SOCIETY

Silver Binds the World

1571 CE

History · Early Modern · Holocene · Meghalayan

In the sixteenth century, Ming China converted its money and taxes to silver and, in effect, put half the world to work mining it. Silver's price in China doubled relative to the rest of the world; Spanish America and Japan answered with tens of thousands of tons, and from 1571 the Manila galleons carried some fifty tons a year straight across the Pacific. Isotopes in old coins now trace the routes: Mexican metal flowed to Europe, Potosí's to China.

Why it matters

Economic historians date globalization from this loop: for the first time, a price set in Beijing moved wages in Bolivia and fortunes in Seville. The trade carried its shadow, the forced labour of the mines; and its stowaways, the American crops that helped double China's population. Every supply chain that wraps the planet today descends from this first one, built on a metal and an appetite.

Dating & uncertainty

Spanish Manila, founded in 1571, opened the Pacific leg of the silver trade; historians of globalization take that year as the moment the world's populous continents entered a single exchange. The flows are reconstructed from registers and, lately, from physics: isotopes in English coinage of the period show Mexican silver moving east to Europe while Potosí's went west, across the Pacific, to China.

Sources

1. Flynn & Giráldez (2002), Journal of World History · Cycles of silver: global economic unity through the mid-eighteenth centurydoi:10.1353/jwh.2002.0035
2. Desaulty & Albarede (2013), Geology · Copper, lead, and silver isotopes solve a major economic conundrum of Tudor and early Stuart Europedoi:10.1130/g33555.1
3. Barragán (2017), Brill · Potosí's silver and the global world of trade (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries)doi:10.1163/9789004336391_007

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