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Silver

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Silver was the principal globally accepted monetary commodity of the early modern world, linking American mines, European merchant houses and Asian markets into a single settlement system. From the sixteenth century, American silver — above all from Potosi and the Mexican mines — moved east through Europe and across the Pacific to pay for Asian goods, because Asian economies, and China's in particular, absorbed silver at favourable rates and had limited appetite for European manufactures. In the tea trade this produced a structural British problem: Chinese sellers wanted silver, not British goods, so buying tea meant exporting bullion. That imbalance, and the search for a commodity that could replace bullion in payment, is the direct economic origin of the Anglo-Indian opium trade.

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Evidence · 2
Timeline

No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.

Connections · 3
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 45 blocks · 2 evidence · 47 related

  1. Story
  2. Silver was the principal globally accepted monetary commodity of the early modern world, linking American mines, European merchant houses and Asian markets into a single settlement system. From the sixteenth century, American silver — above all from Potosi and the Mexican mines — moved east through Europe and across the Pacific to pay for Asian goods, because Asian economies, and China's in particular, absorbed silver at favourable rates and had limited appetite for European manufactures. In the tea trade this produced a structural British problem: Chinese sellers wanted silver, not British goods, so buying tea meant exporting bullion. That imbalance, and the search for a commodity that could replace bullion in payment, is the direct economic origin of the Anglo-Indian opium trade.
  3. Knowledge
  4. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
  5. Silver
  6. Manila
  7. The Columbian Exchange
  8. Connections
  9. Tea
  10. The Columbian Exchange
  11. Manila
  12. Canton (historical) — modern Guangzhou
  13. Opium
  14. Qing trade confined to Canton
  15. Commutation Act cuts British tea duty
  16. The Opium Wars
  17. Treaty of Nanking
  18. Potosí
  19. Silver ore is registered at the Cerro Rico of Potosí
  20. Manila is founded as the eastern terminus
  21. Mercury amalgamation and the mita transform Potosí
  22. Silver
  23. The Atlantic crossing (Carrera de Indias)
  24. Potato (Solanum tuberosum)
  25. Maize (Zea mays)
  26. The post-contact population collapse of the Americas
  27. Maize appears in Chinese local records
  28. A documented consignment of potatoes reaches Europe
  29. Silver
  30. The Manila galleon (Nao de China)
  31. Manila is founded as the eastern terminus
  32. The last Manila galleon sails
  33. Tea
  34. Cohong (Gonghang)
  35. Silver
  36. Opium
  37. Shanghai
  38. Qing trade confined to Canton
  39. East India Company's China monopoly ends; Tea Committee founded
  40. Lin Zexu destroys confiscated opium at Humen
  41. The Opium Wars
  42. Treaty of Nanking
  43. Evidence
  44. Between 1757 and 1842 all Western maritime trade with China was confined to Canton and conducted through the Cohong, with tea the dominant export and silver the dominant means of payment.
  45. The Anglo-Indian opium trade, organised as a Bengal monopoly and sold on to private smugglers, rose from a few thousand chests annually in the 1820s to roughly forty thousand by 1839 and reversed the silver flow that had funded tea purchases.
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