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Another Look at Silver Imports into China, ca. 1635–1644*
WILLIAM S. ATWELL
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
| In a series of articles published between 1977 and 1988 (Atwell 1977, 1982, 1986, 1988a, 1988b), I argued, among other things, that a steep decline in silver imports into China during the late 1630s and early 1640s was one of the factors that contributed to the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644.1 Although that argument initially had some support (see, for example, Wakeman 1985: 1–25; 1986: 1–26; Adshead 1988: 208–209; Eastman 1988: 123–130), by the late 1980s it had come under sharp challenge, and by the mid and late 1990s it was being dismissed as "conventional wisdom" that had been undermined or, in the words of one reviewer, "demolished" by new research that purportedly showed silver imports into China rising rather than falling during the last years of the Ming (Adshead 1998: 203; see also Goldstone 1991: 374; Totman 1993: 141; Flynn and Giráldez 1994: 82; von Glahn 1996b: 429; Rowe 1997; Dunstan 1998; Dardess 1999; Schell 1999). However, much of the evidence on which this scholarly "demolition" supposedly was based, particularly the evidence contained in an oft-cited article by Brian Moloughney and Wenzhong Xia (1989), is highly questionable. Indeed, as I will attempt to demonstrate below, many of Moloughney and Xia's key conclusions about the level of silver imports into China during the late 1630s and early 1640s are either incorrect or greatly overstated. Because at least some of those conclusions are shared by others who have written importantly about the impact of international trade on the economic history of China and other parts of early modern East Asia, it perhaps is time for this "old debate" to be reopened. |
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In 1988 Jack A. Goldstone wrote the following about the role of foreign silver in the late Ming economy:
It is sometimes suggested that ... a collapse in China's silver trade with Europe contributed to the Ming decline in the early seventeenth century.... But however tempting it may be to link China's fortunes to Europe's via the silver trade, attributing Chinese economic difficulties to a fall in the number of European ships and bullion shipments reaching Manila and Macao is quite hyperbolic,2 for it ignores the vast scale of the Chinese economy. ... Still, it may be suggested that because the European trade was in silver bullion it played a role far out of proportion to its scale in the economy, for it provided the crucial lubricant of economic activity—hard cash. This assumption, too, bends under the vast weight of the Chinese economy. (Goldstone 1988: 115)
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In 1989 Goldstone's views were supported and elaborated upon by Moloughney and Xia:
[I]n late Ming times the Chinese economy was huge and while silver use was expanding at this time, it is difficult to establish a direct causal relationship between the volume of monetary metal entering the empire at any particular time and the concomitant degree of political and social instability enjoyed.... The suicide of the Chongzhen emperor that marked the collapse of the Ming in 1644 was due more to factionalism and nepotistic squabbling that infected the late Ming bureaucracy than to the vicissitudes of international movements of bullion. (Moloughney and Xia 1989: 68)3
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