Europe and the People Without History by ERIC R. WOLF

Author:ERIC R. WOLF
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

Opium for Tea

Tea drinking, introduced into Europe by the Dutch, had begun in England in 1664, when a quantity of two pounds, two ounces was imported. By 1783 the amount sold by the East India Company alone was nearly 6 million pounds, and two years later it came to more than 15 million (Greenberg 1951: 3). An additional amount perhaps as great was smuggled into England by private traders attempting to avoid taxes. (When the Crown could not collect tea taxes in Europe, it tried to do so in Boston, turning Americans into rebels and coffee drinkers at the same time.) All this tea had to be paid for in silver, causing silver to flow to the East in "a chronic hemorrhage" (Dermigny 1964,1: 724). China drew silver both from Japan and Manila. In 1600 the flow of silver from Japan to China amounted to 200,000 kilograms, but around that same year the annual flow of silver from Manila into China came to 8 million kilos (Rawski 1972: 76). China became "the tomb of American treasure." Dermigny estimates the amount of silver flowing into China between 1719 and 1833 at between 306 and 330 million piasters, representing one-fifth of all the silver produced in Mexico during this time, and perhaps as much as 20 percent of all European stocks of silver (1964, I: 740).

In this bullion drainage, the English inherited an ancient problem. Even in Roman times, southern India had sent spices, muslins, and precious stones to the Mediterranean, receiving in turn Roman gold. Roman aurei or denarii have been found in quantity in hoards of Roman coins in India (Wheeler 1955: 164—166). The amount of bullion drained from the Mediterranean was considerable. Pliny remarked that "in no year does India absorb less than fifty million sesterces" (quoted in Wheeler 1955: 167). Nor did the outflow cease with the fall of the Roman Empire. The Middle Ages witnessed a steady outflow of gold and silver through Italy to Byzantium and the Muslim world, and from there on to India (Lopez, Miskimin, and Udovitch 1970). In the early modem period, Braudel writes,

the Mediterranean as a whole operated as a machine for accumulating precious metals, of which, be it said, it could never have enough. It hoarded them only to lose them all to India, China, and the East Indies. The great discoveries may have revolutionized routes and prices, but they did not alter this fundamental situation. [1972, I: 464]

By the seventeenth century, the same problem faced northwestern Europe.

All this commercial activity had, of course, repercussions within China itself. In the sixteenth century along the southern coast of China, expanding Portuguese and Spanish trade had prompted the specialized production of sugar, textiles, porcelain, and metal wares for the overseas market. In turn, the Iberians brought tobacco, sweet potatoes, and peanuts from the New World. The new food crops were eagerly adopted by the Chinese peasantry, and they appear to have been instrumental in its rapid population growth (Ho 1965). Tobacco became a

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