English to Serbian Social Sciences History History of the nineteenth century

A more convincing general motiv for colonial expansion was the search for markets. The fact that this was often disappointed is irrelevant. The belief that the 'overproduction' of the Great Depression could be solved by a vast export drive was widespread. Businessmen, always inclined to fill the blank spaces on the map of world trade with the vast numbers of potential customers, would naturally look for such unexploited areas: China was one wich haunted the imagination of salesmen - what if every one of those 300 millions bought only one box of tin-tacks - and Africa, the unknown continent, was another. The Chambers of Commerce of British cities in the depressed early 1880s were outraged by the thought that diplomatic negotiations might exclude their traders from access to the Congo basin, which was believed to offer untold sales prospects, all the more as it was being developed as paying proposition by the crowned businessman, King Leopold II of the Belgians. (As it happened, his favourite method of exploitation by forced labour was not designed to encourage high per capita purchases, even when it did not actually diminish the number of customers by torture and massacre.)