Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Blaðsíða 17

THE BALANCE OF WORLD ECONOMY
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economic, social and political repercussions? How has it been
financed — to abuse a modern expression. Technical progress
cannot offer the true explanation, for it is the effect of some-
thing, yiz. a market with purchasing power. It is the market
which is the cause. When there is a market it calls upon tech-
nique. If technique takes the initiative and finds a capitalist to
finance it before there is a market, it will ruin him, as it happens
in numerous cases. Hargrave’s spinning jenny which was invented
in 1767 and marks the opening of what is known in England
as the industrial revolution had been invented a century earlier
in Leipzig, where it was left to decay on a town hall loft because
no one had any use for it. People spun their yarn themselves,
and nobody dreamt of wasting their money on machine-made
yarn. If somebody to-day invents a process by which a thousand
locomotives a day can be put out at a quarter of the present
price he might as well go and hang himself, for there is no use
for them, and if he cannot rid himself of his idea he will end
m a lunatic asylum. But where, then, was the market to which
Europe owes her unique economic development in the last cen-
tury and the beginning of the present?
II.
This market was found in the colonies, and we must there-
fore examine their development more closely.
We must once more look at a map of the world, but this
Pnie a map from the ijth century before the discovery of Amer-
Jca and the sea route to India. If we look eastwards from Eng-
Wd at that time we see before us poverty-stricken Europe. If
spices, silk or other oriental goods were then to be procured
for the very narrow circle in Europe which was in a position to
buy luxuries, they had to be fetched from the other end of long
and dangerous caravan routes terminating in the coastal towns
°f Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. They then had to be carried
Ey sea through the long and dangerous Mediterranean which
V/as crowded with African pirates, and when the goods finally
reached their destination the cost prices were enormous because
°f the duration and risk of the journey. It is significant that
when Yasco da Gama arrived at Lisbon in 1503 after his second
voyage to the East Indies with the first cargo of Indian spices