The Sixteenth-Century Expansion

Abstract

Hominid beginnings may go back some 15 million years; and according to recent work in Africa the earliest evidence of humanlike creatures dates from about three and a half million years ago. By the fifteenth century, humans numbered perhaps some 500 million, organized by a large variety of modes of production, cultures, and civilizations. These codetermined the socioeconomic formations that would emerge and are still emerging from capitalist transformation, and indeed they helped to determine at which historical time each would enjoy or suffer that transformation.

The discovery of America, and that of the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest events recorded in the history of mankind. Their consequences have already been very great; but, in the short period of between two and three centuries which has elapsed since these discoveries were made, it is impossible that the whole extent of their consequences can have been seen. What benefits, or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those great events, no human wisdom can foresee. By uniting, in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another’s wants, to increase one another’s enjoyments, and to encourage one another’s industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial. To the natives, however, both of the East and the West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.

—Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development …

—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)