Re: Spain: colonizer and colonized

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Julio Huato:
> So, when fully taking into account the damage to the environment, the
> adjusted measure of productivity in the capitalist countries will yield
> zero percent growth throughout their capitalist history.  Thus, Western
> European societies have been stagnant in the last four centuries."  I'd
> like to see your figures.

I suggest that you read Clive Ponting's "A Green History of the World" for
more information on this. If you take into account the number of indigenous
peoples who were slaughtered in the process of securing the New World for
capitalist development and add that to the waste of natural resources in
producing coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, etc. and presented the bill to the
descendants of the conquistadores and their northern counterparts, the net
effect would be to reduce Europe to 3rd world standards. All this robbery
had the net effect of enriching Europe.

Ponting writes:

The virtual extermination of fur-bearing animals in western Europe and the
western parts of Russia by the early sixteenth century meant that from the
start of settlement in, and trade with, North America the search for furs
was one of the driving forces behind European expansion across the
continent. At the first contact between the French and the Indians in 1534
the Europeans exchanged their goods for beaver skins and they soon
established an organised trade in furs. For a long period the Europeans did
not trap the animals themselves but used the Indians to do so and traded
the goods the local inhabitants wanted in return for furs. The habits of
the beaver made it very easy to trap. They settled in dense colonies and
were also sedentary, making it possible for the trappers to concentrate on
particular areas. But their low birth rate also made it very difficult for
them to recover from overhunting. What the fur traders and trappers
preferred to do was exploit an area until it was no longer economic to
continue and then move on. For example, by 1600 the region around the St
Lawrence river was exhausted as was upstate New York shortly afterwards -
beaver were common on the Hudson river in 1610 but extinct by 1640.

By the mid-seventeenth century the trade was well organised in the interior
of North America, mainly along the St Lawrence river, and controlled
through a series of fortified trading posts. The rivalry between the French
and the British Hudson's Bay Company was intense and ensured a high rate of
exploitation. Europeans were also becoming fur trappers as well as traders.
(The consequences for wildlife in the area where the trappers wintered
could be dire. For example, during the winter of 1709-10 at Port Nelson
eighty men consumed 90,000 partridges and 25,000 hares.) The scale of the
fur trade at this time can be judged from a series of examples. In just one
year (1742) Fort York traded 130,000 beavers and 9,000 martens and at one
trading post in Canada in the 17603 the Hudson's Bay Company was taking
nearly 100,000 beaver skins a year. In 1743 the French port of La Rochelle
(one of the centres of the trade with Canada) imported 127,000 beaver
skins, 30,000 martens, 12,000 otters, 110,000 racoons and 16,000 bears.
Similar figures were common at other French and British ports. It is not
surprising, with this level of exploitation repeated in a large number of
ports year after year, that by the end of the eighteenth century the
animals were driven to extinction in area after area and the North American
fur trade was in decline. The number of furs trapped in the Red River area
fell by two-thirds between 1804 and 1808 and beaver skin exports from
Canada fell from 182,000 in 1793 to 92,000 in 1805.

The American trade was sustained in a last burst through the opening up of
new areas for exploitation in the far west and the Pacific coast at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1805 when the first American
explorers (Lewis and Clark) travelled through the area west of the
Mississippi into the Rocky mountains and on to the Pacific they reported
that the area was 'richer in beaver and otter than any country on earth'.
Within less than forty years the area would be virtually cleared of both
animals and the American fur trade would have nowhere else to go. In 1840,
a traveller, Frederick Ruxton, noted the achievements of the trappers: 'Not
a hole or corner but has been ransacked by these hardy men. From the
Mississippi to the mouth of the Colorado of the West, from the frozen
regions of the north to ... Mexico, the beaver hunter has set his traps in
every creek and stream." Trading was organised in the traditional way with
Indian tribes working for European traders in return for European goods and
white fur trappers working either independently or for the main firms
involved - the British Hudson's Bay Company or the American, Jacob Astor.
Unrestrained competition between them rapidly depleted beaver stocks. In
the early 18305 the number of animals killed was already in decline as the
beaver neared the point of extinction. By 1831 the beaver was extinct on
the northern Great Plains and the trapping effort had to move further west
to the Pacific area. Across the whole area overtrap-ping had reached such a
point that yields of furs were down to a quarter of the level expected from
new areas. In 1833 the situation was so bad that the Hudson's Bay Company
issued instructions to its trappers not to hunt in certain areas where the
beaver was almost extinct - the instructions were ineffectual. The next
year saw the almost complete collapse of the beaver trade in the far west
of North America because of overtrapping. By the late 1830s only 2,000
beaver skins a year could be obtained from the whole of the Rocky Mountains
area. Beavers were only saved from total extinction by a change in fashion.
Beaver skins were mainly used to make hats but prices rose as the supply
collapsed and a new craze for silk hats made demand plummet. By 1840 beaver
trapping in North America was over. The trapers switched to other furs -
500,000 muskrat skins were sent to England in 1842 and 137,000 martens in
the early 1850s - but they too were soon exhausted.


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org