Free The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism by Joyce Appleby, Joyce Oldham Appleby Page B

compete with the much-esteemed Spanish leaf.
    Rolfe’s hybrid triggered a boom. Throughout the 1620s tobacco fetched between two to three shillings a pound, a price high enough to encourage Virginia Company shareholders to pour money and men (along with a few women) into their plantations. Newcomers and surviving colonists scrambled to plant more tobacco. The volume of exports surged from fifty thousand pounds in 1618 to more than three hundred thousand, eight years later. Cultivation spread along the tidal rivers emptying into the Chesapeake Bay. When the inevitable oversupply followed this boom of demand-driven expansion, prices dropped to one twenty-fourth the price of good Virginia leaf in the 1620s. Busts, caused by decentralized decision making from overly confident profit seekers, were to become a permanent feature of capitalism. But an upside followed this downer.
    A whole new crowd of consumers could afford to buy tobacco at the cheaper price. Here is a wonderful example of the unintended consequences of pioneering enterprises. The increased demand for tobacco to chew or smoke created an incentive to cut production costs in order to take advantage of this larger body of consumers who would buy if the price were low enough. Within a few years the planters had found a way to serve it.
    Not to be outdone by the Portuguese, Dutch, and English, a bold and tenacious Frenchman, Jean de La Roque, backed by the French East India Company, single-handedly wrested the trade in coffee away from the Middle East, where coffee had been grown exclusively for centuries on the mountain slopes of Ethiopia and Yemen. De la Roque took more than two years to complete his voyage from the Red Sea to around the Cape of Good Hope. Despite the time, going by sea, he cut transportation costs considerably. Coffee in the seventeenth century ranked as a luxury because of its high price, but a luxury the Europeans longed to indulge themselves in. Within the next decade, coffee trees were sent to France’s island of Martinique and French Guiana. The Dutch started growing them on Java, the Spanish in Colombia, and the Portuguese in Brazil, which today exports almost a third of world production. Thriving in all these places, coffee dramatically fell in price. Like tobacco, many Europeans could now afford this aromatic, caffeinated way to start the day. 16
    When ordinary people joined their social superiors in the pursuit of the pleasures of consumption, their numbers changed the character of enterprise. Retrospectively we can see that this boom-and-bust cycle unintentionally widened the market for new goods. Investors responded to the profits of the boom; ordinary people, to the opportunity of the bust. The increase in the volume of goods when ordinary people became consumers meant enormous augmentations in the wealth and power of those nations and persons who participated successfully in supplying the new tastes. Society also had to learn to accommodate a push from below. Always much more than an economic system, capitalism persisted in Europe in changing mores and values however deeply embedded they once had been. This adaptability was to become a critical factor in the spread of capitalism beyond its homelands in the West.
    Unintended and Unexpected Consequences
    During the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, while Europeans were experiencing their Renaissance, the Mughal court of India was flourishing, as was the Ming dynasty in China. The Ottoman caliphate still hoped to control world trade along with European land, as evidenced by its menacing Vienna with an army. Both European Christians and Ottoman Muslims found the styles of each other exotic and appealing. Decorated Italian cut glass vases and lacquered boxes could be found among the possessions of a Persian aristocrat. The techniques for working up art and ceramics themselves came from Syria and Iraq. Islamic artists copied the naturalistic style and oil paintings they saw in