Global Connections and Monetary History 1470-1800 (review)

The role of precious metals (whether in the form of money or specie) in the fixing of prices and the appearance of inflation or deflation, as opposed to such factors as population change and technological improvements, was bitterly debated in the economic history of the 1950s and 1960s. This debate has been somewhat muted since, although some economic historians have persevered with the thankless task of establishing from defective sources what metals there were, how they were minted and how they circulated in Europe and the rest of the world. This volume of essays, the product of a session at the twelfth International Economic History Congress in 1998, confines itself largely to the critical preliminary task of establishing as far as is possible what metals and moneys there were in this period. The editors have, however, a wider agenda of which this is only a part, that of totally reinterpreting the globalisation of trade in the period and offering an alternative explanation of the growth of a world economy to that of Emanuel Wallerstein who focussed on what he sees as the core Atlantic states. A number of the essays provide a necessary jolt for those like me with an incurable Europe-centred viewpoint, by focussing on the Ottoman Empire, India, Japan and China. The most important is that by Richard von Glahn, which effectively provides a short introduction to his book Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000 - 1700. He suggests that China, Europe and the rest of the world were already linked by a single global economy, in which China's huge demand for silver drove the world economy.

Jan der Vries's essay provides a different insight into the Wallerstein/Frank argument over the importance of Asian trade for the rise of Europe to dominance in the nineteenth century. Sushil Chaudury adds to this reassessment by demonstrating that it was the Asian merchants who imported most silver to Bengal, not the Europeans. Sevket Pamuk, who has recently published a history of money in the Ottoman empire, has compressed the essential features of that history and government policy into a few critical pages that clarify not only the nature of that Empire but also its links to global developments.

Other essays, such as John Munro's on South German silver mining from 1470-1540, supplementing and expanding the materials in his earlier works, reassess the relative position of bullion imports to Europe, which in the editors' overall approach is reduced to an important but minor part of the whole system. García-Baquero González demonstrates the excessive importance that has been given to Spanish silver in the earlier period although as J. R. Fisher shows, in the eighteenth century Latin American production was rising dramatically. Munro provides the figures to prove what a number of people have long contended, that the south German sources of bullion, extracted with improved technology that still amazes visitors to the historic mines, outweighed the importance of bullion from the new world for Europe until well after 1540.

While acknowledging the problematic nature of the monetary consequences of gold and silver production throughout the globe, the essays supply a series of invaluable tables of output and minting in Europe and the world, quantitative estimates of the trade and shipping from and to different parts of the globe. The overall significance of the individual studies is not immediately apparent in the book itself. These careful, cautious and separate arguments, however, really serve to underpin a much more revolutionary assertion of an alternative explanation of long term change which is developed in other books. The value of such a reassessment to all aspects of the history of individual countries and its effects on historians studying governmental, social and cultural aspects of their history cannot be overestimated. In a period of globalisation some historians at least are reassembling the pieces of the puzzle to create...