However this new economic system could not prosper unless companies could access cheap materials and labor so they could increase profits. Then the powers of Europe began a period of colonization throughout Africa, Asia, North and South America. In his writings Robinson refers to “eras” or periods of capitalism, this expansion by Europeans into new territories is known as “epochal change”; that is, “fundamental changes on a global level to the social structure that modify and even transform the very functioning of the system in which we live