Silk, Tea and Treasure: Maritime Trade in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Abstract

Drawing on contemporaneous literary work, this essay explores how maritime trade reshaped popular concepts of currency and credit in China and Britain. In the eighteenth century, silver produced in Spanish America was carried on board galleons sailing from Acapulco to Manila, and was then transshipped to Southeast China by local seafarers and European traders. China’s monetary system had become by then fully bimetallic—copper coins and silver bullion maintained a parity whereby they were mutually convertible and universally accepted. The Chinese system was, in that sense, different from that prevalent in the West, where gold, paper instruments, and government regulation had begun to play a significant monetary role. If the eighteenth century was for China one of passive reliance on imported silver, it presaged in Britain a transition into nation-statehood and big government. The radiation of paper money from Britain to Continental Europe in the eighteenth century was one expression of an emergent credit economy that helps explain the starkly divergent development paths of China and Europe a century later.