A feeling grew up in the fifth and fourth centuries BC that there was something wrong and unnatural about Greeks having Greeks as slaves; but there were Greek slaves all the same. That there were fewer slaves in Greece than in the great oriental empires or in later Roman times, has much to do with the small-holding character of Greek agriculture. Small farmers could just about rub along getting a living for themselves and their families. They could afford neither to buy a slave, nor to feed him, because he could not do enough to earn his keep. There were no great estates relying on slave labor. Pg 114-115

Late Medieval Society (1100)

Black Death etc led to…The fall in population led to a continent-wide collapse of food production as there ceased to be labour to till the fields. That crisis, in its turn, was followed by social struggle-peasant revolts and risings. They were provoked by landlords trying to make a reduced population provide labour as in the old days, although the serfs knew full well that a shortage of labour meant that they could ask for high wages to work as paid labourers. Landlords tried to enforce their old legal rights, but economic facts increasingly forced them to hire labour instead of taking it in kind as part of their tenants’ rent. This was one of the first signs of the beginning of the replacement of an old kind of society by one founded on wage-labour. Pg. 245

One of the most important steps forward from medieval science was the invention of intellectual enquiry by systematic experiment. Pg. 308

The earliest great trading cities in the West had been Italian; Venice and Genoa had all but monopolized trade with the Near East, but other towns like Pisa and Florence were trading as far afield as Sicily and with the great north European fairs as early as the twelfth century. In the north the German Hansa towns of the medieval Baltic were already involved in trade with Russia and Scandinavia, In the sixteenth centre such pioneering centres were overtaken in prosperity by Antwerp, a great shipping and manufacturing centre, through which wool from England and grain, fish and timber from the Baltic reached the growing populations of the Netherlands, Flanders and Picardy. When thanks to foreign competition and Spanish rule, Antwerp declined, Amsterdam succeeded to the domination of European trade and finance in the seventeenth century. Finally, after 1688, came the turn of the City of London. Pg. 312

The Slave Trade

1500’s

The slave-trade expanded hugely when it was found that many of the Caribbean island could grow sugar, a crop best handled on a big scale, on large plantations requiring a great deal of labour. Europe was short of the manpower to develop the New World; Africa could make up the deficiency. …A Dutch ship first sold blacks to British colonists as early as 1619 in Virginia, a tobacco-growing area, where slave-labour was useful. Later cotton and rice plantations of the Carolinas also began to use African slaves. Pg. 314

East India Companies

They became the main ways of testing for trade in Asia, but they suffered from the disadvantage that, except for a few mechanical novelties, there was very little made by Europeans which the Asians wanted. With India, China, and Indonesia the European countries therefore usually had an adverse balance of trade; they could not sell the Asians enough European goods to pay for what they bought, and so had to pay for it in silver. It was another example of how, without anyone really intending it, the world was getting more tied together; the Spanish brought silver from the New World to Europe, where it paid the debts of the Spanish monarchy to bankers who than passed it on to merchants to use to buy goods in Asia. Pg. 316

Global Commerce

Late 1800’s early 1900’s

The process came in the end to involve the whole globe. Europe’s factories sucked in raw materials- cotton, jute, timber, minerals- from overseas. By 1850 more than half the wool used in English mills came from Australia; France was taking more than half of hers from outside Europe, too, by 1914…. The greatest trading nation of all was Great Britain, and the total value of her exports and imports together rose form about L55 million a year in 1800 to over L1,400 million in 1913…. For the first time, there was a true world-wide market. People could buy and sell around the world as they already bought and sold inside one country… The price of grain in Chicago, of meat in Buenos Aires, or steel in Essen could cause changes in other prices right around the world. Pg. 353

A new age of machines

In the nineteenth century, new machines began to appear everywhere in large numbers….First and most obviously, they enormously increased the value of labour: with their aid a worker could produce much more quickly. This was an essential contribution to the huge growth in the output of wealth of the age. Pg. 355

The path towards the modernization of Russian society had been strewn with obstacles. To begin with, there was the tradition of autocratic rule. The Tsar’s authority had never been held in check as had absolutism elsewhere by obstreperous vested interests. If reform was to come to Russia at all, it had to come from above, for there were few channels for demands to dome up from below. Pg. 398

Between 1945 and 1968, Americans raised their rice yield from 4.25 to nearly 12 tons per acre, while that of Burma, the ‘rice bowl of Asia’, rose only from 3.8 to 4.2. Advanced agriculture is usually found in countries advanced in other ways. Unless they have a particular agriculture specialty, countries which most need to grow more food have found it very difficult to produce crops more cheaply then can the developed world. Pg. 406

Between 1913 and 1920 Europe’s manufacturing output went down by almost a quarter. Pg. 440

Great Britain was back to its 1913 level by 1929. Pg. 445

Germany before WW2 Money lost its value at a staggering rate: prices rose by a multiple of about 1,000,000,000 between 1918 and 1923. Pg. 442

Taking 1929 levels of industrial production as 100, by 1932 that of the US had fallen to 52.7, that of Germany to 53.3, and that of the UK to 83.5. Pg. 445

International trade in 1939 was still running at less than half the level of 1929. Pg. 446

A Short History of the World J.M Roberts 1993