Cross-border trade and silver-based capital circulation in early modern East Asia constitutes a major part of the global history of capitalism. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, an increasingly significant volume of goods and capital circulated globally. East Asia, in particular, was deeply involved in global trade through a maritime network connecting Calcutta, Malacca, Batavia, Macau, Canton, Taipei, Nagasaki, Tsushima, and Pusan, a Sino-Korean overland trade network connecting Pusan, Seoul, Pyongyang, Fenghuang City, Mukden, and Beijing, and a Sino- Russian overland caravan trade network connecting intramural China, the Mongolian steppe, and Siberia. The existing literature on the macrohistory of the early modern global economy has revealed the deep influences of these cross-border trade over East Asian societies. However, how these societies and their human agents responded to increasingly powerful capitalist forces in native milieus invite more meticulous examinations. This session examines cross-border trade and silver circulation among different political and economic units, including Qing China, Chosŏn Korea, Tokugawa Japan, British East India Company, and the United States, in the interregional and international context to revisit the history of capitalism in early modern East Asia.

The four presentations of the panel proceed in chronological order. Wang’s presentation examines the significance of Sino-Korean trade in East Mukden and the unprecedented silver-based capital circulation among Japan, Korea, and China from the late seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries. It explores the formation of a powerful trade, financial, and political network connecting the borderland with the political center of the Chinese empire and the prosperity of cross-border capital circulation in Northeast Asia that constituted part of modern capitalism in the region. By examining Chosŏn Korea’s crucial role in the trade network and silver circulation in East Asia, Jeon’s presentation reveals that Chosŏn state agents consistently sought to suppress the capitalistic impulse of ever-increasing production and consumption within its borders. In particular, the state actively closed mines whenever possible, instead of maximizing the economic benefits of the expanding global silver trade network in East Asia. Qiao’s presentation discusses the monetary transformation in the northern frontier regions of the Qing empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the specific case of Guihuacheng in Inner Mongolia, a center of Shanxi merchants’ cross-regional trade network. It provides a new perspective to examine economic history by showing that the function of a complex monetary system on an empire’s frontier was intrinsically bound with the rhythm of the flow of trade and silver within a nationwide merchant network. Gao’s presentation examines China’s dual monetary system in the first half of the nineteenth century by revisiting the traditional theory that the opium trade caused “silver outflow” from China, leading to financial disturbances, war, and domestic rebellion. It points out that the British smuggling of Chilean copper could have remarkably influenced China’s monetary landscape and underscores the importance of Sino-American silver trade.