Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

their small savings had been accumulated. It was not great capitalists, but enterprising gildsmen, who began to make the control of the fraternity the basis of a system of plutocratic exploitation, or who fled, precocious individualists, from the fellowship of borough and craft, that they might grow to what stature they pleased in rural isolation. It was not even the Discoveries which first began the enormous tilt of economic power from south and east to north and west. The records of German and English trade suggest that the powers of northern Europe had for a century before the Discoveries been growing in wealth and civilization,111 and for a century after them English economic development was to be as closely wedded to its continental connections as though Díaz had never rounded the Cape, nor Columbus praised Heaven for leading him to the shores of Zayton and Guinsay. First attempted as a counterpoise to the Italian monopolist, then pressed home with ever greater eagerness to turn the flank of the Turk, as his stranglehold on the eastern commerce tightened, the Discoveries were neither a happy accident nor the fruit of the disinterested curiosity of science. They were the climax of almost a century of patient economic effort. They were as practical in their motive as the steam-engine.

The result was not the less sensational because it had been long prepared. Heralded by an economic revolution not less profound than that of three centuries later, the new world of the sixteenth century took its character from the outburst of economic energy in which it had been born. Like the nineteenth century, it saw a swift increase in wealth and an impressive expansion of trade, a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before, the rise, amid fierce social convulsions, of new classes and the depression of old, the triumph of a new culture and system of ideas amid struggles not less bitter.

It was an age of economic, not less than of political, sensations, which were recorded in the letter-books112 of business men as well as in the state papers of Governments. The decline of Venice and of the south German cities which had distributed the products that Venice imported, and which henceforward must either be marooned far from the new trade routes or break out to the sea, as some of them did, by way of the Low Countries; the new economic imperialism of Portugal and Spain; the outburst of capitalist enterprise in mining and textiles; the rise of commercial companies, no longer local but international, and based, not merely on exclusive privileges, but on the power of massed capital to drive from the field all feebler competitors; a revolution in prices which shattered all customary relationships; the collapse of medieval rural society in a nightmare of peasants’ wars; the subjection of the collegiate industrial organization of the Middle Ages to a new money-power; the triumph of the State and its conquest, in great parts of Europe, of the Church⁠—all were crowded into less than two generations. A man who was born when the Council of Basel was sitting saw also, if he lived to a ripe old age, the dissolution of the English monasteries. At the first date Portuguese explorers had hardly passed Sierra Leone; at the second Portugal had been the master of an Indian Empire for almost a generation. In the intervening three-quarters of a century the whole framework of European civilization had been transformed.

Compared with the currents which raced in Italy, or Germany, or the Low Countries, English life was an economic backwater. But even its stagnant shallows were stirred by the eddy and rush of the continental whirlpool. When Henry VII came to the throne, the economic organization of the country differed but little from that of the age of Wyclif. When Henry VIII died, full of years and sin, some of the main characteristics which were to distinguish it till the advent of steam-power and machinery could already, though faintly, be descried. The door that remained to be unlocked was colonial expansion, and forty years later the first experiments in colonial expansion had begun.

The phenomenon which dazzled contemporaries was the swift start into apparent opulence, first of Portugal and then of Spain. The nemesis of parasitic wealth was not discerned, and it was left for the cynical rationalism of an ambassador of that commercial republic, in comparison with whose hoary wisdom the new plutocrats of the West were meddlesome children, to observe that the true mines of the Spanish Empire lay, not in America, but in the sodden clay of the waterlogged Netherlands.113 The justice of the criticism was revealed when Spain, a corpse bound on the back of the most liberal and progressive community of the age, completed her own ruin by sacking the treasury from which, far more than from Potosi, her wealth had been drawn. But the beginnings of that long agony, in which the powerhouse of European enterprise was to be struck with paralysis, lay still in the future, and later generations of Spaniards looked back with pardonable exaggeration on the closing years of Charles V as a golden age of economic prosperity. Europe as a whole, however lacerated by political and religious struggles, seemed to have solved the most pressing of the economic problems which had haunted her in the later Middle Ages. During a thousand years of unresting struggle with marsh and forest and moor she had colonized her own waste places. That tremendous achievement almost accomplished, she now turned to the task of colonizing the world. No longer on the defensive, she entered on a phase of economic expansion which was to grow for the next four hundred years, and which only in the twentieth century was to show signs of drawing towards its close. Once a year she was irrigated with the bullion of America, once a year she was enriched with a golden harvest from the