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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