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Effects of the Silver Trade

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Effects of the Silver Trade

With the extensive mining in Japan and the colonization of Central and South America by Spain came a huge industry of silver for the entire world. This industry effected many countries, and even dominated a few socially and economically. At first glance, all seemed good. But in reality, only the middlemen were profiting from the large industry. The suppliers, Japan and Spain, as well as the receiver, China, were hurt in the entire process. The economies of the major players in the silver trade eventually suffered. The Europeans traded a valuable, lasting resource for perishable items, like silk and porcelain (Doc 8). The silver basically flowed out of Spain for these luxury goods (Doc 2). Being a scholar, Tomàs de Mercado saw the effect of the trade on the streets of Spain every day. This gives him a good point of view in the manual about business that he wrote. China was also hurt by the loss of silver that the middleman took as payment. In china, the government forced people to pay taxes in silver, so the government could get more. This hurt the people of china that didn’t have any silver to pay with, but rather only rice and grain (Doc 3). Wang Xijue, a court official in the Ming Empire, was writing this to the emperor of china. he was basically saying that the public needs more silver in order for the economy to fix itself. Ironically enough, the gaining of silver by the government was what led to an even worse economy. The concept of losing silver through middlemen is restated in document 5, where dye companies only accept their payment in silver, which the people didn’t have. One county official, Ye Chunji, realized that the payments of silver were bad for the economy, and issued an order for all weddings to limit expenses, so as to save those with small amounts of silver (Doc 1). With all of the silver going away from Spain and japan, the middle classes became smaller. When the Spanish and Japanese traded silver away, they got luxury goods in return. The rich payed for these, making it extremely easy to tell the difference between a merchant or rich person from a farmer or slave. The Chinese wanted to trade with the silver-rich Spanish, because they realized that if they solidified routes to Spain and improved trade relations, then they would have a safe and steady source of silver for many years (Doc 7). All of this silver was coming from the West Indies, which pushed the gap between classes further apart, because the rich and the traders had most of the thousands of tons of silver that came out of the West Indies (Doc 6). The author of this document, the Spanish priest Antonio Vàzquez de Espinosa, probably saw this gap increasing on the streets every day. As a priest, he most likely cared for the people and saw with a keen eye and warned with an experienced tongue of the dangers that the trade with the West Indies would continue to have. A very similar process happened in Japan. The poor, working for the rich, mined the silver, only receiving a small portion of what they had gathered, as the rich owned all of the land. this made it easy to tell the rising hap between the land owners and the workers (Doc 4). Overall, the documents about the change of society and economies in the countries dealing with silver came from the wealthy, influential men of the time. The whole perspective would be better if a document was written by both a woman and a worker, specifically a miner in Japan or a worker in the West Indies.

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