Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/324/en

This opposition becomes manifest with regard to the organism principle right at the beginning of the fifteenth century. On the one side we see how Spaniards and Portuguese, out beyond the already long-familiar Canary Islands, draw ever larger arcs into the Atlantic with their great sailing ships, and it was the Portuguese who in 1425 discovered the island of Madeira. It was uninhabited and bore a species-rich mantle of primeval forests, an "organism in natural growth" grown since primordial times. A little later, from 1426 to 1428, the first settler-farmers from Portugal burned off the island's unique natural biotope, brought over the indigenous inhabitants of the Canary Islands, the Guanche, made them into slaves, had them lay a network of irrigation canals and plant sugarcane as a monoculture over the whole island — which, processed into raw cane sugar, found a ready export market on the mainland and above all in England. Here, as in a seedbed, what then played out in the following centuries on a grand scale in the New World — land seizure, large-scale clearing, monoculture, enslavement, the slave trade, and export markets for foodstuffs — enacts itself symptomatically: an early form of agrarian industrialism and, in decadence, a repetition of culturally grounded pre-Christian streams of development.