The Americas are central to the book’s account of how colonial expansion could enrich European states while constraining development across the regions they controlled. Their silver, trade routes, and plantation economies shaped political institutions on both sides of the Atlantic: Spanish monarchs used colonial wealth to sustain absolutism, English Atlantic commerce fostered a comparatively broad merchant class, and Caribbean plantation colonies helped drive the expansion of the slave trade.

Imperial Wealth and Spanish Absolutism

The discovery and exploitation of precious metals in the Americas strengthened the Spanish Crown. Silver was found in large quantities at Guanajuato in the 1520s and soon afterward at Zacatecas. After the conquest of Peru began in 1532, the monarchy claimed a royal fifth of the proceeds of conquest and mining. The discovery of silver at Potosí in the 1540s added further wealth to the king’s coffers. That revenue mattered politically: it helped the Crown consolidate an absolutist system without relying on the kind of bargaining over taxation that constrained the English monarchy.

Spain organized colonial commerce to keep wealth flowing back to the monarchy. Isabella and Ferdinand routed trade between Spain and its new colonies through a merchant guild in Seville, which controlled the traffic and ensured the Crown received its share. Each year, a large flotilla returned from the Americas carrying precious metals and valuable goods. Trade within the empire was also restricted: a merchant in New Spain could not trade directly with one in New Granada. These arrangements secured royal revenues, but narrowed opportunities for other merchants and reduced the emergence of a broad commercial class that might have demanded political change.

The contrast with England was consequential. England entered Atlantic trade later than Spain and Portugal, but its traders and colonists had relatively broad access to commercial opportunities. The wealth generated by colonial trade accrued not only to the Crown but also to merchants with few ties to it. That merchant class became a foundation for English economic dynamism and a bulwark of the coalition opposing absolutism. The book’s comparison is therefore not simply between empires with different amounts of colonial wealth: it is between different arrangements for deciding who could participate in trade and who controlled its profits.

Atlantic Expansion and Political Change

A dramatic expansion of world trade, especially across the Atlantic, followed after 1600. English colonization in North America began at Roanoke in 1585. The English East India Company was formed in 1600, and the Virginia Company established Jamestown in 1607. By the 1620s, English settlement in the Caribbean was underway, including the occupation of Barbados in 1627. France was expanding across the Atlantic too, founding Quebec City in 1608 as the capital of New France.

The political effects of this trade depended on earlier institutional differences. In England, the Crown could not monopolize commerce with the Americas as thoroughly as the Spanish monarchy could monopolize colonial trade. Atlantic trade and colonization consequently helped create a substantial group of wealthy English traders who resented royal control and pressed for limits on royal prerogatives. They played a critical role in the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. Comparable conflicts occurred elsewhere, including the Fronde Rebellion in France, but the English opponents of absolutism were more likely to prevail because they were relatively wealthy and numerous. Colonial expansion thus became part of a domestic struggle over political power, not merely a source of overseas revenue.

The Caribbean and the Slave Trade

The growth of sugar plantation colonies in the Caribbean in the early seventeenth century caused a dramatic escalation in the international slave trade and increased slavery’s importance within Africa. The scale changed markedly over time. In the sixteenth century, an estimated 300,000 Africans were transported in the Atlantic trade, mostly from Central Africa, with Kongo and Portuguese traders based farther south in Luanda involved. The trans-Saharan trade was then larger, carrying an estimated 550,000 people north. In the seventeenth century, the Atlantic trade grew to about 1,350,000 people, most of them shipped to the Americas, while the Saharan trade remained relatively stable. In the eighteenth century, an estimated 6,000,000 people were shipped across the Atlantic, compared with perhaps 700,000 across the Sahara. Across periods and regions, well over 10,000,000 Africans were taken from the continent.

These estimates convey both scale and uneven impact. Using modern country boundaries, the book notes that cumulative slave exports from Angola, Benin, Ghana, and Togo between 1400 and 1900 amounted to more than the entire population of each country in 1400. The Caribbean plantation system was not presented as a self-contained regional economy: it depended on coerced labor transported across the Atlantic and reshaped the societies supplying that labor. In the book’s account, European colonial profitability could be built on the destruction of independent polities and indigenous economies, or on the creation of extractive institutions where colonial systems were imposed from the ground up.

Constrained Development and Historical Possibilities

The Americas feature in a broader argument about the unequal consequences of European expansion. The same commercial and colonial processes that helped fuel European growth could impose or strengthen extractive institutions elsewhere, destroying commercial and industrial activity or sustaining arrangements that blocked industrialization. In the Caribbean, the near-total collapse of native populations was followed by the importation of enslaved Africans and the establishment of plantation systems. Colonial prosperity in Europe and extraction in the Americas were therefore connected outcomes, not separate histories.

The book also stresses the uncertainty obscured by outcomes viewed in retrospect. It suggests that the independent city-states of the Banda Islands, Aceh, and Burma might have developed their own political trajectories, perhaps gradually moving toward more inclusive institutions through trade. European intervention removed or narrowed such possibilities in parts of Southeast Asia; the American cases likewise show how colonial power could reorganize economies around imperial revenue and labor extraction. Across these examples, the Americas are not simply a backdrop to European expansion. They are a decisive arena in which control over trade, wealth, and labor altered the distribution of political power and the prospects for development.