of the Americas ultimately prepared the foundation for the evolution of the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy.  
The historical process which established the Atlantic economy covered about three and a half centuries, from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It took this long because the domestic economies in Western Europe still had extensive non-market sectors, and those of West Africa were even more so, while the pre-Columbian economies of the Americas were overwhelmingly dominated by non-market production (subsistence production) (Britnell and Campbell, 1995; Inikori, 2014 pp. 56-88). It took many decades to develop effective domestic markets in the economies of the Atlantic basin before they could be integrated by one Atlantic market. The coerced employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale production of export commodities in the Americas was the main factor in the process. The plantation and mining zones of the Americas, which depended heavily on the labour of enslaved Africans, spurred on the growth and spread of the market economy in the Atlantic world (Inikori, 2014, pp. 69-76). When the value of export commodities from mining and plantations in the Americas grew from an annual average of approximately $£ 1.3$ million (sterling) in 1501-1550 to $£ 89.2$ million in 1848-1850, as shown in Table 1, it provoked an inter-connected chain of the commercializing process in the Americas and Western Europe.