Western Europe

Western Europe
Area
• Total	2,636,251 km²
Population
• Estimate	228,339,000

Western Europe is a geopolitical region spanning the capitalist states of the western portion of the European continent, historically including the major imperialist powers of Britain, France, and Germany, along with Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and Switzerland. Through centuries of colonial plunder, the transatlantic slave trade, the systematic destruction of non-European civilizations, and the violent subjugation of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas was how the capitalist mode of production and the industrial revolution first emerged in Western Europe.

Western Europe today is characterized by the decay of its post-World War II despite its continued extraction of the global south through neocolonialism as its role within the imperial core provides it. It is now collectively enforcing austerity, cutting into their social reforms and preparing for war. Social inequality within the region has reached a peak since the early twentieth century.

History

The European "voyages of discovery" beginning between 1470-1500 were predatory enterprises, financed by emerging merchant capital and backed by the absolutist monarchies, aimed at seizing the wealth of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Beginning with Columbus's arrival in 1492, starting a genocide against the indigenous population of the Americas with them being falling from an estimated 60-100 million at the time of contact to an estimated 6 million by 1650, through a combination of mass slaughter, slavery, and the introduction of Old World diseases against which native populations had no immunity.

Gold and silver looted from the Aztec and Inca empires and then systematically extracted from the mines of Potosí and Mexico through the enslavement of indigenous peoples, flooded into Europe and provided the monetary foundation for capitalist expansion.

The Transatlantic slave trade was the single most important source of primitive accumulation that made the industrial revolution possible. An estimated 18.5 million Africans were captured, sold, and transported to the Americas, the Mediterranean littoral, and the Arabian Peninsula. Millions more died in the slave raids, in the forced marches to the coast, and in the painful conditions of the Middle Passage. In a triangle, European manufactured goods to Africa, enslaved Africans to the Americas, and slave-produced sugar, cotton, tobacco, and coffee to Europe made massive profits that were reinvested in the emerging industries of Britain, France, and the Netherlands.

The port cities of Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, and Bordeaux were built on the slave trade. The cotton textile industry, the engine of the British industrial revolution, was entirely dependent on slave-produced cotton from the American South. The industrial revolution emerging first in Britain was fueled by the systematic plunder of India, the Caribbean, and Africa. The British East India Company, a state-chartered monopoly looted Bengal and later India as a whole to the point of famine in 1770, killed an estimated 10 million people which was one third of Bengal’s population.

India which was the world's great manufacturing power was systematically deindustrialized to serve as a captive market for British manufactured goods and a source of cheap raw materials.

The wealth drained from India through taxation, plunder, and unequal exchange funded the infrastructure of the British industrial revolution: the national debt, the banking system, the railways, and the factories.

The Berlin Conference carved up the African continent among the imperial core, which consists of primarily western European countries. Thousands of existing African countries and states were thrown into 40 colonial territories, their boundaries drawn with rulers on maps by white colonialists who had never been to Africa. The colonization of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium led to an estimated 5 to 8 million Congolese murdered under slavery and punishment through dismemberment.  The Force Publique, King Leopold's private army, was instructed to bring back a severed hand for each bullet fired, to ensure none had been wasted and the hands were smoke-cured and delivered in baskets to European state officials to justify the loss of the ammunition ledgers.

Germany’s first genocide was against the Herero and Nama peoples in present-day Namibia, murderering 80 percent of the Herero population through being forced into the desert and starving them off food. The German Empire’s use of the concentration camp against the Herero in Namibia inspired Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust. French, Portuguese, and Italian colonialism followed the same patterns of mass killing, forced labor, and resource extraction especially in the French Congo, Algeria and French West Africa.

The super-profits extracted from these colonies provided the material basis for the emergence of a labor aristocracy, in which the working class of the imperialist country specifically those in the skilled trades and the trade union and party bureaucracies, received crumbs from the imperialists.