Global Silver: Bullion Or Specie? Supply and Demand in the Making of the Early Modern Global Economy
Munich Personal RePEc Archive Global silver: Bullion or Specie? Supply and demand in the making of the early modern global economy Irigoin, Alejandra Economic History Department, London School of Economics 5 September 2018 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/88859/ MPRA Paper No. 88859, posted 14 Sep 2018 15:53 UTC Economic History Working Papers No: 285 Global Silver: Bullion or Specie? Supply and Demand in the Making of the Early Modern Global Economy Alejandra Irigoin LSE September 2018 Economic History Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, London, UK. T: +44 (0) 20 7955 7084. F: +44 (0) 20 7955 7730 Global silver: Bullion or Specie? Supply and demand in the making of the early modern global economy1 Alejandra Irigoin JEL Codes: N10, N20, E42, E44, E5, P5 Keywords: Silver specie, international currency, international trade, monetary capacity, currency trade, global Smithian growth, early modern global economy Abstract In the early modern period the world economy gravitated around the expansion of long distance commerce. Together with navigation improvements silver was the prime commodity which moved the sails of such trade. The disparate availability of, and the particular demand for silver across the globe determined the participation of producers, consumers and intermediaries in a growing global economy. American endowments of silver are a known feature of this process; however, the fact that the supply of silver was in the form of specie is a less known aspect of the integration of the global economy. This chapter surveys the production and export of silver specie out of Spanish America, its intermediation by Europeans and the re-export to Asia.
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