The Atlantic Triangular Trade reconfigured the global order. The forced conscription of Indian labourers in the silver mines of Potosí, Spain, with an average annual mortality rate of 58%, supported 60% of global silver production but decimated the Andean population by 80%. The African slave trade was even more brutal, with 1.2 million blacks trafficked on 5,000 ships sent from Liverpool, England, in the 18th century, and plantation slaves working 73% more hours than European peasants, but with only a third of the nutrition.
Enlightenment thought subverted traditional authority. Locke’s Treatise of Government (1689) viewed the right to property as the basis of political rights, and the Virginia Assembly in North America legislated accordingly: owners of 50 acres of land were automatically enfranchised. The French Encyclopaedia broke the intellectual monopoly of the Church, and citations of the word ‘sovereignty’ jumped 12-fold in a decade, boosting third-class representation from 5 per cent to 96 per cent (1789), but the Declaration of the Rights of Man still excluded half a million black slaves.
Technology exacerbated class cleavages. The Gutenberg printing press reduces book prices by 82 per cent in a century, but Lutheran manuals account for 47 per cent of transactions at the Frankfurt Book Fair and Catholic copyright collapses. In the Industrial Revolution, the patent for the British water-powered spinning machine triggered riots, and workers‘ weekly wages plummeted from 6 shillings to 1.5 shillings, while factory owners’ profits soared to 300 per cent.
Laws solidified systems of oppression. The French Code Noir (1685) allowed plantation owners to amputate the limbs of their slaves and forbade blacks to assemble in groups of three or more. Britain’s Masters and Servants Act (1747) sentenced workers to hard labour for breach of contract, while employers were paid only £2 for breach of contract, resulting in less than 5 per cent of workers succeeding in their lawsuits.
The Reformation reshaped the family. The Calvinists transferred the power to review marriages to the Citizens’ Assembly, and the divorce approval rate in Geneva rose from 0.3 per cent to 12 per cent. Puritan manuals downplayed the doctrine of the original sin of the child and pushed the female literacy rate in New England to 62 per cent (in 1700), far higher than the 35 per cent in Europe.
The period reveals the contradictions of modernity: humanism and colonial violence coexist, technological emancipation and class exploitation, and are at the root of race, gender and class struggles.
