THE CHANGING SIGNIFICANCE OF LATIN AMERICAN SILVER IN THE CHINESE ECONOMY, 16TH–19TH CENTURIES RICHARD VON GLAHN University of Californiaa ABSTRACT The important role of Chinese demand for silver in stimulating world- wide silver-mining and shaping the first truly global trading system has become commonly recognised in the world history scholarship. The com- mercial dynamism of China during the 16th-19th centuries was integrally related to the importation of foreign silver, initially from Japan but princi- pally from Latin America. Yet the significance of imports of Latin American silver for the Chinese economy changed substantially over these three centuries in tandem with the rhythms of China’s domestic economy as well as the global trading system. This article traces these changes, including the adoption of a new standard money of account— the yuan—derived from the Spanish silver peso coin. Keywords: silver, money supply, peso, coinage, international trade JEL Code: N15, N16 RESUMEN El importante papel de la demanda china de plata para estimular la extracción de plata en todo el mundo y dar forma al primer sistema de comercio verdaderamente global se ha reconocido comúnmente por los a University of California, Los Angeles, History.
[email protected] Revista de Historia Económica, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History 553 Vol. 38, No. 3: 553–585. doi:10.1017/S0212610919000193 © Instituto Figuerola, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2019. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.