The slave trade was commercially very important, too. Huge profits were occasionally made - a fact
which partly explains the crammed and pestilential holds of the slave-ships in which were confined
the human cargoes. The rarely had a death rate per voyage of less than 10 per cent and sometimes
suffered much more appalling mortality. The supposed value of the trade made it a great and
contested prize, though the normal return on capital has been much exaggerated. For two centuries
it provoked diplomatic wrangling and even war as nation after nation sought to break in it or
monopolize it. This testified to the trade's importance in the eyes of statesmen, whether it
was economically justified or not.
It was once widely held that the slave trade's profits provided the capital for European
industrialization, but this no longer seems plausible. Industrialization was a slow process.
Before 1800, though examples of industrial concentration could be found in several European
countries, the growth of both manufacturing and extractive industry was still in the main a matter
of the multiplication of small-scale artisan production and its technical elaboration, rather than
of radically new methods and institutions. Europe had by 1500 an enormous pool of wealth to draw
on in her large numbers of skilled craftsmen, already used to investigating new processes and
exploring new techniques. Two centuries of gunnery had brought mining and metallurgy to a high
pitch. Scientific instruments and mechanical clocks testified to a wide diffusion of skills in
the making of precision goods. Such advantages as these shaped the early pattern of the industrial
age and soon began to reverse a traditional relationship with Asia. For centuries oriental craftsmen
had astounded Europeans by their skill and the quality of their work. Asian textiles and ceramics
had a superiority which lives in our everyday language: china, muslin, calico, shantung are still
familiar words. Then, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, supremacy in some forms of
craftsmanship had passed to Europe, notably in mechanical and engineering skill. Asian potentates
began to seek European who could teach them how to make effective firearms; they even collected
mechanical toys which were the commonplaces of European fairs. Such a reversal of roles was based
on Europe's accumulation of skill in traditional occupations and their extension into new fields.
This happened usually in towns; craftsmen often travelled from one to another, following demand.
So much it is easy to see. It is harder to see what it was in the European mind that pressed the
European craftsman forward and also stimulated the interest of his social betters to that a craze
of mechanical engineering is as important as aspect of the age of the Renaissance as is the work