The encouragement of the development of trade was referred to in President Truman’s 1949 speech as a way of aiding the re- building of the international economy in the post-Second World War period, and has been actively encouraged by the World Bank and neo- liberals since the 1980s, as was explained in Chapter 2 . However, the emergence of inter- continental trade, along with the beginnings of European colonisation which would have a signifi cant impact on global develop-ment, can be traced to the late fi fteenth century. It was during this century that there began a shift in the European world perspective beyond its own geograph-ical boundaries, which combined with small but signifi cant technologgeograph-ical advance-ments in sailing, notably in rigging and rudder technology, encouraged exploration.
These advancements permitted the development and exploration of the oceans by Europeans and the discovery of ‘new’ territories (Beaudoin, 2007). They also heralded the changing of a European geographical perspective that previously had held Jerusalem as the world’s centre and the Mediterranean as the world’s most important sea.
This growth in exploration during the latter half of the fi fteenth century, the ‘Age of Reconnaissance’, was also encouraged by the ‘rediscovery’ of Ptolemy’s Geography , during the Renaissance period, which offered a view of the world that had been forgotten for nearly a thousand years (Roberts, 1995). Ptolemy, was an Alexandrian actually called Claudius Ptolemaeus, who in the third century AD compiled the coordinates of all the places in the known world at the time, approx-imately 8,000 of them. He used the sources of other geographers, military and administrative gazetteers, and seafarers’ reports to compile the fi rst World Atlas (MacGillivray, 2006). The extent of the world that Ptolemy mapped stretched from the Canary Isles in the west to China and Malaysia in the east, and from the Arctic Circle in the north to well below the equator in the south (ibid.). In the era of the internet and hyper- mobility, it may seem strange that a single text could inspire visions of travel and exploration. However, Europe in the Middle Ages was a place of short and limited geographical horizons, within which there were very limited opportunities to travel beyond one’s immediate environment, the primary concerns for the majority of the population being to secure their survival and meeting their needs for food, shelter, family and community. The drive for the exploration and discovery of new territories was also driven by the fi nancial desire
of European princes for land and gold, which created opportunities for professional explorers and navigators.
The advancements in sailing technology led to the development of larger ships, which when combined with simultaneous developments in navigation techniques and cartography permitted exploration of the oceans. Towards the end of the fi fteenth century, sea voyages were led by individuals that would change the knowledge of world geography and mark the beginning of economic and cultural interactions between different continents. These individuals included Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the ‘New World’ of the Americas in 1493, Vasco de Gama’s voyage to access the Indian Ocean in 1498 and Magellan’s circumnaviga-tion of the world in 1522. For MacGillivray (2006) this stage of early European exploration was the early step towards globalisation, when the stage and size of the globe fi nally became understood and a period of global competition between rival nation states began. The voyages were essential to an emergent inter- nation economic dependence that extended beyond Europe and by the early 1600s the roots of a trading system had become established that linked the nation states of western Europe with the unlimited resources of the ‘New World’ of the Americas (Heffernan, 2003).
Driven by the advancements in exploration and also in cartography, by the sixteenth century the fi rst atlas had been produced, making navigation simpler, which in turn encouraged the expansion of trade. Thousands of boats left Euro-pean ports in search of trade and profi ts in other continents during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ‘Discovery’ would also be followed by conquest as a new world order emerged that has ramifi cations for today’s global political economy and trade system. The incentives for European expansion embraced a mix of hegemonic, economic and religious infl uences, including authority over distant lands, the potential revenues they offered, and the opportunity to convert inhabitants to Christianity (Houston, 2001). The types of goods that were sought by the European adventurers and traders included spices and fi ne clothes from the Far East, and gold and silver from the Americas. Agricultural connections in the New World were established between producers and European traders who brought back tropical crops such as coffee, sugar, cocoa, tea and sugar cane, their popularity and demand in Europe leading to the establishment of their cultivation specifi cally for export to Europe.
Importantly for the development of commercial trade, the geography of the world was now understood to embrace great oceans, which provided trading routes and offered economic opportunities for those European countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean. These countries included Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England, all of whom would progressively during the following centuries estab-lish colonies and empires, an economic system that would have ramifi cations for
the comparative levels of development between countries. The importance of this era for the expansion of trade and emergence of colonial links is emphasised by Mackinnon and Cumbers (2007), who attribute it as a contributory factor to the rise of capitalism in north- west Europe. European hegemony over trade was extended further in the seventeenth century with the founding of large trading companies, including the Dutch West Indies Company, the British East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company and the Royal African Company. Whilst British companies required a charter from the monarch, these companies conducted their affairs autonomously, and sometimes immorally, the most notorious practice being associated with the Royal African Company founded in 1672 and the pattern of ‘triangular trade’ established during the eighteenth century. This involved trans-porting cotton, sugar and other tropical pro ducts from America and the Caribbean across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom; the shipping of manufactured goods for sale from Britain to West Africa for sale and exchange for slaves, who were then shipped in horrendous conditions to work on the cotton and sugar plantations of North America and the Caribbean. According to some historians and econo-mists, it was the profi ts and vast wealth made from this trade that provided the capital to support the Industrial Revolution in Britain (Chamberlain, 1974).
Although the slave trade represents the most inhumane and barbaric aspect of European colonial expansion, the practice of importing raw materials from other countries, processing them and exporting them as manufactured goods back to their point of origin became established. The advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century compounded this process and wealth inequality between nations, with the GDP per capita of Western Europe, the richest part of the world at that time being no more than three times that of the poorest parts of the world, Africa (Sender, 2003, cited in Lines, 2008). As referred to in Chapter 1 , the most prominent example of this was the exportation of cotton from India during the nineteenth and fi rst half of the twentieth centuries to Britain, where it was manufactured into cotton goods and exported and re- sold in the Indian market. Even though this practice was to become a focal point for protests of the India National Congress and the leadership of Gandhi in bringing an end to British colonial rule in the twentieth century, it exemplifi es a pattern of global trade that has left a contemporary legacy. For many of the LDCs whose main exports include primary commodities and agricultural products, it remains impossible for them to establish their own manufacturing industries in the face of the competition and economic tariffs imposed by the developed countries in the world markets.
Of direct relevance to the contemporary geographical distribution of poverty, the development of trade during from the sixteenth century laid the foundation for two key themes that were to emerge in importance during successive centuries.
These are: (i) more places and people have progressively become reliant on world
trade, subsequently poverty has become increasingly related to the world economy, rather than solely the natural resources of place; and (ii) different cultures have increasingly adopted a Western approach to poverty that no longer understands it as a natural state but rather as a problem that demands a solution.
Whilst a progressive integration of the majority of the world’s population into the world economy and the market system has undoubtedly led to greater opportuni-ties and an overall increase in the standard of living for many, conversely as Hayter (1981) observes, it has also led to an increased dependency on people buying food which may not always be affordable.