Richard von Glahn

Myth and Reality of China's Seventeenth-Century Monetary Crisis

The impact of Chinas demand for silver on global trade in specie and monetary metals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remains poorly understood. Conventional wisdom postulates that seventeenth-century China became so dependent on foreign silver to sustain domestic economic growth that a sharp fall in silver imports in the 1640s led to the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. This hypothesis rests on dubious theoretical and empirical grounds. The demand for silver in China was determined by long-term changes in indigenous demand for money rather than short-term fluctuations in the flow of silver imports.

FOREIGN SILVER COINS IN THE MARKET CULTURE OF NINETEENTH CENTURY CHINA

Both the physical qualities of different types of money and the cultural values assigned to them contributed to the determination of their economic value. China began to import substantial quantities of silver coins from Europe as early as the sixteenth century, but it was around 1800 that a foreign coin, the so-called “Carolus peso” issued by the Spanish kings Carlos III and Carlos IV, became the basis of a new monetary standard in China, the yuan. In the nineteenth century the Carolus peso and imitations of it (mostly manufactured in China) served as the principal means of exchange, and the yuan as the standard unit of account, in the markets of South China. This paper analyzes the monetary conditions that led to the establishment of the Carolus peso as the monetary standard of South China with particular consideration of the distinctive “currency circuits” formed by regional variations in monetary circulation. Significant differences can be seen in the monetary regimes that prevailed in Jiangnan and Guangdong, the major commercial centers of the empire. While Guangdong reverted to a commodity money standard that allowed the use of a wide range of different types of physical monies, including “chopped” and broken foreign coins, in Jiangnan the Carolus peso became a unified, fiduciary monetary standard. This regional variation attests to the distinctive regional characteristics of market culture in late imperial China.

Monies of Account and Monetary Transition in China, Twelfth to Fourteenth Centuries

Between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries China’s monetary system shifted from a multiple currency system including paper notes, bronze coin, and uncoined silver to a unified paper currency system established by the Mongol Yuan dynasty. Consequently, China’s longstanding bronze coin standard was replaced by a new money of account denominated in silver. However, silver largely disappeared as a medium of exchange under Yuan rule. Instead, silver units of account were used to denominate paper currency. The monetary policies of the Mongol Yuan state established a silver unit of account that remained the monetary standard throughout China’s late imperial era.

The Ningbo-Hakata Merchant Network and the Reorientation of East Asian Maritime Trade, 1150–1350

T period 850–1350 was the crucial phase in the formation of an East Asian maritime region. This era has been dubbed “The Age of Maritime Merchants” because private enterprise, rather than state regulation, played the salient role in the emergence and expansion of maritime trade in East Asia.1 To be sure, the Song state in China, the Koryŏ kingdom in Korea, and the Heian and Kamakura governments in Japan endeavored to manage maritime trade and strove to ensure the rulers’ control of prestige goods. But compared to the highly regulated tributary trade system of the Ming (1368–1644) and early Qing (1644– 1911) dynasties, the ban on private maritime trade imposed for much of the Ming period, and the seclusion policies adopted by the Tokugawa regime, maritime traders operated under much more liberal political conditions during the period 850–1350. The political and economic

Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing (review)

In this innovative study, Si-yen Fei proposes two distinct interpretations of urbanism in Ming Nanjing: one in which the neglect of urban society in the regulatory order established by the Ming founder (the Hongwu emperor, r. 1368–1398) compelled constant negotiation between local officials and town dwellers over the terms of urban governance; and a second in which Nanjing literati undertook a cultural reimagining of their city’s landscape amid rapid economic and cultural change. Neither of these interpretative threads speaks to the city as a matrix of social life and economic activity. Instead, Fei’s analysis focuses on the tension between the Ming founder’s bucolic vision of an empire of self-governing village communities and the dominance of specifically urban elites in the political, economic, and cultural life of the empire during the last century of Ming rule. As the original capital laid out by Hongwu and as one of the principal incubators—along with Suzhou and Hangzhou—of the distinctive urban culture of the late Ming, Nanjing provides an excellent template for tracing the arc of this historical change. Fei devotes two chapters to each of the two main themes—the institutional and the cultural—of her analysis. Chapter 1 revisits the municipal reform movement of the late Ming period—the subject of earlier studies by Fuma Susumu 夫馬進 and myself—in order to distinguish the unique character of this movement within the context of Ming governance in general and the municipal service reforms in particular.1 In contrast to the emphasis in my study (and to a lesser extent in that of Fuma) on the class conflicts exposed by the municipal reform campaigns, Fei identifies a process of consensus building between

Economic Depression and the Silver Question in Nineteenth-Century China

In the early nineteenth century, China descended into a prolonged economic decline commonly referred to as the ‘Daoguang Depression’ (1820–1850). It has been argued that the chief cause of this deflation in silver prices was a massive outflow of silver during these years, a reversal of the centuries-long pattern of silver flowing into China. But the ‘drain of silver’ thesis is flawed on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Price deflation in the early nineteenth century cannot be correlated either with population trends or fluctuations in silver imports or in foreign trade generally. Instead, the causes of the Daoguang Depression must be found in the domestic economy, and especially in the growing regional economic autarky that reversed the eighteenth-century trend towards national market integration.

The maturation of the market economy (1550 to 1800)

Emperor Hongwus project of social and economic reformation delivered a shocking blow to Chinas commerce and industry, especially in Jiangnan, the empires economic heartland. The author of a Suzhou gazetteer published in 1506 acidly observed that Hongwus campaigns against Suzhous landowners, the forced removal of wealthy families to the capital, and the conscription of artisans into hereditary service to the state, had severely retarded the citys population growth and economic recovery even a century afterward. But by the end of the fifteenth century Hongwus key institutional innovations – the lijia village household organization and the liangzhang tax headmen – were essentially defunct, and the system of hereditary occupational households inherited from the Yuan had atrophied as well. The ban on private maritime trade was still in force, although Fujian seafarers easily evaded the lax net of enforcement. By the early decades of the sixteenth century commercial growth was beginning to revive, despite lingering obstacles such as a stagnant money supply following the closure of the Ming mints in the 1430s. Economic developments in the sixteenth century utterly erased Emperor Hongwus vision of village autarky and self-sufficiency. Steady gains in agricultural production and the formation of national markets for industrial goods such as cotton, silk, and porcelain stimulated regional specialization. The growing allure of overseas trade following the abrupt influx of silver imports – first from Japan, and later from Spains American colonies – beginning in the 1540s galvanized agitation against the interdiction of foreign trade, which was repealed in 1567. Massive infusions of foreign silver stoked the fires of commercial and industrial growth during the last century of the Ming, especially in coastal regions with ready access to foreign markets. The expansion of the money economy, the growth of rural industries, the increasing spatial range of markets, the greater volume of foreign trade, the disappearance of bound labor, and the ascendancy of private enterprise over state economic management all contributed to what some scholars have referred to as a “second economic revolution” (after the first “economic revolution” of the Tang-Song transition) beginning c . 1550. Commercial revival in the late Ming Hongwus campaigns against the entrenched landowning elite of Jiangnan resulted in a leveling of rural society and more fragmented landholdings. Individual farms typically consisted of a number of plots spread over a wide area; the properties of large landowners often were scattered over several counties.

Chinese Coin and Changes in Monetary Preferences in Maritime East Asia in the Fifteenth-Seventeenth Centuries

In the twelfth-thirteenth centuries massive quantities of bronze coin issued by the Song dynasty in China were exported and became the de facto monetary standard throughout maritime East Asia. However, the cessation of minting by the Ming dynasty in the 1430s provoked a monetary crisis. Private coinage proliferated both in China and abroad, creating a profusion of heterogeneous transactional currencies and numerous regional monetary circuits. This paper examines monetary circulation in maritime East Asia—encompassing China, Japan, Ryūkyū, Vietnam, and Java—during the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries in order to re-assess the impact of Chinese coin in fostering monetary integration (and disintegration).

Ji'an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China (review)

have many detailed studies of the rise of Shanghai and the treaty ports but far fewer of the inland peripheral cities that failed to flourish during the age of Western contact. In the twentieth century Shanghai people saw it as an isolated backwater, but Yangzhou still had its supporters, who praised its preservation of old customs and rejected its image as a city of lazy literati and impoverished whores. Yangzhou, of course, did not die. It would be interesting to know if the Chinese of the twentyfirst century, who, searching for a moral anchor opposed to Western values, now sing the praises of “Chinese tradition,” will find anything worth preserving in old Yangzhou. Or will they simply exploit its past for tourists seeking new stereotypes of traditional China? Finnane’s sweeping social, environmental, and cultural history of Yangzhou provides a microcosmic view of the larger changes that China has endured over the past five centuries.

Chinese Capitalism, 1522 1840. Edited by Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. x1, 517.

This book is a translation of the first volume of a trilogy entitled History of the Development of Chinese Capitalism published between 1985 and 1993 by a team of researchers at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It focuses on the emergence of what Chinese historians have called “embryonic capitalism†(often translated more literally as “the sprouts of capitalism†) prior to the Opium War (1840–1842), which in Chinese historiography marks the beginning of Chinas modern era. The authors utilize an explicitly Marxian analysis to distinguish embryonic capitalism as a distinct phase of economic development. Many Western scholars have begun to define the period 1500–1800 as Chinas early modern era, finding in the emergence of free labor markets, regional specialization in agriculture and handicraft production, rural market integration, the growing autonomy of merchant groups, and increased foreign trade patterns of socioeconomic change comparable to contemporary developments in Europe. The authors of this study, in contrast, distance themselves from the hypothesis, once prevalent among Chinese historians, that China during this period was developing a capitalist economy along lines similar to Europe. Yet at the same time they challenge the tendency to view the late imperial economy as homeostatic, a characterization that gained considerable currency among Chinese historians during the 1980s, most notably in the “super-stability†hypothesis advanced by Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng in their 1983 book Prosperity and Crisis: The Super-Stable Structure of Chinas Feudal Society (Changsha: Renmin chubanshe). The introduction by Chris Bramall and Peter Nolan provides non-specialists with a useful guide to the historiographical background of this book and its methodological approach; but their review of alternative interpretations of the late imperial Chinese economy, which only considers scholarship published up to the mid-1980s, is outdated.