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HISTORIANS of globalization in the early modern period have long recognized the role of demand for silver in the Chinese economy as a foundation for the establishment of trade relations among the Americas, Europe, and Asia since the 1600s. While there is debate about the scale of silver imports into China during three subsequent centuries, the basic structure of this trade is relatively well known.1 Silver from Spanish America reached Europe through the trade of both Spanish licensed merchants and northern European interlopers, whence it continued on to China via the organized trade of European chartered companies, primarily the English and Dutch East India Companies. At the same time, a second route directly linked Spanish American silver production areas in Peru and Mexico to Manila in the Philippines through the famous Manila galleon, which sailed regularly westward from Acapulco to Asia. Historiography suggests that until the 1640s this trade with silver as commodity was essentially driven by large differences in goldto- silver ratios among Spanish America, Europe, and China, allowing substantial arbitrage gains to be realized by intermediaries.2 Japan was also a main supplier of silver to China; although scholars do not agree on whether Japanese or American shares were more important before the 1640s, there is no doubt that the bulk of silver imported into China after the 1640s was of American origin.3
Imports of silver into China continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, as will be shown in this article, far into the nineteenth century. This paper illustrates the nature and structure of the global trade in silver from the West to China in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when it attained its highest volume ever, and discusses major consequences of monetary disruptions for the global economy.4 Particular attention is paid to a neglected aspect of this history, namely, the increasing importance of intermediation carried out by North American merchants from the 1780s onward. Taking into account the volume (normally omitted) of this trade, the nature of the silver commerce is shown to have changed around the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that Chinese demand increasingly shifted from silver as a generic commodity (bullion) toward a specific Spanish American coin, that is, demand for a reliable and...