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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE SHIFTING OF THE CENTRE OF ECONOMIC LIFE SINCE THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY On E of the most important facts in the growth of modern economic life is the removal of the centre of economic activity from the nations of Southern Europeâthe' Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese, with whom must also be reckoned some South German landsâto those of the North-Westâthe Dutch, the French, the English and the North Germans. The epoch-making event in the process was Holland's sudden rise to prosperity, and this was the impetus for the development of the economic possibilities of France and England. All through the 17th century the philosophic speculators and the practical politicians among the nations of North-Western Europe had but one aim : to imitate Holland in commerce, in industry, in shipping and in colonization. The most ludicrous explanations of this well-known fact have been suggested by historians. It has been said, for example, that the cause which led to the economic decline of Spain and Portugal and of the Italian and South German city states was the discovery of America and of the new route to the East Indies; that the same cause lessened the volume of the commerce of the Levant, and therefore undermined the position of the Italian commercial cities which depended upon it. But this explanation is not in any way satisfactory. In the first place, Levantine commerce maintained its pre-eminence throughout the whole of the l7th and 18th centuries, and during this period the prosperity of the maritime cities in the South of France, as well as that of Hamburg, was very closely bound up with it. In the second place, a number of Italian towns, Venice among them, which in the I7th century lost all their importance, participated to a large extent in the trade of the Levant in...