Patrick O'Brien (1982): European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery: "Throughout the early modern era connexions between economies (even within states) remained weak, tenuous, and liable to interruption...
...Except for a restricted range of examples, growth, stagnation, and decay everywhere in Western Europe can be explained mainly by reference to endogeneous forces. The "world economy", such as it was, hardly impinged. If these speculations are correct, then for the economic growth of the core, the periphery was peripheral...
O'Brien's piece is a critique of a large strand of 1970s literature about how exploitation not of internal western European populations but of people outside of Western Europe--Amerindians, mestizo and other inhabitants of the Americas, Asians, and Africans--was the driving force behind the accumulation of capital and the growth of Western Europe from 1500 well into the post-1750 Industrial Revolution era. O'Brien's point is that this argument was always innumerate: trans-oceanic trade flows were simply too small to matter in any simplistic way in which more resources flowing to the elite produce significantly faster economic development. I think his case is air-tight. If you want to draw significant causal links between trans-oceanic exploration, trade, conquest, and exploitation on the one hand and Western European growth after 1500 on the other, you need to tell a much more sophisticated and less simplistic story.
Five questions:
