Among Hans Ulrich Vogel’s important contributions to Chinese and world history has been his work on the outsized influence China exercised in the early history of globalization. In this brief article, we pay tribute to his careful research and deep insights by describing the interconnected circuits of exchange of three commodities – mercury, silver, and sea otter pelts – through which the early Pacific economy was articulated and transformed. Following Professor Vogel’s lead, we explain how the Chinese demand that drove these exchanges fueled competitive economic expansion of European powers in the Pacific, setting in motion political, social, ecological, and economic patterns whose influence endures into the present.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Agricola, Georgius. 1950. De re metallica. (On metals). Translated by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover. New York: Dover.
Baeza, Pedro de. 1607. Traslado del memorial que se hizo con el licenciado don Francisco de Tejada. Madrid, 13 de diciembre, 1607. (Memorandum written with Francisco de Tejada in Madrid, December 13, 1607). Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Signatura: R/ 14034.
Bancroft, Hubert Howe. 1884. History of California. Vol. I: 1542–1800. San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Company.
Barret, Ward. 1990. “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800.” In The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750. Edited by James Tracy, 224–254. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beebe, Rose Marie, and Robert M. Senkewicz. 2015. Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535–1846. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Biringuccio, Vannoccio. 1990. The Pirotechnia of Vannoccio Biringuccio: The Classic Sixteenth-Century Treatise on Metals and Metallurgy. Edited and translated by Cyril Stanley Smith and Martha Teach Gnudi. New York: Dover Publications.
Boxer, Charles R. 1970. “Plata es Sangre: Sidelights on the Drain of Spanish-American Silver in the Far East, 1550–1700.” Philippine Studies 18: 457–478.
Burkholder, Mark A., and Lyman L. Johnson. 1998. Colonial Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cross, Harry E. 1983. “South American Bullion Production and Export, 1550–1750.” In Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern World, edited by J. F. Richards, 397–424. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
Cook, James. 1967. The Journals of Captain James Cook. Vol. 3: The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, 1776–1780, part 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
D’Arcy, Paul. 1998. “No Empty Ocean: Trade and Interaction across the Pacific Ocean to the Middle of the Eighteenth Century.” In Studies in the Economic History of the Pacific, edited by Sally M. Miller, A. J. H. Latham, and Dennis O. Flynn, 21–44. London: Routledge.
Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giráldez. 2010. China and the Birth of Globalization in the 16th Century. New York: Routledge.
Fonseca, Fabian de, and Carlos de Urrutia. 1845. Historia general de Real Hacienda. (General History of the Royal Treasury). T. I México: Vicente G. Torres.
Gibson, James R. 1992. Otter Skins, Boston Ships and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785–1841. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Gunn, Geoffrey. 2018. World Trade Systems of the East and West: Nagasaki and the Asian Bullion Trade Networks. Leiden: Brill.
Lang, Mervyn F. 1969. “La búsqueda del mercurio en el México Colonial” (Search for mercury in colonial Mexico). Historia Mexicana, 18: 473–484.
Lang, Mervyn F. 1992. “La crisis minera novohispana y el suministro de azogue desde Filipinas a principios del siglo XIX” (The mining crisis in New Spain and the supply of mercury from the Phillipines at the beginning of the nineteenth century) In El Lejano Oriente Español: Filipinas (siglo XIX). VII Jornadas Nacionales de Historia Militar (Spanish Far East: Philippines [19th century]. Seventh National Conference on Military History). Sevilla: Cátedra “General Castaños.”
Lapérouse, Jean François. 1959. The First French Expedition to California. Los Angeles: Glen Dawson.
Martínez Torres, José Antonio. 2020. “Imperio y arbitrismo: Los memoriales de Pedro de Baeza sobre las Indias Orientales (1607–1609)” (Empire and arbitrism: The memoranda of Pedro de Baeza on the East Indies). Historia Social 98: 149–164.
McNeill, John. 1999. “Islands in the Rim: Ecology and History in and around the Pacific, 1521–1996.” In Pacific Centuries: Pacific and Pacific Rim History since the Sixteenth Century, edited by Dennis O. Flynn, Lionel Frost, and A. J. H. Latham, 70–84. London: Routledge.
McNeill, John. 1998. “From Magellan to MITI: Pacific Rim Economies and Pacific Islands Ecologies Since 1521.” In Studies in the Economic History of the Pacific Rim, edited by Miller M. Sally, A. J. H. Latham, and Dennis O. Flynn, 72–93. London: Routledge.
Ogden, Adele. 1941. The California Sea Otter Trade, 1784–1848. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Probert, Alan. 1997. “Bartolomé de Medina: The Patio Process and the Sixteenth Century Silver Crisis.” In Mines of Silver and Gold in the Americas, edited by Peter Bakewell, 96–124. Aldershot, UK: Variorum.
Richards, John F. 2014. The World Hunt. An Environmental History of the Commodification of Animals. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Robins, Nicholas A. 2011. Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schlesinger, Jonathan. 2017. A World Trimmed by Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Souza, George Bryan. 1986. The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630–1754. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Von Glahn, Richard. 2016. The Economic History of China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 236 | 236 | 23 |
Full Text Views | 8 | 8 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 256 | 256 | 0 |
Among Hans Ulrich Vogel’s important contributions to Chinese and world history has been his work on the outsized influence China exercised in the early history of globalization. In this brief article, we pay tribute to his careful research and deep insights by describing the interconnected circuits of exchange of three commodities – mercury, silver, and sea otter pelts – through which the early Pacific economy was articulated and transformed. Following Professor Vogel’s lead, we explain how the Chinese demand that drove these exchanges fueled competitive economic expansion of European powers in the Pacific, setting in motion political, social, ecological, and economic patterns whose influence endures into the present.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 236 | 236 | 23 |
Full Text Views | 8 | 8 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 256 | 256 | 0 |