Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Síða 18

12
LE NORD
the price of a staple commodity such as pepper immediately fell
to one half on the Venice exchange.
If we looked towards the West we faced a vast expanse of
ocean behind which there was no country to fetch anything from
or take anything to. It is a great mistake to believe that the sea
was popular in England at that time. Nobody thought of singing
“Britannia rules the Waves”. That was only in the i6th century,
when the geographical position of England had been completely
changed. Then it was the country in the centre, developing con-
tacts in the East with the East Indies and the present Indian
Empire, and in the West with the two vast and underpopulated
continents of America, so richly endowed by nature and soon to be
infused with a most heterogenous European emigration. At first
Spanish and Portuguese, then French-English-Dutch-German-
Scandinavian, and then all other European peoples; but in its
constitutions, institutions and policy above all marked by Eng-
lish influence; and the leading union of states, the United States
of America became completely anglicised.
We cannot, of course, go into details of the history of Europ-
ean colonisation, neither in the East nor in the West, but shall
confine ourselves to showing by a few figures the varied nature
of the human material which Europe sent East and West re-
spectively.
First of all the total numbers.
As early as in the year 1800 between 9 and 10 million people
of European origin lived outside Europe. In the first decade of
the i9th century emigration figures were still only about a couple
of thousand a year, but in the thirties they had increased to 70000
a year. In the following 3 decades the annual average is 300000,
in the eighties 700000, rising in the last year before the world
war to nearly 2 million.1) Since the beginning of the i9th cen-
tury at least 40 million people have emigrated from Europe to
overseas countries to set up their home (A. Jensen, 1. c. p. 29)-
The overwhelming majority went West to America, chiefly to
the United States. And now, perhaps, we begin to understand
where to look for the motor which accelerates the purchasing
power of Europe; it was not dynamic, supplying its own power.
A) Adolph Jensen: Udvandring og Udvandringspolitik in »Det 19-
Aarhundrede« (Emigration and Emigration Policy in The XlXth Century)
VIII p. 21, Copenhagen 1919.