>From a short piece by Ian Morris, it seems that he thinks that the Atlantic trade mattered in an indirect way--it did not remove resource constraints on economic growth, a la Pomeranz, and create massive profit opportunities on the basis of seized land and slave labor, a la Bagchi and Inikori, but thew open new questions, say, in regards to navigation that spurred the Scientific Revolution which in turn underpinned the Industrial Revolution. The vibrant Atlantic economy also pushed wages up and made industrialization economical. Robert C. Allen doubts that Scientific Revolution was crucially important to industrialization but does agree that relative factor prices was the driving force. Morris' explanation does not seem to elide the direct gains from what Pomeranz called a new kind of colonialism.
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