Abstract
The circulation of silver between the Americas, Europe and China has provided a critical impetus for modern globalization since the 16th century. Even though substantial documentary information about this process has been collected and processed, there is still an ongoing debate about its underlying mechanism and the nature of the economic model. This article argues that the scientific analyses of the silver bullion and coins of Ming–Qing China and the Americas can offer a new source of information about this issue. This pilot study shows that the Ag concentration in Ming and Qing silver bullion is higher than that of the Americas, by around 3% and 8%, respectively. In particular, Qing silver bullion made in different reigns shows a remarkably consistent Ag content. Such a difference in the fineness could further contribute to the colossal arbitrage noted by scholars for decades, resulting in high volumes of global trading fundamentally driven by the higher price of silver in China. While quantifying its exact economic and political impacts still appears a distant prospect, as the current database is rather sketchy and many intermediate processes remain unclear, integrating scientific analyses into historical research illustrates several new patterns which helps to rethink the global silver circulation in the early modern period.
Highlights
The period between the 14th and 19th centuries saw the increasingly active integration of the Chinese Ming (1368-1644) and Qing dynasties (1636-1912) into the world economy through the rise of globalisation (Atwell, 1998)
The Qing silver bullion tends to show up to ca. 8% more silver than those in the contemporary New World. These results provide new intellectual stimulation to the long-term debate in this period concerning the possible arbitrage, and open up more questions concerning the global silver circulation between China and the outside world, leading us one small step further in the debate of the role of silver in the early modern period
Taking silver-copper alloying for instance, the corrosion process over time involves the oxidation of copper (Cu to Cu2O), which causes volume expansion, as well as diffusion of copper atoms from the interior to the surface (Condamin and Picon, 1964; Wanhill, 2003), both leading to the loss of copper a consequent increase of silver concentration
Summary
The period between the 14th and 19th centuries saw the increasingly active integration of the Chinese Ming (1368-1644) and Qing dynasties (1636-1912) into the world economy through the rise of globalisation (Atwell, 1998). We have assembled 2750 scientific analyses of silver coins/bullion from various times and places of the human past, including China, Japan, and the New World, in order to combine scientific analyses of silver currency with historical texts and bring new light to the global circulation of silver between the period from the 14th to 19th centuries. When the “single whip tax reform” was imposed, regulated silver bullion became the only official monetary medium for taxation This required more silver from all possible suppliers, including more from the domestic silver mining industry and from overseas imports and resulted in the Ming and subsequent Qing dynasties acting as a “suction pump” for the import of silver (Flynn, 2015, Brook, 1998, Gerritsen and Giorgio, 2015, Gerritsen and Riello, 2016). After the 13th century, especially when the rich silver sources in the New World started pouring silver into the global market, a difference of only 1% in the silver concentration could yield hundreds of tons of silver being released as profit
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