China and Europe: 1500-1800

The Silver Trade, Part 1

The report of silver in China is truly interesting and has been misunderstood for a long clock. From 1500 to 1800, Mexico and Peru produced something like 85 percentage of the worldly concern ‘s silver. During that like period at least a one-third and some people would say over 40 percentage of all that silver finally wound up in China. now what was going on there and what does it mean ? The Europeans of course were not shipping the silver medal to China as an act of contribution or charity. They were getting goods in return, such as silk, porcelain, and late specially tea .
The large volume of silver medal that was going there and the volume of other goods that must therefore have been coming back illustrate the dynamism of the chinese economy. Silver supported the enormously big export sector. This is interesting for many reasons because it invalidates one of our stereotypes of China : that China turned its back on the ocean and was not concerned in the outside world .
rather, we see massive foreign craft, which was attested to by all the silver coming in. so then the following question becomes, What did they want all this silver for ? What were they doing with it ? The independent thing they were doing with it is monetizing it. They were making it their money provide .

The Chinese Demand for Silver [VIDEO]

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Reading: China and Europe, 1500-2000 and Beyond: What is “Modern”?

transcript : traditionally in the West, we ‘ve always told the history the other direction around, in which the keystone to the report is that the Europeans find this issue of flatware, and the Europeans are the ones who want spices, silk, porcelain, et cetera. They go out to China. They do n’t have very much to sell that the Chinese want. And thus they sell ash grey. When you tell the floor that manner, then it always sounds as if it ‘s european demand, european hope, european inaugural that drives the whole report. And the Chinese are treated basically as passive. They had goods the Europeans wanted, but the Europeans had no goods they wanted. Why would that be ? Why would these people have no consumer desires ? That ‘s a little leftover from a modern perspective. And so the floor then always becomes that silver is money that is given to the Chinese to cover what we would nowadays call a balance-of-payments deficit .
well, there are two big problems with that fib. One is the one that I already mentioned, that the Chinese were sucking silver out of Japan, well before they started sucking it out of Latin America. But the second is that, interestingly enough, during the like period in which these huge amounts of silver are flowing into China, small but not superficial amounts amber are actually going in the other commission, out of China towards Europe, because the exchange rate between silver and amber is more favorable for amber in Europe, so the aureate flows that room, the silver flows the other way .
The argue why this in truth matters ( is ) because it makes us see that it ‘s not “ money ” in the mod sense that the Chinese were demanding ; it ‘s a especial commodity—silver—that they want to use in certain ways, partially for money but besides for candlesticks and hair pins and jewelry and all sorts of other things. And once you see it that way, once you see this not as a balance-of-payments deficit caused by a lack of chinese demand for anything, but just a commodity deal in which the Chinese have a very potent necessitate for this commodity that they ca n’t produce, chiefly silver medal, while the Europeans have a demand for certain commodities they ca n’t produce at that point, such as silk and porcelain, and later, tea, then you see a universe in which the Chinese are every bite as much active, desire, consume, and so on and therefore forth as the Europeans are .
And previously, we had tended to have a report in which either we treated the Chinese as being somehow so pure that they had no consumer needs or no consumer desires, and so the Europeans had to give them this “ money. ” And, in fact, there ‘s one celebrated scholar who writes about how all the silver of Latin America was dug up from the ground in Latin America entirely to be shipped across the Pacific and finally to be buried again in China. There ‘s this sort of picture of passivity, inertness … the silver comes to China and “ does nothing. ” Well, no, it does n’t “ do nothing ” ; it fuels this enormous demand for a medium of rally. It ‘s enormously significant .
So we either saw the Chinese as, sort of, therefore virtuous that they were above department of commerce, or sol undesirous and uncurious and thus away, that they had no consumer demand. That besides makes them sound particularly “ unready ” for modernity. But in fact, they ‘re right in there. They ‘re demanding a finical commodity for which they have a enormously important consumption.

For more or less coincident geological reasons, China just has very fiddling in the way of cherished metals : not much gold, about no ash grey, fair amounts of copper but not massive amounts. however, the huge chinese population, something on the order of a draw of humanity for most of the prison term since we ‘ve had properly records, developed an unusually active, commercially sophisticated economy, which needed a medium of exchange : money. And that posed an enormous trouble, which the Chinese solved in the Song dynasty by inventing the global ‘s first gear paper money .

taiwanese composition money, Ming dynasty.
North Wind Picture
This again is one of the signs of early modernity : that they managed to find a medium of exchange that was inordinately brassy to produce. Paper money monetary value very little, but it required a sealed technological edification, such as good printing. And again, it required sociable institutions : paper money is only deoxyadenosine monophosphate good as people ‘s willingness to trust it .
For a couple hundred years, China had a composition currency that worked quite well, centuries before anybody else had it. This did n’t last, however, because when by and by dynasties, the Yuan and then particularly the early Ming, got into fiscal crises, they did what many governments in many moments have done : they tried to solve the problem by printing money, and they undermined confidence in it .
And once burned, people are shy for a long time. It will be centuries before they trust wallpaper money again. It meant that this huge commercial economy had to be supplied with something else, with neologism. And what China turns to, for a whole series of reasons that are imperfectly silent, is silver.

Silver Turns to Opium

The dry board of an opium factory in India, former nineteeth hundred.
North Wind Picture Archives
finally the Europeans, for reasons of their own, became loath to continue shipping so much silver to East Asia. This is largely because they preferred to hoard the argent thus that they could use it to pay mercenaries in their ongoing wars. They started looking for something else to export to China and found that they were in a real bind because there were very few things that they produce more efficiently than the Chinese could. The thing that finally filled the gap left when the Europeans tried to cut back on their silver shipments was opium .
Opium served a whole series of functions for the british in particular. It helped make their fresh colony in India profitable by providing a very ready tax income reference. It saved on the silver that they no longer wanted to ship and, of course, the report of the opium barter to China then gets us into a solid different period of global history and different kinds of links between China and the outside universe .