The Foreign Staple Trade of China in the Pre-Modern Era

Abstract

studies of the trade of pre-modern China have focused on domestic trade.1 By comparison, foreign trade, especially the staple trade (the purchase and sale of goods in bulk), which had an equally long history, has been neglected.2 The reasons for the neglect vary, from lack of data to theoretical bias derived from the seeming incompatibility of sustained foreign trade with the lack of specialization and underdeveloped commercialization and, ultimately, capitalism in China. Immanuel Wallerstein, for example, assumes that in pre-modern times