Techniques, State–Merchant Relations, and the 19th-Century Crisis: Contestation over Silver Value in Early Modern Coastal China

Using accounts based on the archives of the East India Company, reports from the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, and handbooks on silver testing composed by Chinese merchants, this article discusses the contestation over silver’s value in foreign trade by comparing knowledge and techniques of silver testing adopted by both Chinese and Western Merchants. Through observing every external detail of ingots and summarizing the features of ingots from high quality to low, Chinese merchants created pragmatic knowledge that quickly produced approximate assessment of silver quality. This “pragmatic way of knowing,” albeit useful for Chinese merchants, also became the target of unsatisfied Western traders who were accustomed to using standardized silver coins.

The paper further tracks this technical discord to its socio-economic origin based on memoirs, memorials, and judicial documents. When Spain and England had already taken control over mints in the metropole and colonies in the eighteenth century, the Qing government kept its distance from the circulation of silver and allowed merchants to steer the course. Without any power to alter the reality that each economic region had its own type of silver standard, merchants simply adapted themselves to the sophisticated currency system and produced pragmatic knowledge to sustain it. As the serious financial crisis in the mid-nineteenth century broke out, the habit of delegating the responsibility of silver management to merchants made the central government reluctant to initiate effective silver policy regardless of the suggestions from governors from coastal provinces and, therefore, significantly influenced the trajectory of the following reform.