ChinaIn China, silver deepened the already substantial commercialization of the country’s economy. Toobtain the silver needed to pay their taxes, more and more people had to sell something — eithertheir labor or their products. Communities that devoted themselves to growing mulberry trees, onwhich silkworms fed, had to buy their rice from other regions. Thus the Chinese economy becamemore regionally specialized. Particularly in southern China, this surging economic growth resulted inthe loss of about half the area’s forest cover as more and more land was devoted to cash crops.

China’s role in the silver trade is a useful reminder of Asian centrality in the world economy of theearly modern era. Its large and prosperous population, increasingly operating within a silver-basedeconomy, fueled global commerce, vastly increasing the quantity of goods exchanged and thegeographic range of world trade. Despite their obvious physical presence in the Americas, Africa,and Asia, economically speaking Europeans were essentially middlemen, funneling American silverto Asia and competing with one another for a place in the rich markets of the East. The productivityof the Chinese economy was evident in Spanish America, where cheap and well-made Chinesegoods easily outsold those of Spain. In 1594, the Spanish viceroy of Peru observed that “a man canclothe his wife in Chinese silks for [25 pesos], whereas he could not provide her with clothing ofSpanish silks with 200 pesos.” Indian cotton textiles likewise outsold European woolen or linentextiles in the seventeenth century to such an extent that French laws in 1717 prohibited thewearing of Indian cotton or Chinese silk clothing as a means of protecting French industry.

Asian CommerceIn the early seventeenth century, a large number of Japanese traders began to operate inSoutheast Asia, where they behaved much like the newly arriving Europeans, frequently using forcein support of their commercial interests. But unlike European states, the Japanese government ofthe Tokugawa shogunate explicitly disavowed any responsibility for or connection with theseJapanese merchants. Japanese merchants lacked the kind of support from their government thatEuropean merchants consistently received, but they did not refrain from trading in Southeast Asia.During the Edo Period (1603-1867), the Edo government’s policy of sakoku not only limited tradewith Europeans; it also strictly controlled economic interactions with all foreign entities, includingChina, Korea, and other regional states. Only the Dutch were allowed to trade out of the port ofNagasaki until the arrival of Americans in 1853.

Other Asian merchants did not disappear from the Indian Ocean, despite European naval dominance.Arab, Indian, Chinese, Javanese, Malay, Vietnamese, and other traders benefited from the upsurge inseaborne commerce. A long-term movement of Chinese merchants into Southeast Asian port citiescontinued in the early modern era, enabling the Chinese to dominate the growing spice trade betweenthat region and China. Southeast Asian merchants, many of them women, continued a long traditionof involvement in international trade. Overland trade within Asia remained wholly in Asian hands andgrew considerably. Tens of thousands of Indian merchants and moneylenders, mostly Hindusrepresenting sophisticated family firms, lived throughout Central Asia, Persia, and Russia, thusconnecting this vast region to markets in India. These international Asian commercial networks,equivalent in their commercial sophistication to those of Europe, continued to operate successfullyeven as Europeans militarized the seaborne commerce of the Indian Ocean.

Within India, large and wealthy family firms, such as the one headed by Virji Vora during theseventeenth century, were able to monopolize the buying and selling of particular products, such aspepper or coral, and thus dictate terms and prices to the European trading companies. According tothe British East India Company, Virji Vora was the wealthiest merchant in the world at the time. Hisbusiness activities included wholesale trading, money lending, and banking. He established a monopolyover certain imports in Surat, and dealt with a wide range of commodities including spices, bullion (goldand silver), coral, ivory, lead, and opium. He was a major credit supplier and customer of the British East

India Company and the Dutch East India Company

Fur in Global CommerceThe rise of the fur trade in the colonial context is a story of both supply and demand. The

aristocracy of Europe always was a reliable market for fur, a product that was viewed as

functional, fashionable, and even regal. European fur-bearing animals, however, were being

depleted by overhunting and by competition from expanding farming frontiers for territory.

Beavers were effectively extinct in the British Isles by the 16th century; in France their numbers

were similarly reduced.

Meeting demand for furs became the task of merchants. Their principal source was Russia, but

the discovery that furs could be obtained much more cheaply from North America reoriented

not only the supply, but also demand: the discovery of furs in North America actually refueled

fur as a fashion trend. The wealth merchants gained fuelled the rise of a merchant class that

would, itself, demand more furs as they increased their own social status. Soon the wealthiest

merchants were sporting fur hats and trim on their coats.

By 1500, European population growth and agricultural expansion had sharply diminished the supply offur-bearing animals, such as beaver, rabbits, sable, marten, and deer. Furthermore, much of the earlymodern era witnessed a period of cooling temperatures and harsh winters, known as the Little Ice Age,which may well have increased the demand for furs. These conditions pushed prices higher, providingstrong economic incentives for European traders to tap the immense wealth of fur-bearing animalsfound in North America.

The French were most prominent in the St. Lawrencevalley, around the Great Lakes, and later along theMississippi River; British traders pushed into theHudson Bay region; and the Dutch focused theirattention along the Hudson River in what is now NewYork. In the southern colonies of British North America,deerskins by the hundreds of thousands found a readymarket in England’s leather industry. Furs from the

Dutch Fort Orange (now Albany, New York) were

transferred down the Hudson River to New Amsterdam

(New York after 1667), most of which seemed to be

coming from the lands around Lake Ontario. The

resulting elongated colony served primarily as a

fur-trading post, with the powerful Dutch West India

Company controlling all commerce. Fort Amsterdam,

on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, defended the

growing city of New Amsterdam. The director general of the colony also defended New Amsterdam

from Indian attacks by ordering African slaves to build a protective wall on the city’s northeastern

border, giving present-day Wall Street its name.

Europeans usually waited for Native Americans to bring the furs or skins initially to their coastalsettlements and later to their fortified trading posts in the interior of North America, paying for the furswith a variety of trade goods, including guns, blankets, metal tools, rum, and brandy, amid muchceremony, haggling over prices, and ritualized gift giving. Native Americans represented a cheap labor

force in this international commercial effort, but they were not a directly coerced labor force. Nothing,however, protected them against the diseases carried by Europeans, and rivalries and wars betweenEuropeans in North America often forced natives to take sides.

A consistent demand for beaver hats led to the near extinction of that industrious animal in much ofNorth America by the early nineteenth century and with it the degradation or loss of many wetlandhabitats. By the 1760s, hunters in southeastern British colonies took about 500,000 deer every year,seriously diminishing the deer population of the region. As early as 1642, Miantonomo, a chief of theNew England Narragansett people, spoke of the environmental consequences of English colonialism:“since these Englishmen have seized our country, they have cut down the grass with scythes, and thetrees with axes. Their cows and horses eat up the grass, and their hogs spoil our bed of clams; andfinally we shall all starve to death.”

Native Americans also grew dependent on European trade goods. New manufactured goods replacedtraditional handcrafted goods. A wide range of traditional crafts were thus lost, while the nativepeoples did not gain a corresponding ability to manufacture the new items for themselves. In additionto guns and germs, alcohol became a destructive European import. With no prior experience ofalcohol and little time to adjust to its easy availability, these drinks “hit Indian societies with explosiveforce.”Binge drinking, violence among young men, promiscuity, and addiction followed in manyplaces. In short, it was not so much the fur trade itself that decimated Native American societies, butall that accompanied it — disease, dependence, guns, alcohol, and the growing encroachment ofEuropean colonial empires.

The Russian Empire also became a major source of furs for Western Europe, China, and theOttoman Empire. The profitability of that trade in furs was the chief incentive for Russia’s rapidexpansion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries across Siberia, where the “soft gold” offur-bearing animals was abundant. Here the silver trade and the fur trade intersected, as Europeanspaid for Russian furs largely with American gold and silver.

The consequences for native Siberians were similar to those in North America as disease took its toll,as indigenous people became dependent on Russian goods, as the settler frontier encroached onnative lands, and as many species of fur-bearing mammals were seriously depleted. Russianauthorities imposed a tax or tribute, payable in furs, on every able-bodied Siberian male betweeneighteen and fifty years of age. To enforce the payment, they took hostages from Siberian societies,with death as a possible outcome if the required furs were not forthcoming.

Africa & the AtlanticThe European demand for slaves was clearly the chief cause of this tragic commerce, and from thepoint of sale on the African coast to the massive use of slave labor on American plantations, the

entire enterprise was in European hands. Within Africa itself, however, a different picture emerges, forover the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, European demand elicited an African supply. Theslave trade quickly came to operate largely with Europeans waiting on the coast, either on their shipsor in fortified settlements, to purchase slaves from African merchants and political elites. Certainly,Europeans tried to exploit African rivalries to obtain slaves at the lowest possible cost, and thefirearms they funneled into West Africa may well have increased the warfare from which so manyslaves were derived. But from the point of initial capture to sale on the coast, the entire enterprise wasnormally in African hands. Almost nowhere did Europeans attempt outright military conquest; insteadthey generally dealt as equals with local African authorities.

In exchange for slaves, African sellers sought both European and Indian textiles, cowrie shells (widelyused as money in West Africa), European metal goods, firearms and gunpowder, tobacco andalcohol, and various decorative items such as beads. Europeans purchased some of these items —cowrie shells and Indian textiles, for example — with silver mined in the Americas. Thus thetransatlantic slave system connected with commerce in silver and textiles as it became part of anemerging worldwide network of exchange.

Although the slave trade did not produce in Africa the kind of population collapse that occurred in theAmericas, it certainly slowed Africa’s growth at a time when Europe, China, and other regions wereexpanding demographically. Beyond the loss of millions of people over four centuries, the demand forAfrican slaves produced economic stagnation and social disruption.

The vast majority of the African captives transported across the Atlantic, some 80 percent or more,ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean. The plantation complex of the Americas, based on Africanslavery, extended beyond the Caribbean and Brazil to encompass the southern colonies of BritishNorth America, where tobacco, cotton, rice, and indigo were major crops. The availability of land andnatural resources in America enabled the collection or production of a wide variety ofcommodities—furs, lumber, cod, and wheat, for example. It was, however, the demand for twocategories of goods that stands out as being most responsible for the continuing flow of capital, labor,and governmental military services across the Atlantic: groceries and silver. The Americas becamethe prime supplier of tobacco, sugar, sugar byproducts such as molasses and rum, and coffee, andcocoa. 74% of the value of imports coming into Amsterdam and more than 85% coming into Londonfrom colonies in America consisted of tobacco and sugar products. The Americas represented both anew center of supply as well as a new market for finished goods, creating a “triangular trade” as isoften portrayed in maps like the one below. Of course, while this transatlantic trade system was afeature of what historians call the Atlantic World, it simply formed a subregion of the wider globaltrade network, providing and demanding many of the goods that fueled this new era of globalization.