Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700 (review)

Richard von Glahn's Fountain of Fortune has far-reaching implications for world history, although its title and most of the text refer only to money in China. The importance is not only that of China per se, but also of its largely unrecognized place and role in the development of the global economy. Indeed, the author ends his magisterial study of China's monetary history with these words: "To fully appreciate the dynamics of the silver economy we must train our gaze on the infinite numbers of daily transactions in markets throughout China as well as the macrohistorical trends in global bullion movements." Even that is still an understatement, for these markets in China and their analysis by the author put all global development itself at issue.

Von Glahn begins with a review of classical Chinese monetary analysis and proceeds to the Song and Yuan "Transition to the Silver Economy, 1000-1435." However, he concentrates his own analysis on the "Age of Silver" during Ming and Qing times until the early eighteenth century, with a brief excursion to the nineteenth. The author makes reference to a plethora of contemporary Chinese and later Japanese authorities on monetary analysis and policy, and he marshals masses of previously largely unknown primary sources and data, particularly on the ubiquitous market role of copper-bronze "cash" coin and its debasement by tin and zinc alloy in competition with silver bullion, cowry, rice, textiles, and other commodity currencies. Indeed, his central section (chapters 5 and 6), which analyze the public issue and debasement, and private counterfeiting and circulation of copper coin, offer the most incisive look yet into how the Chinese economy "really worked."

Von Glahn draws on these sources and data to construct his own analysis, which challenges and replaces two major lines of received wisdom: One is the "early modern" model "of sprouts of capitalism" that compares China with Europe, whose own two variants either neg-lect or affirm the monetization of China. The other is the Chaunuu-Adshead-Reid thesis that a "seventeenth-century crisis" originated in the silver-based European world economic and monetary "center" and spread around the world also to engulf China, among other parts of Asia. On the evidence in this book and many others, the extensive and intensive monetization of China can no longer be disputed. Moreover, for me, von Glahn's evidence and analysis clinch my predisposition to reject both theses. As I also argue in my forthcoming book (ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age [Berkeley: University of California Press]), China/Europe comparisons (along the lines of Praz-niak, Wong, or Pomeranz) enlighten us, but tying them to where and how "capitalism" sprouted is a snare and a delusion. The real issue is how China, Europe, and the rest of the world were related by a single global economy, about which Fountain of Fortune supplies ample evidence. However, on the evidence there was no generalized "seventeenth-century crisis" and certainly none in China, and it could not have spread from Europe, because the place and role of Europe in the global economy were far too small to produce any such impact.

So far, I would take issue with von Glahn on only four "minor" matters. First, silver imports were probably somewhat higher—other researchers estimate them as significantly higher—than the ones von Glahn proposes. I suggest that calculating their increasing tonnage as a constant 80% share of registered maritime commodity exports results in an underestimate of real silver imports, including those that came overland. Second, von Glahn, like Brian Molougheny and Xia Wei-zhong (in "Silver and the Fall of the Ming: A Reassessment," Papers on Far Eastern History40 [1989]: 51-78), explicitly denies a significant decline in silver flows to China around 1640. Yet that abrupt...