Silk, Tea and Opium - Part I
This is an essay on money. I am going to talk about money indirectly, by looking at a previous collision between economic systems, specifically the collision between Europe and China between roughly 1500 and 1900, and how different goods led to different strategies – porcelain, silk and tea were all Chinese goods in 1500, and would be the basis for export, while the Chinese were largely only interested in silver from the outside. This is a situation which is fundamental to political economy – in every chain of trading commodiites
China
If you had alighted on the planet from someplace else, let us say, Neptune, and dispassionately observed the comings and goings of a certain species of bipeds, you would have been able to pick out their unusual ability to organize in very large troops that spanned space and time. If you were of a technological bent, you would have looked at the Chinese troop, and admired their technological prowess, and perhaps picked this troop as the one which was most likely to dominate the planet. The European troop, sickly, short, prone to excess, would have been distant behind others in any ranking. Unfavorable location and cultural chaos, as well as a large dollop of anti-empiricism and predeliction for multigenerational warfare would seem to preclude them from doing much more than holding off the expanding and aggressive Turkish empire, which seemed destined to do for Islamic culture what Alexander the Great had done for classical Greece – create a continental empire and seed it with a militarized version of an intellectually and artistically advanced society.
