agriculture and the Land
A. The Open-Field System
1. The open-field system was the great accomplishment of medieval agriculture.
2. Three field rotations helped keep fields fertile.
3. Traditional village rights reinforced traditional patterns of farming.
4. Peasants were exploited in a number of ways, with those in Eastern Europe
generally the worst off.
B. The Agricultural Revolution
1. The use of more complex systems of crop rotation increased the amount of land
under cultivation.
2. Grain crops were alternated with nitrogen-storing crops.
3. The open-field system was ended by “enclosing” the fields, particularly in
England.
4. The enclosure movement meant an end to common lands and to the
independence of the rural poor who relied on them to survive.
C. The Leadership of the Low Countries and England
1. Prior to the agricultural revolution, Holland was already the most advanced
country in Europe in many areas. By the mid-seventeenth century intensive
farming was well established throughout the Netherlands.
2. One important Dutch advantage was a very dense population.
3. The English were adept at learning from the Dutch.
4. Jethro Tull gained fame in experimental agriculture and animal husbandry.
5. By the mid-eighteenth century, English agriculture was in the process of a
radical transformation.
6. Half of all English land was enclosed by 1700.
7. By 1700 a distinctive pattern of landownership and production existed in
England.
8. Enclosure marked the emergence of market-oriented estate agriculture and of a
landless rural proletariat.
The Beginning of the Population Explosion
A. Limitations on Population Growth
1. Famine, disease, and war were the usual checks on growth.
2. Europe’s population growth was kept fairly low.
B. The New Pattern of the Eighteenth Century
1. Fewer deaths occurred, in part due to the disappearance of the plague.
2. Advances in medicine did little to decrease the death rate.
3. Improved sanitation promoted better public health.
4. An increase in the food supply meant fewer famines and epidemics.
III. Cottage Industry and Urban Guilds
A. The Putting-Out System
1. The two main participants in the putting-out system were the merchant capitalist
and the rural worker.
2. Merchants loaned, or “put out,” raw materials to workers who processed the raw
materials and returned finished goods to the merchant.
3. The putting-out system grew because it had competitive advantages.
4. Rural manufacturing did not spread across Europe at an even rate.
B. The Textile Industry
1. Throughout most of Europe’s history, the textile industry has employed more
people than any other industry.
2. Most participants in cottage industry worked in textiles.
3. Cottage industry was a family enterprise.
4. Relations between workers and employers were often marked by conflict.
C. Urban Guilds
1. Europe’s guild system reached its highest point in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
2. Guild masters were at the top of the world of work.
3. Guilds jealously restricted their membership.
4. The power of guilds varied across Europe.
5. Critics of guilds saw them as obstacles to innovation and progress.
6. Over the course of the eighteenth century, some guilds grew more accessible to
women.
D. The Industrious Revolution
1. One scholar has used the term “industrious revolution” to describe Europe’s
social and economic transformation.
2. Northern European households made new choices about the allocation of time
and resources.
3. The impact of these new patterns of the quality of life for ordinary people is
hotly debated.
4. Economic and social change in the eighteenth century laid the foundation for the
Industrial Revolution.
IV. Building the World Economy
A. Mercantilism and Colonial Wars
1. English mercantilism was characterized by government regulations that served
the interests both of the state and of private individuals. Mercantilism in other
European countries generally served only state interests.
2. The Navigation Acts of 16511663 were a form of economic warfare against
Dutch domination of Atlantic shipping. They gave British merchants and ship
owners a near monopoly on trade with Britain’s North American colonies.
3. After defeating the Dutch, England fought a series of wars with France for
maritime domination of the world.
a) War of the Spanish Succession (17011713)
b) War of the Austrian Succession (17401748)
c) The Seven Years’ War (17561763) ended with British winning full
control over India and North America.
4. London grew into the West’s largest and richest city.
5.
B.
C.
D.
E.
F.
Colonial populations provided an expanding market for English manufactured
goods.
6. English exports were increasingly balanced and diversified.
7. Despite their losses, the French profited enormously from colonial trade.
Land and Labor in British America
1. In Britain’s North American colonies cheap land and scarce labor resulted in the
following:
a) Rapid increase in the colonial population in the eighteenth century.
b) Import of African slaves to tobacco plantations in southern colonies.
c) Growing prosperity for British colonists.
The Atlantic Slave Trade
1. The forced migration of millions of Africans was a key element in the Atlantic
system and western European economic expansion.
2. After 1700, Britain was the undisputed leader of the slave trade.
3. Increasing demand led to rising prices for African slaves.
4. Africans participated in the trade.
5. After 1775, a campaign to abolish slavery developed in Britain.
Revival in Colonial Latin America
1. Under Philip V (r. 17001746) Spain recovered economically and successfully
defended her American colonies.
2. Rising silver exports in the eighteenth century helped create a class of wealthy
Creole (people of Spanish blood born in America) merchants.
3. Creole estate owners dominated much of the peasant population through debt
peonage, really a form of serfdom.
4. The large middle group in the Spanish colonies were the mestizos, the offspring
of Spanish men and Indian women.
Trade and Empire in Asia
1. Europeans vied for dominance of Asian trade.
2. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch became major players in the Asian
spice trade.
3. The Dutch replaced the Portuguese as the dominant European power in the
Indian Ocean trade world, transforming Asian business partners into dependents.
4. In the eighteenth century, the Dutch faced fierce competition from the English
East India Company.
5. The British focused their attention on India.
6. Britain’s great rival in India was France.
7. By the early 1800s, the British had gained economic and political dominance
over much of the subcontinent.
Adam Smith and Economic Liberalism
1. Smith challenged mercantilist ideas with his defense of free trade and his
argument for keeping government interference in the economy to a minimum
(The Wealth of Nations [1776]).
2. Smith was one of the Enlightenment’s most original thinkers.
3. His work became the basis of the classic argument for economic liberalism.
Primary Sources for Review
Turgot Abolishes the French Guilds
Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot
(1774)
In almost all the towns the exercise of the different arts and trades is concentrated in the hands of a
small number of masters, united in corporations, who alone can, to the exclusion of all other
citizens, make or sell the articles belonging to their particular industry. Any person who, by
inclination or necessity, intends following an art or trade can only do so by acquiring the mastership
[i.e., freedom of the corporation] after a probation as long and vexatious as it is superfluous. By
having to satisfy repeated exactions, the money he had so much need of in order to start his trade or
open his workshop has been consumed in mere waste. ...
Citizens of all classes are deprived both of the right to choose the workmen they would employ, and
of the advantages they would enjoy from competition operating toward improvements in
manufacture and reduction in price. Often one cannot get the simplest work done without its
having to go through the hands of several workmen of different corporations, and without enduring
the delays, tricks, and exaction which the pretensions of the different corporations, and the caprices
of their arbitrary and mercenary directors, demand and encourage. ...
Among the infinite number of unreasonable regulations, we find in some corporations that all are
excluded from them except the sons of masters, or those who marry the widows of masters. Others
reject all those whom they call "strangers,"--that is, those born in another town. In many of them
for a young man to be married is enough to exclude him from the apprenticeship, and consequently
from the mastership. The spirit of monopoly which has dictated the making of these statutes has
been carried out to the excluding of women even from the trades the most suitable to their sex,
such as embroidery, which they are forbidden to exercise on their own account. ...
God, by giving to man wants, and making his recourse to work necessary to supply them, has made
the right to work the property of every man, and this property is the first, the most sacred, the most
imprescriptible of all. ...
It shall be free to all persons, of whatever quality or condition they may be, even to all foreigners, to
undertake and to exercise in all our kingdom, and particularly in our good city of Paris, whatever
kind of trade and whatever profession of art or industry may seem good to them; for which purpose
we now extinguish and suppress all corporations and communities of merchants and artisans, as
well as all masterships and guild directories. We abrogate all privileges, statutes, and regulations of
the said corporations, so that none of our subjects shall be troubled in the exercise of his trade or
profession by any cause or under any pretext whatever.
Preamble to Turgot's Edict Abolishing Guilds, in James Harvey Robinson, ed., Readings in European History (Boston:
Ginn, 1904), 2:389.
An Eyewitness Describes the Slave Trade in Guinea
Captain Willem Bosman
(c. 1700)
Not a few in our country fondly imagine that parents here sell their children, men their
wives, and one brother the other. But those who think so, do deceive themselves; for this
never happens on any other account but that of necessity, or some great crime; but most of
the slaves that are offered to us, are prisoners of war, which are sold by the victors as their
booty.
When these slaves come to Fida, they are put in prison all together; and when we treat
concerning buying them, they are all brought out together in a large plain; where, by our
surgeons, whose province it is, they are thoroughly examined, even to the smallest member,
and that naked both men and women, without the least distinction or modesty. ...
The invalids and the maimed being thrown out, as I have told you, the remainder are
numbered, and it is entered who delivered them. In the meanwhile, a burning iron, with the
arms or name of the companies, lies in the fire, with which ours are marked on the breast.
This is done that we may distinguish them from the slaves of the English, French, or others
(which are also marked with their mark), and to prevent the Negroes exchanging them for
worse, at which they have a good hand. I doubt not but this trade seems very barbarous to
you, but since it is followed by mere necessity, it must go on; but we yet take all possible care
that they are not burned too hard, especially the women, who are more tender than the men.
We are seldom long detained in the buying of these slaves, because their price is established,
the women being one fourth or fifth part cheaper than the men. The disputes which we
generally have with the owners of these slaves are, that we will not give them such goods as
they ask for them, especially the boesies [cowry shells] (as I have told you, the money of this
country) of which they are very fond, though we generally make a division on this head, in
order to make one part of the goods help off another; because those slaves which are paid
for in boesies, cost the company one half more than those bought with other goods. ...
When we have agreed with the owners of the slaves, they are returned to their prison; where,
from that time forwards, they are kept at our charge, cost us two pence a day a slave; which
serves to subsist them, like our criminals, on bread and water: so that to save charges, we
send them on board our ships with the very first opportunity, before which their masters
strip them of all they have on their backs; so that they come to us starknaked, as well women
as men: in which condition they are obliged to continue, if the master of the ship is not so
charitable (which he commonly is) as to bestow something on them to cover their
nakedness.
You would really wonder to see how these slaves live on board; for though their number
sometimes amounts to six or seven hundred, yet by the careful management of our masters
of ships, they are so [well] regulated, that it seems incredible. And in this particular our
nation exceeds all other Europeans; for as the French, Portuguese, and English slave-ships
are always foul and stinking; on the contrary, ours are for the most part clean and neat.
The slaves are fed three times a day with indifferent good victuals, and much better than
they eat in their own country. Their lodging place is divided into two parts; one of which is
appointed for the men, the other for the women, each sex being kept apart. Here they lie as
close together as it is possible for them to be crowded. ...
Credits: Willem Bosman, "A New and Accurate Description ... " (London: 1721), in David Northrup, ed., The
Atlantic Slave Trade (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1994), 72-73.
The Wealth of Nations: A Natural Law of Economy
Adam Smith
(1776)
To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the
division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a
workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct
trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of
which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with
his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the
way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but
it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades.
One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth
grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct
operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade
by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this
manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are
all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two
or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were
employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct
operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated
with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them
about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins
of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of fortyeight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight
thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day.
But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having
been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made
twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth,
perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of
performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different
operations.
In every other art and manufacture, the effects of the division of labour are similar to what
they are in this very trifling one: though, in many of them, the labour can neither be so much
subdivided, nor reduced to so great a simplicity of operation. The division of labour,
however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of
the productive powers of labour. The separation of different trades and employments from
one another, seems to have taken place, in consequence of this advantage. This separation
too is generally carried furthest in those countries which enjoy the highest degree of industry
and improvement; what is the work of one man in a rude state of society, being generally
that of several in an improved one. ...
... As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in
the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of
the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the
society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public
interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to
that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in
such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and
he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was
no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By
pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than
when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who
affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among
merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it. ...
The natural advantages which one country has over another in producing particular
commodities are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to
struggle with them. By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be
raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the
expence for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be
a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the
making of claret and burgundy in Scotland? But if there would be a manifest absurdity in
turning towards any employment, thirty times more of the capital and industry of the
country, than would be necessary to purchase from foreign countries an equal quantity of
the commodities wanted, there must be an absurdity, though not altogether so glaring, yet
exactly of the same kind, in turning towards any such employment a thirtieth, or even a three
hundredth part more of either. Whether the advantages which one country has over another,
be natural or acquired, is in this respect of no consequence. As long as the one country has
those advantages, and the other wants them, it will always be more advantageous for the
latter, rather to buy of the former than to make. It is an acquired advantage only, which one
artificer has over his neighbour, who exercises another trade; and yet they both find it more
advantageous to buy of one another, than to make what does not belong to their particular
trades. ...
Adam Smith, in Edwin Cannan, ed., The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 4-5, 423, 425426.
Geography
Use Outline Map 19.1 to answer the following questions.
1. On Outline Map 19.1 below, and using Map 19.3 in the textbook as a reference, mark
the colonial holdings of the European countries in North America in 1755.
2. What territorial changes took place in North America after 1763?
3. Which European country gained the most territory after 1763?
4. Which country lost the most territory after 1763?
5. Did the largest colonial holdings go to the largest European countries or was a position
on the Atlantic the key factor?
Key Terms & Definitions
Agricultural revolution – The period from the mid 17th century on in Europe during
which great agricultural progress was made and the fallow was gradually eliminated.
Atlantic slave trade – Forced migration of millions of Africans to work in servitude
during the 18th century. By the peak decade of the 1780s, shipments of black men and
women averaged about 80,000 per year.
Common lands – The open meadows maintained by villages for public use.
Cottage industry – Domestic industry, a stage of rural industrial development with wage
workers and hand tools that necessarily preceded the emergence of large-scale factory
industry.
Creoles – People of Spanish blood born in America.
Crop rotation – The system by which farmers would rotate the types of crops grown in
each field as to not deplete the soil of its natural resources.
Debt peonage – A system which allowed a planter or rancher to keep his workers/slaves
in perpetual debt bondage by periodically advancing food, shelter, and a little money; it is
a form of serfdom.
Economic liberalism – Based on the writings of Adam Smith, it is the belief in free trade
and competition. Smith argued that the invisible hand of free competition would benefit
all individuals, rich and poor.
Enclosure – The idea to enclose individual share of the pastures as a way of farming
more effectively.
Guild system – Found in most of Europe in the 17th & 18th centuries and were used as a
means to encourage high quality production and collect taxes.
Industrious revolution – A term to describe the burst of major inventions and technical
changes they had witnessed in certain industries.
Mercantilism – System of economic regulations aimed at increasing the power of the
state.
Mestizos – The offspring of Spanish men and Indian women.
Navigation Acts – The result of the English desire to increase both military power and
private wealth, required that goods imported from Europe into England and Scotland be
carried on British-owned ships with British crews or on ships of the country producing
the article, etc.
Open-field system – A system of village farming developed by peasants where the land
was divided into several large fields which were in turn cut into strips. There were no
divided fences or hedges and it was farmed as a community.
Proletarianization – The transformation of a large number of small peasant farmers into
landless rural wage earners.
Putting-out system – Term used to describe the 18th century rural industry
Treaty of Paris – Ratified British victory on all colonial fronts in 1763