The Advance of Colonization and Agricultural Production and the Progress of Rural Population in the West from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Centuries.

Between the eleventh and the middle of the fourteenth century the agrarian populations of the West had, indeed, accomplished a magnificent work, which justified their emancipation. The great business of colonizing Europe, sketched out in the Carolingian period, was taken up again and achieved by them in a century and a half. Production developed enormously, and the West was repopulated. At no other period of history has so great an enterprise been conceived and brought to so full and successful a realization, save, perhaps, in our own day, in which the conquest of new worlds by European civilization has been begun. It was one of the capital events of history, although historians have commonly passed it by in silence.