Colin wrote: On the question of the role of colonial trade in European growth, however, we risk going back over ground covered a year ago, when you raised this question. I raised two points of analysis drawn from Blackburn's 1997 book; let's call them the "leading sector" and "scale economies" arguments. We had a brief back-and-forth on how to frame the question, but you never responded to these points. Could you do so now? You also raise again the "1% of GNP" argument: > O'Brien's findings, however, cannot be pushed aside. > ... the colonial profits > re-invested would have amounted to only 1 % of GNP, or 10% > of gross investment. Which Barkley answered a year ago, saying > Ricardo, > 1% of GNP directed towards capital investment is > non-trivial, especially over time, and especially if it is > concentrated in crucial sectors, as the returns to > Liverpool-based slave traders in England certainly were. > Barkley Rosser The archives don't show a response from you, and it's an important point. The same consideration would apply to your more recent raising of O'Brien's claim that > colonial profits permitted British gross annual investment > to be 7% higher than it would have otherwise been. So, > Wallerstein played around with this figure to show that "it > mattered". These are not insignificant figures especially if we disaggregate. And indeed as Marx and many others emphasize this is vital because we are talking about qualitative change in national economies. Simply comparing a sector like textiles to the mass of the existing European economy may not tell you a whole lot. Ricardo: Colin, let's not lose track of my earlier post which distinctly recognized the importance of the colonial trade through the re-export market which obviously stimulated intra-European trade both indirectly and directly. Did it play a *decisive* role in the Industrial Revolution? The numbers seem to say no. I don't recall Robin Blackburn's arguments (I took a course with him) except that our exchange then was specifically about the slave trade. Now, if we take Eric Williams's argument (who everyone would agree wrote highly readeable, masterful histories on the West Indies and the slave trade), it is simply an exaggeration to say that slavery provided most of the profits in the formation of British capital. Someone has estimated that the percentage of slave profits in the making of British capital was a scrimpy 0.11% (Anstey)! Engerman, for his part, has calculated "the gross value of slave trade output" to England's national income to be 1%, to rise to 1.7% in 1770. These two sources I have taken from David Landes's recently published book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), which I am reading now (as well as using for one of my classes) as part of my evaluation of Frank. (BTW Landes and Frank just met this last December at Northeastern, heralded in some lists as a major debate, with cameras and all. Frank had been pestering him for a while to come and debate him as Landes's book takes a position too "eurocentric" for Re-Orient. I will bring Landes's argument soon, as it will connect to the issue of China's economy in 1400-1800; but if I may anticipate a point, I am no follower of Landes, who I think is methodological closer to Frank than people assume.) But in his book, Landes, in a a section which coincidentally I read this morning as part of my lecture, is quite fair to Williams's thesis, and reminds us that the slave trade was part of a broader "triangular trade" - which is why I framed the whole issue in terms of the colonial trade - adding that the role of this trade consisted less on the profits made from it than on its forward and backward linkages. Nonetheless, he concludes, correctly, that this trade accelerated an industrialization processs which would have happened only more slowly. I think this answers/conforms to some of what you say later. The additional point you make that "the fact that silver from Potosi ended up in Canton does not mean that Europe lost. The key, surely, was Europe's ability to position itself in an international trading system" is precisely what I said Frank says about the colonial trade, that even if O'Brien is right what matters is that Europe gained a ticket into the world-economy as a result of this exploitation. But I already showed that there was no world economy but two dominant ones of which the intra-European was the dominant. Colin concludes: "But I would ask you to consider whether the very question of locating e.g. "the main factor in the industrialization of England" inside or outside Europe is sensible. Surely the force of AGF's argument is that we have had a truly international economy for a very long time." Again, the numbers are against Frank's claim there was a world economy dominated by Asia, since the Asian economy was much smaller (with very few links to the European one) as compared to the intra-European world-economy...Perhaps the sibling rivalry between Louis Proyect and Doug Henwood is obscuring my points.
