No American colonies – effects on Europe

I'm new to this forum and I read many threads about the question what would have happened in the Americas without European colonization. But what’s with Europe? This wasn’t a one way street.

This question troubles me for some time now. Europe’s economy wasn’t the best at the beginning of the 16th century (deforestation, pollution, overpopulation, no trade with the east etc.). So, if the discovery of America would have been delayed for about 50 or 100 years there would have been a century without the gold, the resources and the new land of the Americas. What would have happened to Europe?

[FONT=&quot]Would they have find other sources for their needs, would there be constant war or…?[/FONT]
 
I'm new to this forum and I read many threads about the question what would have happened in the Americas without European colonization. But what’s with Europe? This wasn’t a one way street.

This question troubles me for some time now. Europe’s economy wasn’t the best at the beginning of the 16th century (deforestation, pollution, overpopulation, no trade with the east etc.). So, if the discovery of America would have been delayed for about 50 or 100 years there would have been a century without the gold, the resources and the new land of the Americas. What would have happened to Europe?

Well, don't make the mistake of thinking that Europe's economy was a basket-case. There was plenty of money to go around, at least for the time. After all, Kings and Popes managed to carry out great architectural works, and wars don't fund themselves. People say that the medieval era and renaissance period was a time of sparseness and poverty, but the real truth is just that there was no concept of saving money - you spent what you had, and frequently overspent, hence why states were so frequently in debt. And there was trade with the East, it was just indirect. Chinese goods would pass through five, ten or twenty different merchants before reaching Europe, each time the value of the goods slightly increasing - hence why Europeans (particularly Portugal) wanted to get to the East by themselves, to cut out on all the middlemen.

The truth is that the first 100 years or so of American colonisation were not beneficial to Europe at all. Yes, Spain rapidly harnessed Mesoamerica's gold and silver bullion, but this was in fact disastrous to their economy, and was one of two reasons why their economy was so horrendously stagnant for the next 400 years. The effect of thousands of ingots of bullion coming back to Europe didn't make Spain fabulously wealthy - it actually created the exact opposite. Gold suddenly became so proliferous in the European market that its value absolutely tanked, and every year when the bullion convoy arrived, it crashed a little bit more. Consequently, the effect was simply to make the Spanish currency absolutely worthless, and Spain's debt grew so large that 3/4 of all the bullion the Spanish shipped in actually went straight to the Genoese bankers as debt repayments. For the other countries, most of the 17 century was wasted on just setting up their colonies, and then paying to expand them and defend them. It wasn't for a good few decades before the Spice Islands started to be properly harvested and the North American colonies actually became profitable.

So long story short - it wouldn't make that much difference. The real difference would be that, whereas OTL by the year 1700 colonies had become profitable, in your TL, Europe still has the expensive first 100 years to go through...

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Would they have find other sources for their needs, would there be constant war or…?

Eh, there was constant war anyway. And North America didn't really do that much for supplying Europe's "needs". OK, so it introduced a few things (potatoes, tobacco, etc) but these were things that Europe could do without. Portugal eventually did start trading with China yes, but it was doing so very slowly and at a much-tariffed rate anyway. I guess there would be less spice and silk and such, but it's really only Portugal that would suffer for the first 100 years.
 
Thank you so much for this detailed answer. I know, that the colonization of North America was a very slow process (and when the colonies were profitable at last, they got independent). But I thought I missed something for South America and Europe.

Well - perhaps there wouldn't be a Great Famine in Ireland.
 
Thank you so much for this detailed answer. I know, that the colonization of North America was a very slow process (and when the colonies were profitable at last, they got independent). But I thought I missed something for South America and Europe.

Well - perhaps there wouldn't be a Great Famine in Ireland.

There would still be a Great Famine in Ireland, at some point. Ireland suffered the problem of a weak economy based far more than was healthy on the growth of a single crop which was grown on only average soil and so wasn't over-productive in a way that could produce great profits. OK, if you remove the potato from the Irish farming system then they can't have a Potato Famine, but they will still have to grow something, and a Wheat Famine could happen just as easily.

South America was similar to the north in that it had its own resources yes, but they took a while to exploit. That happened for different reasons though. While the scale of the Spanish conquest of South America was remarkable, they still didn't simply set foot on land and instantly take over the continent. It still took several decades for them to create and then solidify their control. I guess they did start pumping out resources quicker than in the north, yes, but this was for the Spanish entirely offset by the fact that, as mentioned previously, all the bullion they shipped entirely negated their profits in other fields. For the Portuguese, yes they made some money but most of their money came from trading with the Orient. They actually only had a peripheral control of Brazil for quite a while, and Brazil's rainforest nature meant that resources were simply harder to access there.
 
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