Suchergebnisse

Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- The bronze age economy (1045 to 707 b.c.e.) -- From city-state to autocratic monarchy (707 to 250 B.C.E.) -- Economic foundations of the universal empire (250 to 81 B.C.E.) -- Magnate society and the estate economy (81 B.C.E. to 485 C.E.) -- The Chinese-nomad synthesis and the reunification of the empire (485 to 755) -- Economic transformation in the Tang-Song transition (755 to 1127) -- The heyday of the Jiangnan economy (1127 to 1550) -- The maturation of the market economy (1550 to 1800) -- Domestic crises and global challenges : restructuring the imperial economy (1800 to 1900) -- Bibliography -- Index

AbstractBetween 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.

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.

"When visited by the British trade mission led by Lord George Macartney, who aimed to show off the best of Western trade and technology, the Qianlong emperor of Qing China was known to have famously replied in 1792 that "Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce."2 Qianlong's statement came at the height of Qing's glory, overseeing a remarkable tripling of population and a doubling of territory between the 15th and 18th centuries. No single political entity at the time achieved such size in both geography and population under such stability and durability"--

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