32.3 Europe: a.d. 1701 to 1800  (Page 11/28)

The best silk in Europe was grown in Valencia, where there were 5,000 looms by 1787. By 1790 there were a hundred cotton factories in Catalonia, with some 80,000 workers, chiefly women. Trading, even in slaves, was generally farmed out to Genoese contractors and French merchants dominated Seville. (Ref. 213 ) Galacia had 5,243 watermills and 12 windmills in an area of 2,000 square leagues and a population of 2,000,000. (Ref. 260 ) The Basque country was tending to become a national market. In the end, even Church property and estates went on sale and overall, land ownership became concentrated in a few hands and the poor became still poorer. (Ref. 292 )

Portugal

Portugal had now practically abandoned the Indian Ocean, except for its colony at Goa, India to which it occasionally sent a boatload of convicts. This was a century of Portuguese alliance with England. The Methuen Treaty of 1703

France

Like the 17th, this was a French century and French culture was as encompassing as French power. (Ref. 74 ) In the last years of his reign, Louis XIV drifted to the propitiation of the papacy, with continued and aggravated religious persecution. Great numbers of most valuable Protestant subjects left France, taking arts and industries with them, leaving mainly Catholic believers or Catholic atheists behind. Other serious troubles accumulated at the same time. The year 1709 was perhaps the worst year France had known. All the rivers and the Atlantic coastal waters froze, with the winter wheat, vines and fruit trees killed. Children starved to death and both public and private finances were in desperate ways. Then in 1711 the Grand Dauphin, Louis' only legitimate heir, died of small-pox and within 11 months the Dauphine and 2 of her 3 sons died of measles, leaving only the youngest grandson Berri. Even he died in 1714 after an accident on a horse, leaving only his nephew as heir to the throne. Thus, when Louis XIV died with a gangrenous leg in 1715, this great grandson became Louis XV, with a great uncle, Philippe Duc d'Orleans as regent. (Ref. 147 ) There resulted much unrest among the common people and a tumultous workers' strike of 1716 in Abbeville had to be put down with armed troops. (Ref. 292 ) During that interim Regency, a transplanted Scot, John Law, attempted to redeem the bankrupt finances of France by issuing paper money on the credit of the state, up to twice the value of the national reserves in precious metals and land. A central banking system was necessary and eventually established. The idea was basically sound, but in the end the entire system collapsed because of overspeculation by all of the people in Law's additional scheme of establishing a company to develop the Mississippi basin in America. In 1721 France had perhaps the world's worst stock market crash, as the leading value of stock in that Mississippi development company fell from 12,000 livres to 200. Durant (Ref. 54 ) says that the Regency was, morally, the most shameful period in the history of France. Religion disgraced itself by having immoral men at the top; government was corrupt by having immoral men throughout.