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Myth and Reality of China's Seventeenth-Century Monetary Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2009

Richard Von Glahn
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473.

Abstract

The impact of China's demand for silver on global trade in specie and monetary metals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remains poorly understood. Conventional wisdom postulates that seventeenth-century China became so dependent on foreign silver to sustain domestic economic growth that a sharp fall in silver imports in the 1640s led to the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. This hypothesis rests on dubious theoretical and empirical grounds. The demand for silver in China was determined by long-term changes in indigenous demand for money rather than short-term fluctuations in the flow of silver imports.

Information

Type
Papers Presented at the Fifty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1996

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