5.2 The Rise of Global Markets

The Atlantic economy was a web of trade connecting Europe, West Africa and the Americas. The 1700s were the peak of the Atlantic slave trade: more than 6 million enslaved Africans were forced across the ocean in that century alone. Britain became the largest carrier, with ports like Liverpool and Bristol, and France's Nantes and Bordeaux grew rich too.

Plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil grew sugar, and North American colonies grew tobacco, rice and, later, cotton. French Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti, became perhaps the most profitable colony in the world by producing huge amounts of sugar and coffee with the labor of about half a million enslaved people.

• Europe to Africa: textiles, guns, metal goods, alcohol.
• Africa to the Americas: enslaved people, on the Middle Passage.
• Americas to Europe: sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton, indigo.
• Europe to the Americas: manufactured goods for colonists.

In Asia, Europeans mostly traded with powerful local states rather than ruling them, at least at first. The British and French East India Companies competed in India from fortified trading posts like Madras and Pondicherry. As the Mughal Empire weakened, the companies made alliances with local rulers and trained Indian soldiers called sepoys.

At the Battle of Plassey (1757), Robert Clive of the British East India Company defeated the ruler of Bengal and his French allies. In 1765 the company won the right to collect Bengal's taxes, turning a trading company into a territorial ruler. The Dutch East India Company controlled much of the East Indies (today's Indonesia), making money from spices and coffee, until it was dissolved in 1799 and the Dutch state took over. In China, after 1757 Europeans could trade only through the port of Canton under strict rules, buying tea, silk and porcelain mostly with silver.

Goods once reserved for the rich became everyday items. Sugar sweetened tea and coffee across all classes in Britain. Printed cotton cloth from India was so popular that British laws restricted its import to protect local wool and silk makers, which later encouraged British cotton manufacturing. Shops, advertising and fashion spread.

This connected to the industrious revolution (see 3.3): families worked longer and sold more labor to buy these goods. European consumers' everyday comforts depended on enslaved labor and colonial power.

Global trade enriched merchants and states, funded navies and helped build the capital and markets that would later support industrialization. It also made colonial wars more likely, as in the Seven Years' War (see 5.3), and it rested on the suffering of millions of Africans.