Related Lesson Plan and Classroom Readings

Lesson Plan: Bound by a Silver Chain, by Maggie Favretti

Classroom Readings:

LESSON PLAN: Bound by a Silver Chain – by Maggie Favretti, Scarsdale HS (Winner 2006 WHA Teaching Prize)

Scroll to pg. 39 of this PDF for the excellent lesson by Maggie Favretti, who introduces the lesson as follows:
"I wrote this lesson on silver and monetary exchange after reading Pomeranz & Topik's The World That Trade Created, Flynn & Giraldez's "Born with a Silver Spoon," and Paul Lunde's "American Silver, Ottoman Decline." I had in mind an AP World History class, which would have these "role-play" discussions during their study of the era of global interaction, 1450-1750. The lesson deals with three different empires, and demographic changes, but most importantly addresses economic issues such as global trade and currency flows. It additionally provides students with a basis for interpreting contemporary economic models, such as globalization and currency trading. I have tried to incorporate change over time by having students address issues typical of 1571, 1635, and 1700, key dates in the history of silver exchange. Students can compare and contrast responses among three empires: China, Spain, and Japan. Students must also become aware of divergent points of view within each of these areas, as they prepare for and play roles in the days' discussions. Lastly, the structure functions as a predictive lesson model ("how do you think people would have reacted under these circumstances"), and then asks students to analyze how and why their responses may differ from the interpretations provided by the supportive reading. The predictive model reinforces my efforts to lead students to use historical thinking skills (or "habits of mind") to make sense of historical events and also the world around them."

CLASS READINGS

Peer Vries, the Great Divergence, and the California School: Who's In and Who's Out?

by Ricardo Duchesne, University of New Brunswick, Saint John

Available in World History Connected

World history teachers seeking to keep up with the highly charged, richly detailed, and fast-paced debate on the question why western Europe/Britain, rather than China, was the first culture to undergo an industrial revolution, may want to consult Peer Vries's carefully researched book, Via Peking back to Manchester: Britain, the Industrial Revolution, and China.(1) Vries, professor of history at the University of Leiden, tries to answer this question in a way that allows students to see both sides of the debate right away. From the time Vries joined this debate in the late 1990s, he has shown a willingness to accommodate recent reassessments of our global economic past without discarding received historiography and economic theory. He has certainly kept away from both the polemical excesses of Andre Gunder Frank, who boldly proclaimed that an accidental contraction in the Asian market in the late 1700s gave Europe the chance to overcome its marginal position in the world economy, and David Landes, who defiantly insisted that western Europe was the driving cultural force in the world as long ago as the year 1000 CE.(2) Although Vries concludes, after measured consideration of all the salient points and after synthesizing much of the recent literature, that "by the eighteenth century it [Britain] had become both technologically and scientifically a much more dynamic society than China," he takes very seriously, and indeed expands upon, many well-known theses associated with R. Bin Wong, Kenneth Pomeranz, Andre Gunder Frank, and Jack Goldstone.(3)

Available also in Research Gate:

‘In this article the author presents a description, analysis and evaluation of the fundamentally new interpretation of the economic history of the early modern world that is defended by authors who collectively have become known as the California School, the most important among them being Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong, Andre Gunder Frank and Jack Goldstone. He in particular analyses their claim that in the period from roughly 1400 to 1800 the most advanced economies of Eurasia formed a world of ‘surprising resemblances’ and that the Great Divergence between ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ only originated with industrialization and must be interpreted as a fairly contingent and recent phenomenon, basically due to differences in the availability of resources. The author claims that the Californians have a tendency to exaggerate the resemblances between Western Europe and East Asia and should be more specific when it comes to time, place and the differing historical trajectories of various regions. Finally, he claims they should pay far more attention to political and military developments and to the role of culture and institutions.”

China, Technology and Change, by Linda Shaffer

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), [an advisor to King James I of England]and an early advocate of the empirical method, upon which the scientific revolution was based, attributed Western Europe's early modern take-off to three things in particular: printing, the compass, and gunpowder. Bacon had no idea where these things had come from, but historians now know that all three were invented in China. Since, unlike Europe, China did not take off onto a path leading from the scientific to the Industrial Revolution, some historians are now asking why these inventions were so revolutionary in Western Europe and, apparently, so un-revolutionary in China.

In fact, the question has been posed by none other than Joseph Needham, the foremost English-language scholar of Chinese science and technology. It is only because of Needham's work that the Western academic community has become aware that until Europe's take-off China was the unrivaled world leader in technological development. That is why it is so disturbing that Needham himself has posed this apparent puzzle. The English-speaking academic world relies upon him and repeats him; soon this question and the vision of China that it implies will become dogma. Traditional China will take on supersociety qualities—able to contain the power of printing, to rein in the potential of the compass, even to muffle the blast of gunpowder.

The impact of these inventions on Western Europe is well known. Printing not only eliminated much of the opportunity for human copying errors, it also encouraged the production of more copies of old books and an increasing number of new books. As written material became both cheaper and more easily available, intellectual activity increased. Printing would eventually be held responsible, at least in part, for the spread of classical humanism and other ideas from the Renaissance. It is also said to have stimulated the Protestant Reformation, which urged a return to the Bible as the primary religious authority.

The introduction of gunpowder in Europe made castles and other medieval fortifications obsolete (since it could be used to blow holes in their walls) and thus helped to liberate Western Europe from feudal aristocratic power. As an aid to navigation the compass facilitated the Portuguese- and Spanish-sponsored voyages that led to Atlantic Europe's sole possession of the Western Hemisphere, as well as the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa, which opened up the first all-sea route from Western Europe to the long-established ports of East Africa and Asia.

Needham's question can thus be understood to mean, Why didn't China use gunpowder to destroy feudal walls? Why didn't China use the compass to cross the Pacific and discover America, or to find an all-sea route to Western Europe? Why didn't China undergo a Renaissance or Reformation? The implication is that even though China possessed these technologies, it did not change much. Essentially Needham's question is asking, What was wrong with China?

Actually, there was nothing wrong with China. China was changed fundamentally by these inventions. But in order to see the changes, one must abandon the search for peculiarly European events in Chinese history, and look instead at China itself before and after these breakthroughs.

To begin, one should note that China possessed all three of these technologies by the latter part of the Tang dynasty (618-906)—between four and six hundred years before they appeared in Europe. And it was during just that time, from about 850, when the Tang dynasty began to falter, until 960, when the Song dynasty (960-1279) was established, that China underwent fundamental changes in all spheres. In fact, historians are now beginning to use the term "revolution" when referring to technological and commercial changes that culminated in the Song dynasty, in the same way that they refer to the changes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England as the "Industrial Revolution." And the word might well be applied to other sorts of changes in China during this period.

For example, the Tang dynasty elite was aristocratic, but that of the Song was not. No one has ever considered whether the invention of gunpowder contributed to the demise of China's aristocrats, which occurred between 750 and 960, shortly after its invention. Gunpowder may, indeed, have been a factor, although it is unlikely that its importance lay in blowing up feudal walls. Tang China enjoyed such internal peace that its aristocratic lineages did not engage in castle-building of the sort typical in Europe. Thus, China did not have many feudal fortifications to blow up.

The only wall of significance in this respect was the Great Wall, which was designed to keep steppe nomads from invading China. In fact, gunpowder may have played a role in blowing holes in this wall, for the Chinese could not monopolize the terrible new weapon, and their nomadic enemies to the north soon learned to use it against them. The Song dynasty ultimately fell to the Mongols, the most formidable force ever to emerge front the Eurasian steppe. Gunpowder may have had a profound effect on China—exposing a united empire to a foreign invasion amid terrible devastation—but an effect quite opposite to the one it had on Western Europe.

On the other hand, the impact of printing on China was in some ways very similar to its later impact on Europe. For example, printing contributed to a rebirth of classical (that is, preceeding the third century CE) Confucian learning, helping to revive a fundamentally humanistic outlook that had been pushed aside for several centuries.

After the fall of the Han dynasty (BCE 201-220 CE), Confucianism had lost much of its credibility as a world view, and it eventually lost its central place in the scholarly world. It was replaced by Buddhism, which had come from India. Buddhists believed that much human pain and confusion resulted from the pursuit of illusory pleasures and dubious ambitions: enlightenment and, ultimately, salvation would come from a progressive disengagement from the real world, which they also believed to be illusory. This point of view dominated Chinese intellectual life until the ninth century. Thus the academic and intellectual comeback of classical Confucianism was in essence a return to a more optimistic literature that affirmed the world as humans had made it.

The resurgence of Confucianism within the scholarly community was due to many factors, but printing was certainly one of the most important. Although it was invented by Buddhist monks in China, and at first benefited Buddhism, by the middle of the tenth century printers were turning out innumerable copies of the classical Confucian corpus. This return of scholars to classical learning was part of a more general movement that shared not only its humanistic features with the later Western European Renaissance, but certain artistic trends as well.

Furthermore, the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe was in some ways reminiscent of the emergence and eventual triumph of Neo-Confucian philosophy. Although the roots of Neo-Confucianism can he found in the ninth century, the man who created what would become its most orthodox synthesis was Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi, 1130-1200). Neo-Confucianism was significantly different from classical Confucianism, for it had undergone an intellectual and political confrontation with Buddhism and had emerged profoundly changed. It is of the utmost importance to understand that not only was Neo-Confucianism new, it was also heresy, even during Zhu Xi's lifetime. It did not triumph until the thirteenth century, and it was not until 1313 (when Mongol conquerors ruled China) that Zhu Xi's commentaries on the classics became the single authoritative text against which all academic opinion was judged.

In the same way that Protestantism emerged out of a confrontation with the Roman Catholic establishment and asserted the individual Christian's autonomy, Neo-Confucianism emerged as a critique of Buddhist ideas that had taken hold in China, and it asserted an individual moral capacity totally unrelated to the ascetic practices and prayers of the Buddhist priesthood. In the twelfth century Neo-Confucianists lifted the work of Mencius (Meng Zi, 370-290 BC) out of obscurity and assigned it a place in the corpus second only to that of the Analects of Confucius. Many facets of Mencius appealed to the Neo-Confucianists, but one of the most important was his argument that humans by nature are fundamentally good. Within the context of the Song dynasty, this was an assertion that morality could be pursued through an engagement in human affairs, and that the Buddhist monks' withdrawal from life's mainstream did not bestow upon them any special virtue.

The importance of these philosophical developments notwithstanding, printing probably had its greatest impact on the Chinese political system. The origin of the civil service examination system in China can be traced back to the Han dynasty, but in the Song dynasty government-administered examinations became the most important route to political power in China. For almost a thousand years (except the early period of Mongol rule), China was governed by men who had come to power simply because they had done exceedingly well in examinations on the Neo-Confucian canon. At any one time thousands of students were studying for the exams, and thousands of inexpensive books were required. Without printing, such a system would not have been possible.

The development of this alternative to aristocratic rule was one of the most radical changes in world history. Since the examinations were ultimately open to 98 percent of all males (actors were one of the few groups excluded), it was the most democratic system in the would prior to the development of representative democracy and popular suffrage in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (There were some small-scale systems, such as the classical Greek city-states, which might be considered more democratic, but nothing comparable in size to Song China or even the modern nation-states of Europe.)

Finally we come to the compass. Suffice it to say that during the Song dynasty, China developed the world's largest and most technologically sophisticated merchant marine and navy. By the fifteenth century its ships were sailing from the north Pacific to the east coast of Africa. They could have made the arduous journey around the tip of Africa and sail into Portuguese ports; however, they had no reason to do so. Although the Western European economy was prospering, it offered nothing that China could not acquire much closer to home at much less cost. In particular, wool, Western Europe's most important export, could easily be obtained along China's northern frontier.

Certainly the Portuguese and the Spanish did not make their unprecedented voyages out of idle curiosity. They were trying to go to the Spice Islands, in what is now Indonesia, in order to acquire the most valuable commercial items of the time. In the fifteenth century these islands were the world's sole suppliers of the fine spices, such as cloves, nutmeg, and mace, as well as a source for the more generally available pepper. It was this spice market that lured Columbus westward from Spain and drew Vasco Da Gama around Africa and across the Indian Ocean.

After the invention of the compass, China also wanted to go to the Spice Islands and, in fact, did go, regularly—but Chinese ships did not have to go around the world to get there. The Atlantic nations of Western Europe, on the other hand, had to buy spices from Venice (which controlled the Mediterranean trade routes) or from other Italian city-states; or they had to find a new way to the Spice Islands. It was necessity that mothered those revolutionary routes that ultimately changed the world.

Gunpowder, printing, the compass—clearly these three inventions changed China as much as they changed Europe. And it should come as no surprise that changes wrought in China between the eighth and tenth centuries were different from changes wrought in Western Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. It would, of course, be unfair and ahistorical to imply that something was wrong with Western Europe because the technologies appeared there late. It is equally unfair to ask why the Chinese did not accidentally bump into the Western Hemisphere while sailing east across the Pacific to find the wool markets of Spain.

—article by Linda Shaffer, World History Bulletin, Fall/Winter 1986/87.



Excerpts from the Far Eastern Economic Review (1999)

  • Seeds of an Industrial Revolution in China, 1000-1200
  • The Ming Voyages of Cheng He: Chinese Naval Power in 1405
  • Trade, New World Crops, and China's Population
  • Globalization in Asia, 16th -19th centuries: The Silver Trade, Impact and Implications
Seeds of an Industrial Revolution in China, 1000-1200

Early in the 11th century, Chinese government arsenals manufactured more than 16 million identical iron arrowheads a year. In other words, mass production. Rather later, in the 13th century, machines in northern China powered by belt transmissions off a waterwheel twisted a rough rope of hemp fibers into a finer yarn. The machine used 32 spinning heads rotating simultaneously in a technique that probably resembled modern ring-spinning. A similar device was used for doubling filaments of silk. In other words, mechanized production, in the sense that the actions of the human hand were replicated by units of wood and metal, and an array of these identical units was then set into motion by inanimate power.

Common sense thus suggests that the Chinese economy, early in the millennium just coming to a close, had already developed the two key elements of what we think of as the Industrial Revolution: mass production and mechanization... Much later, from the middle of the 19th century on, China had to import, then service, adapt, and even at times improve, mechanical engineering from the West. This was done with considerable flair, particularly by Chinese firms in Shanghai, a city which during treaty-port days turned into a nonstop international exhibition of machine-building. So Chinese technical capability can hardly be said to have withered in the intervening centuries... Why did the first industrial revolution not take place in China, as it seems it should have?

— from "The X Factor," by Mark Elvin, Far Eastern Economic Review, 162/23, June 10, 1999.



 

The Ming Voyages of Cheng He: Chinese Naval Power in 1405

On a crisp autumn morning in 1405 ... amid the sounds of drums and gongs, an extraordinary armada of giant ships unfurled its red silk sails and slowly made its way out [the Liujia harbour at the mouth of the Yangzi River] to the East China Sea. Under the command of a tall, ruddy-faced eunuch admiral, Zheng He, more than 300 vessels [some of which were four times the size European caravels, and armed with cannons and a slew of explosive devices], carrying a cornucopia of merchandise as well as 28,000 sailors, soldiers, traders, doctors and interpreters, set out on a voyage to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. It was the beginning of an epic series of voyages ... [that] dazzled maritime Asia and east Africa with the riches of the Middle Kingdom and the display of its political and military power.

— from "Sailing into Oblivion," by Nayan Chanda, Far Eastern Economic Review, 162/36, September 9, 1999.



Trade, New World Crops, and China's Population

When Christopher Columbus first laid eyes on the moonlit hills of San Salvador on the night of October 12, 1492, he could hardly have guessed at the impact that his discovery would eventually have on China, half a world away. In the subsequent decades, Spanish traders carried high-yielding crops from Spain's dominions in the Americas to the Philippines, which was Spain's main foothold in Asia. In the late 1500s, those crops, among them corn, sweet potatoes, white potatoes and peanuts, made their way to China. There, beginning in the second half of the 1600s, they fuelled a population explosion... which saw numbers swell from 150 million in the early 1700s to 450 million by the mid-1800s.

— from "Miracle Strains," by Susan V. Lawrence, Far Eastern Economic Review, 162/15, April 15, 1999.



 

Globalization in Asia, 16th -19th centuries: The Silver Trade, Impact and Implications

Financial globalization came to Asia well before the likes of George Soros or Barton Biggs walked this earth. But, rather like today, it was a mixed blessing, bringing wealth—and trouble.

The currency that flowed into Asia from the 16th to the 19th century was in the form of bars of silver and Spanish silver coins which gave an unprecedented boost to trade with China, India, and Southeast Asia. ... By the end of the 15th century, new direct sea routes to Asia allowed Europeans to discover for themselves that it was just as Marco Polo had described—a place of enormous wealth and splendor. Asia was not only spilling over with the spices they hankered after, it had Chinese tea, porcelain and fine silks to offer...

But the traders were soon disappointed by their inability to buy all they coveted. Their Asian counterparts were not interested in the trinkets that they wanted to barter: They wanted settlements to be made with gold or silver...

... the biggest boost to trading with Asia came with Spain's discovery of silver in newly conquered Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru in the early 16th century. When the galleon trade across the Pacific between Acapulco and Manila started in 1572, Spanish silver began flowing into Asia in huge quantities. ... It's said that at least half the silver mined in America between 1527 and 1821 found its way to China. [Fernand] Braudel [1902-1985], the historian, believed the claim plausible because in China there was an attractive profit to be made exchanging silver for gold. For example, in 1570 the ratio of silver to gold was 6:1 in China, as against 12:1 in Spain, which opened up great possibilities for arbitrage.

... by the end of the 18th century, the balance of trade became a major issue as the Chinese had not yet developed a taste for European cotton or woollen cloth or Europe's mechanical products like clocks. Between 1760 and 1780, Qing China's import of silver rose from 3 million taels to 16 million taels. ...

In the 1820s, the crisis over silver was heightened by a worldwide silver shortage and an increasing amount began to flow out of China. The amount of silver leaving China rose from 2 million taels a year in 1820 to 9 million taels in 1830. The country's lack of silver resulted in a major new problem—inflation. Merchants and farmers alike used copper coins to buy silver to pay their taxes and the soaring price of the metal was a crushing burden.

But it was the opium trade which was seen to be at the root of China's financial problems. And it was the opium trade, plus the Daoguang emperor's efforts to stamp out the scourge, which eventually triggered the Opium War—and that changed China for ever."

— from "Early Warning," by Nayan Chanda, Far Eastern Economic Review, 162/23, June 10, 1999.