>Yet, according to O'Brien's tentative findings, England;s trade with >the periphery, and the profits thereof, were still too small a percentage of >its total economy to explain its expansion through the 18th century. Ernest Mandel: Hamilton estimates at over 500 million gold pesos the total amount gold and silver exported from Latin America between 1503 and 1660. According to Colenbrander, the total value of the dividends, officials' remittances and cargoes of spices taken out of Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company amounted to 600 million gold forms for the period 1650-1780. On the basis of the calculations made by Father Rinchon, we know that profits from the slave trade amounted in eighteenth-century France to nearly half a billion livres tournois (without including the profit arising from the work done by the slaves, which came to several billion livres). The profits obtained from the labour of the Negroes in the British West Indies amounted to �200 to �300 million. Finally, even if estimates differ markedly on this point, it is not exaggeration (see the work of a high colonial official, a firm defender of the Empire, Sir Percival Griffiths: The British Impact on India) to estimate at �100 to �150 million the outcome of the British plundering of India between 1750 and 1800. The total amount comes to over a billion pounds sterling, or more than the capital of all the industrial enterprises operated by steam which existed in Europe around 1800! Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
